When you want Internet users to find your business online, the key phrase is Search Engine Optimization. Most anyone with an online presence has probably received an offer from a professional SEO service offering to bump up your page rankings for a fee. For the do-it-yourselfers, however, there are a number of tools, some free and others for a nominal fee, available to optimize your search-engine rankings.

While the term Search Engine Optimization has been around for more than a decade, the sheer volume of websites and the economic need to drive traffic to them has created an entire SEO culture of strategies and expertise. Broadly categorized as “Black Hat SEO,” “White Hat SEO,” or the newly coined “Gray Hat SEO” designation, these methodologies can produce highly desirable ranking results. Misuse, on the other hand, can get your site barred by search engines. More…

You’ve decided what items you will offer online, developed great products to sell, built a fantastic-looking website and peppered it with key words to make it soar in the search engines. Yet all that effort is not enough to guarantee that your Internet business will be a success.

You can have the best pizza, the best boutique—or the best website—but if no one knows about it, few will come. With all the mechanisms in place for successful Internet sales to take place once a visitor stops by your site, you must now become an expert in getting the consumer to your site. More…

So you want to get in the Internet game and test your entrepreneurial prowess on the World Wide Web? It’s true that Internet businesses can be great wealth-building revenue streams, but there are also a lot of misconceptions that can lead you down a trail of frustration or even failure.

Here are some facts and myths about Internet-based businesses. Test your knowledge here before you get to the grand opening of your virtual business doors. More…

Have you been “tweeting” your own horn? If you don’t know what we’re talking about, it’s past time to catch up on the latest social media phenomenon – Twitter.

Twitter offers you the chance to send short messages of 140 characters or less — commonly known as “tweets” — to any other Twitter member who has chosen to “follow” you. You can send the messages from your laptop or desktop – but most users send and receive tweets on their cell phones. More…

When looking for a business to start or a service to offer, take a lesson from history: Mine for a little gold, if you want, but make your main business the tools behind the trend.

During the many gold rushes throughout the United States in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s, only a handful of the thousands of gold prospectors hit the mother lode. But nearly all of the providers of mining tools made their fortunes. That’s a difficult concept to grasp at first. For one thing, it is much less glamorous. It can also be a slower and much more predictable road to wealth, but it is often more lucrative. More…

Does your business have a Director of Community? Can your clients go behind the scenes of your offices by watching your YouTube videos? Social media has taken internet marketing to a whole new level of engagement—and traditional advertising is trailing in its wake.  Growing companies are harnessing the power of social media and internet marketing successfully, but exactly what does that look like today? More…