You want your business to be competitive and successful.

You know that your website is an essential aspect of this goal.

You keep hearing about how important web marketing is. Content marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising……

You understand, but you don’t know where to start.

We can help.

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Search engines like Google survive by dishing up the most relevant results to their users. If they didn't, then no one would use their service and no one would click on their paid placements.

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Back in March, BBC, the world’s largest broadcast news organization, was hit with an unnatural link notification. A little more than a month later, Mozilla was hit with a manual spam update.

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NPR. BBC. CBS. AP. They’re all high-profile, well-known, respected news sources. What else do they have in common?

Each of these companies had their official Twitter account hacked in the last couple of weeks.

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We’ve all seen 'About Us' as the first item on a website’s main navigation bar. Plenty of websites do it this way, and many of the clients we partner with want it this way as well. We try to present other options for where to place this important area of information.

You worked hard to build your company into something special. You should be proud and you should want to brag about yourself. And the 'About Us' page is the perfect place to do that. But the fact of the matter is this: prospective customers just don't care as much you do about your company - at least at first - and that means you shouldn't put your About Us page as the first or second item on the main navigation bar.

You’ve got to give them a reason to care!

Pinterest is now driving more traffic to sites than Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube combined.

With stats like this, Pinterest is quickly securing itself as a valid place for businesses to increase their visibility online. The latest analytics updates and site verification tools give businesses even more reasons to join the thriving community of pinners.

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The dust hasn’t settled yet for Vine, an app released by Twitter in January. It’s still young enough that marketers (advertisers and brand ambassadors in particular) are figuring out how to use it, as its popularity soars. It's currently the top app on the iTunes store.

The app allows you to film six second videos. You read that right: six seconds. Reactions I’ve seen have gone from “This is a fresh revival of an art form!” to “This is really stupid.”

If you are walking down the street, seeing what there is to see, you might happen upon a door. If the door has no signage, and nothing to indicate what is behind the door, you probably wouldn't want to open it. Even if the door has a sign that says 'Open Here,' if there is no clear reason to open the door, and if you don't know where the door leads, it's likely you wouldn't bother.

The same is true with links. Why would you want to click a link that says 'click here,' but offers no clue what you're clicking or where it would take you? Why would you bother?

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So you're a company that provides a great service. This service is proven to save your customers time and money. But your target audience doesn't fully understand your service or, even worse, they don't even know that your industry exists. To make matters more complicated, your website doesn't reflect the high level of quality that you provide to your existing customers. What do you do to grow?

Consider web marketing.

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What are social media policies? Why are they important? Why would a company want—or need—a social media policy?

Check out the answers to these questions and more in my guest post for ERC’s Insights Blog.

The post explores:

• How social media policies establish guidelines for employees’ use of social media.
• How policies can help protect employees and companies.
• The first steps in starting a social media policy.

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ERC offers HR consulting services, employee and job training, networking events, and more. ERC members receive a 10% discount on certain Aztek services.

"Social Media 01," ©2009 Rosaura Ochoa, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.