Online Marketing Blog

We have the latest information on SEO, social media, digital advertising and marketing, analysis, and opinion from our online marketing blog. If you’re in need of quality marketing strategy and tactics, read the posts you find here.

We’re always contributing what we’ve discovered, what works in online marketing and online advertising. If there’s something new we learn, we share it here. If there’s something new in the world of internet marketing, we’ll reveal what we know about it.

Business Listing Plugin Released

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Today we added a new plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory on WordPress.org. It’s called “Business Listing Plugin.” We’ve been using it to manage business listings on 4boca.com already. This release is a free open-source version, so if you want to use it, go ahead!

The plugin can be found on WordPress.org, in the official directory of approved plugins.

Information about the plugin, including links to a Support Forum and to Donate to its development, can be found here: Business Listing Plugin Main Page

Business directories are useful for sites targeted at local audiences, industry audiences, even franchises.

If you’re a website owner and you want to list multiple businesses on your website this plugin is exactly what you’re looking for. It allows a website to feature a business directory, quick and easy. Each business listing can be uniquely managed. Critical information about the business is listed in a special way, automatically by this plugin, using a web coding standard called structured data. This method of displaying business information is exactly what Google is looking for in order to have your site’s business listings show up when someone Googles the business or is searching for the type of business that’s listed. Help your community get found.

Click here to see the plugin live, demonstrated on 4boca.com

Structured Data Best Practices

Experience with structured data marketing in content marketing efforts led to the observation that too many web publishers were falling short in their implementations. They were interpreting the schema.org guidelines too conservatively, hardly exercising the options, restraining their use of it as opposed to using it to communicate. This plugin approaches the use of structured data more aggressively. For example it uses the “Knows About” property to list what practice areas attorneys specialize in. It allows selection of the cuisine served by food vendors. It uses the same normalized values for these properties that the major listing services like Yelp and Google use. It also displays Google Maps in a couple different ways for business listings.

What’s coming next?

Business Listing Plugin is one of many plugins authored by Massive Impressions but it’s the first one we’ve added to the WordPress Plugin Directory. Whereas most of the plugin and theme work we’ve done is proprietary and focused on meeting very specific requirements, this plugin is a more general tool that’s useful for a wider audience. There are other plugins being developed right now in parallel with this one, also designed to be used by a wide range of publishers. Keep an eye out for them.

Electronic Agent Consideration - Getting AI to choose your brand

Electronic Agent Consideration: When AI Thinks About YOU

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What is Electronic Agent Consideration? It’s the term that describes what’s going on when robots, artificial intelligence, compares your products and services to your competitors. Why is this important? When people use artificial intelligence to make decisions they expect their robots to be smart and live up to “intelligence” part, not just be some artificial voice that responds thoughtlessly with bad information.

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Structured Data Marketing - Content Marketing for AI

Structured Data Marketing

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Structured Data Marketing is to yesterday’s online marketing like yesterday’s online marketing was to print.  It’s a way to make web pages so that robots understand them better. It’s immediately important, today, for making search engines send more traffic.  Artificial intelligence needs certainty when determining what conclusions to deliver: what pizza place to call, what airline has the best deals, what car is safest. There’s no better way to publish information so that tomorrow’s digital agents connect your business with tomorrow’s customers with certainty, the certainty needed to make a recommendation and sale.
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One of the Worst Myths of SEO: Popularity Drives Ranks

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Does a site’s search engine rank improve from increased popularity, from more people visiting a site? 

Does Popularity Drive Search Engine Rank? This is a very common belief, but it’s really not one of the major factors that determines which webpages appear first on Google searches. It does seem intuitive that Google would consider how much traffic a site gets when it’s trying to decide whether it’s credible or not, whether it should be sent more traffic. However, this hasn’t been a useful metric for Google from the start. Once you understand how SEO works it becomes a little clearer why using traffic as a metric doesn’t necessarily help Google meet its goals.

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Why Does My Site Keep Updating - The Technology Layers In WordPress

Why does my site keep updating?

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A recent WordPress update notification brought a client some concern. The concern was whether WordPress being updated would cause an issue we experienced to re-appear. In this case it didn’t, and the odds of updates causing issues is generally low. However, there is a liability in updating. It’s just that the potential costs of not updating outweigh the potential risks.

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database improvements yield better performance

Database Changes Yield CMS Improvements

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We’ve recently changed a way we configure the databases that our sites depend on, the back-end databases for WordPress.  This change was oriented towards improving the speed that visitors to the sites experience. An unanticipated site-result was that the administrative interface performance improved even more. This speed up results in less time required for doing things like authoring new pages and posts, uploading images and checking on lead form responses.  It takes us less time to administer the sites and this translates into lower costs for our clients.

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Free AutoSSL at Massive Impressions

AutoSSL: Free SSL Certificates?

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Here’s a surprise from the servers that turned out to be a delight for a change: AutoSSL. Now your Massive Impressions Managed Hosting Account comes with free, auto-renewed, basic , doman validated SSL certificates. What does this mean? It means your site gets the security and SEO benefits of SSL without having to go through an initial business validation process. It means you don’t have to remember to renew the certificate every year. Basic SSL isn’t enough to meet all SSL requirements, but it’s better than having no SSL.

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Top ten online marketing tactics that work today.

Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics That Work

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Online marketing tactics are the specific efforts undertaken to market a service or product. These tactics might be part of a plan, a thought out marketing and advertising strategy, but they don’t have to be linked to a strategy. They’re simply the things that can be done, either planned or unplanned, to promote a brand, products or services. Tactics are the specific steps taken. They’re where the rubber hits the road and results are gained.

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What we learned from our digital disaster experiences with IRMA.

Digital Disaster Experiences – What we learned from IRMA.

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Digital disaster experiences change with every new disaster. People’s ability to know about, withstand, and react to disaster has grown quickly in the past decade thanks to the excellence of new ideas and the hard work of digital producers. When Hurricane IRMA hit South Florida, the home base of our digital marketing company, Massive Impressions, we took note of how different the digital experience was compared to hurricanes that threatened in previous years.  The behavior South Florida’s digital audience in front of the hurricane’s path was very different due to technology. Florida experienced and unprecedented evacuation with clogged roads, gas running out and trips that normally only take a few hours lasting all day and into the night. The experience of people preparing and travelling was quite different depending on how tech enabled they were.

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