Summer is coming, and while everyone rejoices, bloggers like you scratch their heads and wonder how on earth will they update their blog while they are on vacation. Should you take your laptop with you at the beach? Won’t that spoil your vacation?

If you’re a blogger and want to keep your blog updated during your upcoming summer vacation, you have a few options:

• Write a few posts in advance and schedule them to be posted while you are away. WordPress and most other top blogging platforms have a scheduling feature which enables you to automate content posting. In general it’s good to have one or two articles in your drafts for emergencies, or for holidays.

Social media is a powerful marketing tool in the right hands, but it’s not a marketing platform, and making mistakes while using it for business purposes is easy. If you are a small business owner looking for some good advice on how to properly use social media platforms, try to avoid the following social media marketing mistakes.

1.    Focusing your efforts on getting more Facebook likes. The fact is that few Facebook users ever return to a brand page after they’ve liked it. Likes bring reputation and traffic, but they don’t (always) bring sales.

For a brick-and-mortar business, local SEO is like advertising, only that it’s free, and its effects are long-lasting. Optimizing for local customers is probably the most effective way to spread the word about your business and to increase its visibility in a short time, without spending anything. Here’s a step-by-step guide on optimizing your business for local searchers.

•    Consolidate your online presence.

•    Join Google+, create a business page, and fill it up with relevant information.

•    Create a Facebook page.

•    Build a subdomain for each of your locations.

It’s a good idea to look at your social media strategy while 2013 is still fresh, and see what improvements you can make. Start with the biggest and possibly most important social site for your business, Facebook.

•    Donate a product or money for each like your business page gets. You can get Facebook page likes by the thousands with a good charitable campaign. For best results choose a charity that appeals to all your fans, regardless of their age, sex, or nationality, like one providing medical treatment to children in underdeveloped countries.

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have rocked the SEO world in 2012, leading to the demise of keyword stuffing and artificial link-building strategies. The updates propelled to the top of the search results page websites with top notch content and links that they had accumulated organically, and punished those with unoriginal, spammy, or poor content. Panda and Penguin put emphasis on organic SEO techniques and made it clear that inorganic SEO techniques are not reliable in the long run.

The Disavow Links Tool that Google launched late last year is user-friendly and inviting, but that doesn’t mean you should rush to use it. Webmasters are divided about it. Some use it, some don’t. And then there are those who say it’s okay but that it should be used only sparingly. What are you to make of all this? Let’s see…

What Actually is the Disavow Links Tool?

It’s a way to deny or block inbound links coming from poor quality websites that could negatively affect your SEO ranking, by asking Google to exclude them when it assesses external links leading to your site. In theory, it should help those who have purchased links and have come to repent it, or those who somehow managed to get the wrong sites link to their site.