Over 20% of searches on Google each month are for local products and services. This makes local search a real opportunity for many businesses and optimising your Google Places listing is a great place to start.

We are delighted to have Victoria Ipri of Modello Media as a guest blogger. Victoria is a world renowned LinkedIn specialist. She is also a successful author and speaker. In this post Victoria shares 3 essential LinkedIn tips for Inbound Marketing (plus one great bonus tip!).

Having duplicate content across very similar pages can be a big issue for ecommerce sites, like those built in Magento. To avoid the search engine optimisation (SEO) problems this can cause, it’s useful to know why these pages are created and how to deal with them. If some of a website’s pages have duplicate or very similar content, then a search engine has to decide which is the best page to list in its search results. Without guidance it won’t know which page to add to its index, where to direct search authority or which page to rank in its results. What’s more, if the search engine suspects the duplicate content is an attempt to manipulate its results, the site may incur penalties or be removed from the search results altogether.

A business blog has become an essential marketing tool. Research by Hubspot shows that, on average, companies that blog attract 55% more website visitors and generate 88% more leads.