When it comes to promoting your local business online, learning how to leverage the power of social media is key to your success. If you've dipped your toe in the waters of Facebook, there's no time like now to go "all in". While some social media platforms have diminished in strength over the years, Facebook is going full speed ahead, with no foreseeable end in sight. Just how strong is it?

How to Blog With a Local Search Optimization (LSO) Focus

As a business owner, you've got one thing on your mind when it comes to your business blog — increasing your bottom line. If your blog isn't boosting your visibility and driving referrals in your direction, the 'increasing bottom line' part is never going to happen. Whether you have just recently discovered business blogs or are well into your third or fourth year of use, we've got your blueprint for success.

The face of advertising has come a long way over the past few years. Only a decade ago we were an advertisement driven society with markets still relying on catchy tag lines, commercials, and other forms of advertising that originated solely with the manufacturer or the business owner. The message of a business or a product was 'advertiser speaking to consumer' without too much outside interference, aside from the occasional competition-bashing commercial.

What are search portals and why are they so important to your business?

The online landscape has changed to a local focus. There are really only two primary search engines in 2012: Google and Bing as Yahoo is powered by Bing. (I'm going to give honorable mention to DuckDuckGo, (pure results minus ads), Blekko (a slashtag and trusted site-based search engine) and WolframAlpha (a wicked computational answer engine) to be fair here as these are awesome search resources too). Because there are only two majors and there are so many second tier directories, aggregators, databases, social networks and Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), it all becomes one big jumble for our local search optimization efforts.  So this term is something we coined to simplify it for you. Let's just define it this way. Search portals are the best places "you want your business to be on the internet."