Alyssa Ast

As a business owner, you have heard the term “SEO” thrown around quite a bit, but what is search engine optimization? SEO involves a strategic process to increase website visitors (traffic). It is a somewhat broad term that covers various ranking factors that are necessary to have your website appear in search results. Why Do I Need to Rank Well? With more than 12 billion searches conducted on Google alone every month, it provides you with the opportunity to reach new customers that would not have found you otherwise. With this added visibility, you build your brand recognition and customer loyalty to improve your sales. You will see an improvement in your bottom line as you remain front and center with an effective edge over your competition. Although you want to see an increase in revenue right away, you cannot just jump to the finish line. You must have a roadmap to get you to your destination, which is SEO. Your overall goal is to have your website rank as high as possible

There’s a new player on the digital marketing field—Verizon. Verizon and Yahoo officially announced that Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion. Included in the deal are most of Yahoo’s assets. Verizon isn’t new to joining the search engine world as they acquired AOL in 2015 for a similar price tag of $4.4 billion. Verizon plans to merge the assets and integrate the two companies into one another under the reported leadership of Marni Walden, EVP and president of production innovation and new businesses organization at Verizon. As part of the deal between Verizon and Yahoo, it's presumed Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer will leave the company.

In today’s digital world, we have numerous social media outlets at our disposal to use for marketing. Among one of the latest social platforms to gain traction is Snapchat. Snapchat is a messaging app that allows you to share videos and pictures with fun captions or lenses to spice up the visual to send to friends and followers. While many view Snapchat as a trend among teens, it has actually turned into a viable means of marketing for businesses. As the social app continues to gain traction, Snapchat for business marketing is simply a smart choice.     What is Snapchat? Snapchat is a free mobile messaging application that was launched in September 2011. The app allows you to send videos and images with creative captions to friends and followers. While the app has been largely popular among teens in recent years, Social Times reports that it’s now the fastest growing social network with nearly 100 million active daily users in 2015. Although I didn’t find the app app

In recent years, press releases were a critical component to marketing strategies, which were mainly published in newspapers. In today's digital world, press releases are now widely used online with 80 million people getting their news online every day. The large amount of internet users offers a huge marketing potential, yet many have come to view press releases as ineffective in today's world. Many just don't see how press releases benefit SEO strategies, so they are often underutilized. Believe it or not, press releases produce many benefits to SEO strategies-- both indirect and direct. Press releases improve your search engine ranking, while attracting the attention of customers who are ready to buy as you establish yourself as an industry expert through brand awareness. Press releases are evolving and becoming a common place in an SEO strategy despite the controversy surrounding whether or not they actually aid SEO. I'm here to tell you, yes, press releases

Earlier this week, news broke that Google released a new learning machine that uses artificial intelligence to improve their ranking system. RankBrain is the latest algorithm update to emerge. What is RankBrain? Basically, RankBrain is the name Google is using for a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that will help process search results. The learning machine teaches itself how to do something, rather than following detailed programming. RankBrain is not being used as a ranking signal, but instead it's an overall search algorithm that will sort through billions upon billions of internet pages to find relevant results based on a search query. RankBrain falls under the Hummingbird algorithm that was released in 2013, acting as an essential component to how Hummingbird finds relevant search results. What can we Expect? As of now, RankBrain will continue to look at the current ranking signals to either promote or demote website pages in the search results. Basi

The Bullhead City Bee reports that a close source to the Arizona State Prison-Kingman Complex has revealed that the prison has reached a new contract with the GEO Group, INC., a Boca Raton, Florida company, which has 104 facilities with approximately 84,000 beds and 20,000 employees around the world. Read more....