I mean hot mess in a bad way, just so you know. While Google Hotpot is a bit disheveled, it is not attractive.

There is nothing more irritating than knowing a place exists and searching for it on Google, only to have it not show up on the location search. So when our Marketing Manager, Colin, asked me to write a post about the 5 most important ranking criteria for Google local business listings, I was thrilled. I could finally figure out just why my favorite little shops were leaving me high and dry when I tried to find their locations.

Let’s face it, someday Google is going to rule the world and we are just along for the ride of free beta testing. I don’t mind being the guinea pig if it means getting some sort of free service so of course I had to scope out the new Google Voice.

One of the most important activities in any online marketing campaign, be that Pay Per Click (PPC) or Organic (SEO), is determining what your conversions (or valued events) are. For most people, this is a product sale or contact form submission. It could even be extended to a white paper download, phone call from the website or a page view on an important page.

Once you've determined your conversion point, it's important to then track it in your analytics package. In Google Analytics, this involves either setting a goal for your account.

Social media is on the rise for businesses that are looking to take on this weak economy by boosting their marketing effort online. According to a 2009 survey by BtoB Magazine and the Association of National Advertisers, 66 percent of marketers are now using social media. The other 44 percent haven’t found a way to convince their boss or clients the usefulness of this tool.

Thousands of people use Google Analytics every day for their website reporting. Besides being one of the most comprehensive analytics platforms on the web, Google Analytics is also 100% free, which is invaluable to a small business looking to get the most out of their online marketing spend.

If you have ever been involved in an organic search optimization (SEO) and a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you have probably noticed how markedly different they are. If you don't do this everyday this is probably quite confusing.

Both, after all, are just driving traffic from the search engines. A person searches on a keyword phrase at a site like Google, your listing pops up and they click over to your site. SEO and PPC should be the same, right?

Not exactly.

1. Meta page title

Arguably one of the most important factors of your on-page SEO, the meta page title is one of the first signals that search engines look at when they try to rank your page.

A good meta page title should be kept to 70-75 characters long, and should include 2-3 keyword phrases (a good keyword phrase is generally 3-4 words long), with little to no keyword repetition.

In economics, utility is a measure of relative satisfaction. Given this measure, one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility, and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase one's utility. Utility is often modeled to be affected by consumption of various goods and services, possession of wealth and spending of leisure time.

The book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is about the importance of intrinsic motivation. The foundation of the book is that there are three levels of human motivation:

1. Basic needs – survival, food, sex, etc.
2. External rewards and punishment
3. Internal interest and purpose