For years, chasing inbound links has been one of the main points of focus in search engine optimization strategies. It's well-known that Google considers your linkability to be one of the main factors in their search result ranking: Sites that are linked to by high quality sites are given a boost because it's assumed they are high quality as well.

Yesterday, Yahoo officially confirmed its acquisition of the ultra popular microblogging site, Tumblr, for $1.1 billion dollars. What, if anything, does an acquisition of this size mean for brands?

It's easy for businesses that still focus on their offline sales or presence to overlook local Internet marketing. “Well, inbound marketing is for websites,” we hear them say. And, sad to say, most of them have websites online that were cutting edge in 2005.

The big push in marketing today is inbound marketing. It's organic search, not paid advertising that is bumping web pages to page 1 of Google. The first step is for your business to be found, right? Inbound marketing consists of blogging, content creation and social media posting. It's this quality content that businesses and marketers are creating that is growing businesses online presence all over the Internet. So the questions is: When I can promote my business for free, why (or when) would I pay for advertising?

Everyone has to start somewhere, but it's not like climbing Mt. Everest.

At this point, you've probably heard of “parallax scrolling” in web design. If you missed out, just take a quick look at this design site – it utilizes virtually every trick in the parallax book. More and more people, bored with static web design, have begun picking up on it because of its eye-grabbing qualities. 

For newcomers, the inbound marketing scene can be totally baffling. It's a new kind of marketing, developed specifically for the Internet, and much about it is completely unlike offline marketing. There are a lot of new techniques that can take months to learn, and a seemingly-endless supply of statistics just begging to be misinterpreted.

May 2013 Desktop Calendars are here! 

One issue being talked about increasingly among businesses who work in social media marketing is that their complaint volume seems to be going up. This has been experienced, at least, by some of the largest companies, such as McDonald's and most of the Airline Industry, and is being increasingly reported on.

Marketing is a never-ending arms race between folks trying to get messages out to consumers, and consumers trying desperately not to be bothered. We've seen this throughout advertising – whenever someone finds a nifty new outlet for contacting customers, chances are good someone is going to find a way to annoy them with it.