This is a question I get asked all the time. Get the final answer right here.

Inspired from this article at Search Engine Roundtable

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Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid (I still clean out my e-mail—although I don’t reply much—and I still moderate comments on my blog), I don’t write any blog posts (on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide), and I stay off Twitter. I also don’t read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitter—it’s a social media fast. Each year, it’s interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again. This year, I did something a bit different, because… Read More

Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future by any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined.

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When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it’s your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it’s that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.

Think about it. If you’re not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do… Read More

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

Teaching tricks the audience likes

There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like… Read More

If you aren’t familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It’s growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing.

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We don’t often realize this, but we can train our website content to do tricks. Unfortunately, most website content just lays around all day. This is why you see high bounce rates and poor conversion rates on so many websites. About the only “trick” this content knows how to do is to roll-over and play dead. But, those aren’t tricks at all. The opossum that streaked across the highway after getting hit by a truck can do that!

What I’m talking about is teaching your content how to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”.… Read More