They call it "buzz." When a movie, product, service, or public whatever finds itself the topic du jour around the watercooler, it is said to be generating buzz. These days, Social Media outlets are the tip of the spear when it comes to buzz propagation, with its wildfire speed and exponential growth curve possibilities.

Even though digital technology has given "buzz" a high-octane boost, it still comes down to hundreds of quick decisions: to share or not to share? Sometimes we find the urge to share irresistible. At other times, it's the last thing we would inflict on our social media friends. One way to make an attempt at "viralizing" your social media posts is to crank out huge volumes of them. But that can backfire, as you might imagine. What other ideas are there?

In clinical terms, being unresponsive is bad. It means being unable to speak, move, gesture or otherwise signal any information about anything. Unresponsive websites don’t get the attention like an unconscious ER patient would, they just vegetate in their little corner of the internet.

If you’ve read this headline and find yourself sighing audibly because the thought of having to learn a dictionary full of tech-talk is painful… We hear you. Bear with us for a moment while we make it clear that you actually do need to make your website “responsive” yesterday. Whether you realize it or not, your unresponsive website is repeatedly bypassed because it’s not structured to grab traffic on any web-searching device (translation: smartphones) nor does it feature the intuitive features needed for any size screen, especially the small ones.

Your awesome website makes you available to the entire planet!

“But,” you’re thinking, “If only the locals knew about me!”

How to expand your local reach

Unless you're a retirement home or your brick-and-mortar shop is located across the street from one, we're guessing that you aren't actively pursuing octogenarians for new business. My 81 year old father still reaches for the yellow pages when he's fed up with the new girl at his haircut place. Yes, an actual book with pages that contain ads and listings for businesses in a defined nearby area. Those alphabetical listings are the reason for company names like Aardvark Plumbing and AAAA Bail Bonds. He scans through the entries, and when he finds one he likes (often the cheapest, or one with the best coupons), he drives over there to give it a try.

• Is your website missing something?
• Do you get many customers or leads from your online presence?
• Are you showing up in the top search engine results?
• Does your website represent who you are as a business?

These are questions we ask our clients, but a few months back, we realized it was time to ask ourselves these questions about our own website. While we loved our old website, we knew it was time for an update.

Do links really matter?

The short answer - yes! When it comes to optimizing your website’s content, you probably already know a thing or two about the meta data and the page content. But one key mistake that we as an Internet Marketing company have noticed is that not many people are using links to their advantage for search engine optimization! Here’s the long and short of why and how to use inlinks, outlinks and backlinks to your business’s advantage.