“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” John Wanamaker didn’t have big data and cloud storage to prove the worth of his advertising. What’s your excuse?

Had a discussion with some smart people the other day. Turns out that when your favorite supermarket places food on the shelf marked “organic," they may actually be stretching the truth. Many pesticides and a few steroids and related toxins may still be used in some of this organic food. 

Search engine optimization is dead. At least, that’s what critics, naysayers and haters would tell you. Each time there’s a major algorithm update, they all jump at the opportunity to stir up some controversy. SEO is not dead, however. In fact, SEO is very much alive and well. That’s not to say that SEO hasn’t evolved.

More and more consumers are concerned with online security. Websites are now using additional protocols to ensure safe browsing. This can leave website owners wondering what they can do to make their websites secure. Check out the questions below regarding SSL Certificates and website security.

In the largest update of its kind since the launch of Panda in early 2011, the newest version of Google's algorithm is said to have affected 7.5% of English language search queries. Panda 4.0 has worked its way through millions of websites, penalizing some top players like ebay.com, biography.com and retailmenot.com.

I’ve never been one to highlight personal certification, accreditation, education, and other monikers that are supposed to suggest credibility in a given field. Especially in marketing, what you learn in college doesn’t translate directly to job qualifications. You can have a marketing, advertising, or public relations degree and not be very good at any of them. 

If you write, you’ve heard of the Five Ws. It’s basic information gathering for the reader. Write for your readers and stop writing for search engines. That’s the message Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, has been repeating anyway:

When I began my career some 25 years ago, most companies had the same basic marketing tools. It seemed that no matter what the organization did, they needed a tri-fold brochure, a folder, a house print ad, and a cheap promo item or two. Given the marketing outlets of the day, it was generally effective stuff. Over time, the fundamental tools that most companies need evolved; videos, presentation decks, websites, etc.

Have you ever left a comment on YouTube? What about anything on Blogger? Ever left a review on a Google Place or maybe you're one of the 540,000,000 accounts on Google+...if you nodded your head to any of these, there is a good chance you are about to become a Google advertising star.

In myth and culture, hummingbirds’ iconic beaks are known to resemble instruments of weaponry, and it appears Google has declared war on outdated search with the release of the newest algorithm, Google Hummingbird.

In response to growing public concerns of Internet security, Google moved to “secure” search data for its users by removing keyword data from search referral strings. This change comes after The Guardian and The Washington Post published controversial details on the NSA’s PRISM program. Refuting allegations the company allowed the NSA access to its secure severs, Google issued the following statement:

Over the past three months, Google has been refining its algorithm with updates named after animals. The first major update was Panda, and the most recent was Penguin.