Renegade Search

NASCAR. FEMA. NCAA. DARPA. UNICEF. NASDAQ.

What do all of these have in common? Not much, aside from being acronyms. And by virtue of that, they are pretty strictly verboten from Google Places profiles.

According to the guidelines from the market leader in local search, business owners are not allowed to use 'excessive capitalization' in any part of their profile. This means that a local listing simply won't be displayed if there are any strings of more than three capital letters in a row. And there's no method to request that Google reconsider profile inclusion.

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Ok, so you've got Google Analytics on your site and you're tracking your goals and making changes on your site based on your reports. You've got your PPC conversion tracking codes on your site so you can better optimize your site based on actual user search queries and account metrics you can't see through analytics. You seem to have your bases covered. But what happens when your business does a large portion of their conversions offline? This is when you'd want to use call tracking on your website!

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If you're reading this blog, I'm assuming that you're the kind of person who has spent a decent amount of time on YouTube. And if you're a person who has spent any amount of time on YouTube (especially watching music videos), you've probably encountered the following:

Repeated comments attacking Justin Bieber on completely unrelated videos
Vile expressions of hatred
At least one commenter saying 'I'm only [insert age here] and I love [insert relatively older band]
Repeated comments attacking Lady Gaga on completely unrelated blogs
Repeated comments defending Justin Bieber and/or Lady Gaga
Trolling
And above all else, grammar, punctuation, and spelling that could make a third grade teacher weep for the future

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Link building is perhaps the most challenging and idiosyncratic aspect of search engine optimization. Recently I have been doing a lot of it, and I thought I would share my strategy for attaining high quality links by leveraging the content on my client's sites.

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