Following are four summaries of well-shared SocialMediaToday.com posts, along with links to each article...

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Shares

Odd as it might seem, images are often overlooked and undervalued in today's world of online marketing and business web design. Even though most of us recognize intuitively that photos and drawings capture the viewer's attention first, the fact that they aren't as well indexed by Google often makes them an afterthought.

Here are a few tips for finding images that work well with your blog posts:

Know the difference between stock and "stock." Stock images are available for any marketer to use, but the best ones don't look like they have no relation at all to the content you’re posting. Learn to find ones that look like they could be part of your marketing mix.

Make it easy to pass your content along. Since getting shares and re-tweets should be a big goal of your content marketing plan, choose images that are non-offensive and easy to understand. Those will be easier for fans and viewers to pass along.

Make the most of graphs and charts. Images aren't just for accenting written content; they can also help to make it clearer. By using custom graphs, charts, and tables, you might be able to add a new dimension to your content that viewers will love.

For more great tips on blog posts and images, check out the entire article here.

Rebuild Your Business Website from the Ground Up

Even though a lot of new clients might not realize it, relaunching a business website is a lot like renovating an old home from the ground up. It isn't just a matter of adding new colors and logos to existing social profiles… in fact, there is a comprehensive process you should follow with your web design team.

Here are a few of the major steps:

Take away what doesn't work. We begin by knocking down the walls. Lots of old websites have sections that are no longer useful, functional, or "up to code" in a search engine optimization sense. Those have to go.

Build a new foundation. If you have lots of junk in your business website, including spammy-type pages and articles, beginning with a new marketing platform and focus is an important step toward rebuilding your credibility.

Rebuild in a smarter way. In addition to your content, apps, plug-ins, and even bits of custom web development may need to be updated for your website to function as it was meant to.

Want to learn more about rebuilding and relaunching a business website? Read the whole article here.

Get to Know the Tao of Google

In Google's reflection, we see ourselves. It's no secret that Google is making major updates to its search algorithm, but what gets lost in this knowledge is the reason behind it. Google is changing because we want it to change. In other words, it's getting better at giving searchers the results they want to find, instead of the ones that are simply the most optimized."Zen and the Art of Search Engine Optimization" was a big topic that generated a big response, so we returned with round two – titled the Tao of Google. In it, you'll find a set of insights that are more practical than mystical, and that can help you get the attention from search engines your business deserves:

You can never climb the same mountain of search results twice. What helped you achieve a high search engine ranking in the past isn't going to do the trick now. Businesses need to take a new, comprehensive, and more holistic approach to the way they produce and promote content if they want it to be easier to find.

Content creation is endless and timeless. Content marketing is to the web what self-improvement is to spiritual awareness – a journey that never really ends. If you want to dominate the search engine listings, be a regular source of new ideas, not the owner of a site with lots of articles that were created at one specific point in time.

Need a better understanding of the Tao of Google? Enlightenment is just a click away, because the whole article is available here.

Are You Making It Easy on Hackers?

In movies and media reports, cyber crimes are almost always carried out by sophisticated teams of technological geniuses, executing detailed and coordinated attacks to cash out with the big "score." The reality is a lot less complicated – a lot of business websites get hacked simply because they use passwords that are easy to guess and break.

Here are a few tips for making sure your password isn't the weakest link in your security chain:

Mix it up. Good passwords are made up of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and even special characters.

Write a bit more. Because of the mathematics involved, longer passwords are exponentially more difficult for automated software programs to crack than shorter ones.

Change it frequently. Your password shouldn't remain constant over time, because that makes them easier for hackers to guests. Nor should they be consistent from one website to the next.

Want to know a bit more about password security, and just how easy it is to break into most websites? Follow this link to view the full article.

Please feel free to comment in the Disqus below. We truly appreciate it and will respond.