Have you ever had a new house built, or maybe watched one go up in your neighborhood? We live in a growing community and now that the economy is improving, construction is exploding again. We have two houses being built across the street, and two more where the lots are already sold. In each case, once they were ready to begin construction, the first task was to dig a hole and insert metal frames so that the concrete foundation can be poured. Once the foundation is in, they can build up the rest of the home's walls, flooring, windows, siding and rooftop.

Your website is that foundation. Your site needs to be the structure on which the rest of your marketing is built, and therefore, it must be solid and well constructed.

Content Marketing for your business means creating great content and sharing it to your social networks. But it also means looking for additional, sometimes creative ways to get what you're writing in front of more people. What do you think are the best tools for getting more traffic to your blog?

The tools below generally offer creative ways to use social media, and other people, to share your latest work. They might include getting more retweets or +1's for a particular post, or having your new blog post automatically shared to other people's social networks, gaining exposure to their followers. Read more »

When was the last time you watched Star Wars? Do you remember the first scene where we were introduced to Darth Vader? These scary "stormtroopers" had just assaulted and boarded some kind of transport spaceship, anhialated a bunch of other guys in a laser gun fight, and then in walks the scariest guy of them all. Dressed in black form head to toe, complete with cape and a full helmet that accentuated his breathing, in walks Darth Vader. Dum dum duh dum goes the music, right?

While I love Star Wars, the point of this article is less about the films and more about the brilliant musical score from John Williams. John Williams has composed such memorable film soundtracks as Jaws, Jurrasic Park, Harry Potter and more. He is known as "America's composer" and has five Oscars, two Emmys, three Golden Globes and eighteen Grammys.

So we have talked before about Newsjacking, and I had promised to go into more detail. We first brought it up when I reviewed Newsify and how bloggers can use that tool to monitor RSS Feeds. And then just recently we mentioned it as a great way to earn co-citations for improved SEO. Newsjacking is when you have an opportunity to blog about a current news event and add your own perspective.

Are you frightened of Pandas and Penguins? If your business and website was severely affected by Google's algorithm changes in 2012, you might be. I have talked to numerous clients who have lamented how much their traffic dwindled as a direct result of those changes. Many have told me how they're scared to do anything with their website for fear of future issues, and not a few have refused to ever speak to an "SEO Expert" again.

Fortunately, there are definitely steps that a business can take to not only improve their ranking within Google search, but also avoid potential issues with the next major algorithm change that Google will inevitably release.

The merging of social media and television is becomining more and more obvious. What started with a few simple icons during commercials to make viewers aware of a brand's presence on Facebook, has grown to extensive hashtag use and social media references. After the Super Bowl, social media integration has actually been a topic of great discussion, and Twitter has even gone so far as to purchase a company that specializes in monitoring and measuring social media response and engagement with live television broadcasts.

One company that is excelling at the new Social+TV advertising venue is Wonderful Pistachios.

Many of the clients we work with are just getting started on Social Media. If they have used Facebook or other Social Media platforms at all, it has been only for limited personal use. In order to help small business owners get started, we are launching a series of posts, each of which will outline how to quickly get up and running on a specific social network. Businesses can go through these posts one at a time or pick and choose which networks they want to start with. With each post we will review how to set up your account and cover some of the basics for posting and participating on that network.

So, you've decided to have a professional website designed. That's great! There's no better way to educate other people on everything you have to offer, be it products, services, or something else entirely. You've made the decision to get online, and you've found someone to help you with the technical aspects of creating a website. Now what?

This is the point where many of us start to have real trouble. We have all been to other people's websites and have seen different ways to organize them, but if you have never actually considered what information to put on your site and where that information comes from, the task might seem a bit daunting.