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Eight ways content marketing and SEO can work together

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:30:00 -0700

Since the rise of the term content marketing, perhaps three or four years ago, there’s been plenty of talk about the end of SEO and its replacement by this ‘new’ discipline.

It’s true that many search agencies have since rebranded or have emphasized their content expertise, but this doesn’t mean that content marketing has rendered SEO obsolete. Far from it. Indeed, the two disciplines should work together, and the use of either has to include both SEO and content if it is to be truly effective online.

Key differences between content marketing and SEO

SEO and content marketing overlap, but there are key differences.

Aspects of SEO are more technical. This includes the use of correct URLs, title and ALT tags, sitemaps and so on: the stuff that underpins your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is broader and isn’t necessarily confined to SEO goals. For example, a publisher should produce excellent content first and foremost as a way of attracting and retaining an audience.

How content and SEO can work together

There is a school of thought, or at least the perception exists in some quarters, that SEO is merely about creating good content for the search engines to index.

While I’m all for the quality content part, there’s more to it than that. If you haven’t ensured that the on-site SEO groundwork has been done, your content efforts will be wasted.

For example, if your site has a penalty, or Google isn’t indexing pages properly, then you’re going to need some SEO expertise, great content or not. This is why the SEO experts and content teams need to work together. As the stats below show, this isn’t necessarily happening all the time, butthere is a desire for closer collaboration.

Here are some ways SEO and content can work together:

1. Creating original, quality content

While thin content created to provide fodder for Google’s crawlers may have worked to a certain extent a few years ago, it isn’t effective now. Also, weak content produced to make up the numbers will not work from a content marketing perspective, as it will not help to attract and retain readers.

Instead, from an SEO perspective, original and engaging content will set you apart from competitors, as it gives the search engines something to index that can’t be found elsewhere. It also helps your content marketing goals, as original and quality content is far more likely to attract the audience you’re targeting.

Ask yourself whether your content inspires people to linger on your site longer than a minute or so. Does it provide value, such as useful advice that helps them to do their jobs better?

2. Evergreen content and SEO

Creating evergreen content is a great strategy for improving search rankings, as well as making your site a more useful one. A piece of news will often do well in Google while it’s fresh topical, but will fade thereafter. It doesn’t deliver long-term traffic. However, a more useful article that contains valuable advice and insight will attract the kinds of links and engagement metrics that Google is looking for, and is more likely to perform well in the search rankings over a longer period of time.

If you can get this right, it’s a virtuous circle, as higher search rankings means more visits to the article, which then leads to more links, better rankings and so on. One example of evergreen content from Search Engine Watch illustrates this point; this article on writing title tags for SEO is from 2012, but is still useful to readers and attracts plenty of traffic.

It also ranks at No. 1, or in the top three for searches around writing title tags and SEO.

he useful content helps it rank in the first place, but this high ranking means that the article continues to deliver traffic to SEW. It’s great when it works like this.

3. Keyword research

Keyword research is essential for content marketing and SEO to work well together. First of all, the quality has to be in the content you produce, but you should also ensure that the content you spent time creating achieves the exposure it deserves. To achieve this, your content needs to match the search terms that people are using and answer these search queries effectively.

If you use too many technical terms in your articles, this language may not match that which searchers are using. To avoid this, do some keyword research to find out which terms are popular and match the language you use to the way people search

Soovle, shown below, is a good tool for quick idea generation, but there are plenty of other SEO tools available.

4. Monitoring keyword goals

Once you have a list of terms and phrases to target with your content efforts, it’s important to monitor and measure your efforts. Is the content you produce hitting the mark? Is it having an effect on search positions? Don’t expect overnight results; it can take time before you see any shifts in search, and it may be very competitive for certain keywords.

There are no guarantees of success, but a well-applied strategy using focused content will pay off on a long term basis. It’s important to add that, while content can play a key role in achieving SEO goals, it shouldn’t be a slave to those goals. Keywords shouldn’t be crowbarred in so that content quality is affected. The reader shouldn’t notice too much.

5. Link building

Good content attracts links. Just make sure it’s distributed effectively so that it can get the attention of as big or influential an audience as possible. There’s no great science to this; just create content that people will want to link to and see how it works.

On my last site, good posts would generally get between 200 and 1,000 backlinks. However, the odd one received more than 10,000. They weren’t necessarily the most popular posts, either. If I knew the secret, I’d bottle it.

We can see how evergreen SEW articles have attracted impressive numbers of backlinks. This article on Excel shortcuts and tricks fits the bill in terms of being a useful resource for marketers, and has therefore attracted plenty of links, as Majestic data shows.

6. Internal linking

This is an obvious way to use content to help with SEO goals, as well as improving the user experience. Internal linking can help Google crawl your site more effectively, help pages to rank well for certain search terms, and also point users toward content that is relevant to the article they’re reading.

It’s simple enough to put into practice, and should be a part of the thinking when writing and editing content.

7. Measurement

It’s vital to measure the effects of the content you create in terms of SEO goals. If you’re aiming to improve rankings, there are some useful tools out there to track changes in ranking positions and see the results of your efforts.

You can also use analytics to see how the volume of search traffic changes over time, and which pages and articles are most effective for this.

Content marketing metrics should be applied too. If you’re creating the kind of content that is valuable to your target audience, then metrics such as bounce rates, time on site, and visitors viewing multiple pages should be moving in the right direction.

8. Headlines

Headlines are very important. They should be descriptive and should work hard to convince people to click, but they shouldn’t try too hard. For example, a title such as “10 useful tips to improve your landing pages” is fine, as long as those tips are useful and deliver on the promise. However, “10 awesome tips that will improve your landing pages and make you a millionaire” might be promising more that it can deliver.

Headlines must be written for the Web, and you need to consider the keywords and phrases you use in headlines. How do people search for these topics? How will people find your articles? What do you want to rank for?

Headline length is important too. It shouldn’t be too long, for a number of reasons.

Google truncates long titles in search results. You want the full headline to be visible in the search results so people are more inclined to click on it.
Social sharing. For example, if you want people to share your articles on Twitter, the headline should be short enough to allow people to retweet without having to edit it, or to add a comment if they want.
Emails. If it’s going in a newsletter, especially as the headline, the title should be visible in the subject line.

In Summary

SEO and content are distinct disciplines that require different skills and knowledge, but the success of each depends on the other. Content teams should be writing with a knowledge and understanding of SEO goals, ensuring that basics such as internal linking, headline optimization and use of keywords are covered.

To repeat my previous point, the quality of the content is all important and should not be compromised by SEO goals, but it is perfectly possible to write naturally while fulfilling the SEO work. In turn, SEO teams should be working with content creators, ensuring that they are aware of the basics, and helping to set goals which can be achieved through content.

7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:27:00 -0700

For marketers, there are few skills more important than a deep understanding of Google Analytics and its conversion measurement capabilities.

After all, this is the tool that tells you whether your efforts are actually translating into results.

Unfortunately, mastering Google Analytics can be challenging, even for experienced marketers. There is far too much data and too few easy-to-follow dashboards to sort it out.

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of seven custom and standard reports you can use right away to get better insight into your marketing performance.

1. Mobile Performance Report

You know this already: Ours is a mobile-first world. The total number of mobile users now exceedsthe total number of desktop users…

… and mobile e-commerce is nearly 30 percent of all e-commerce in the US.

In fact, mobile is so important now that Google even penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly.

For marketers, knowing how their sites perform on smaller screens is vital to staying alive in the SERPs and winning over customers.

The mobile performance report shows you how well your site (not app) is optimized for mobile and where you need to make improvements.

You can even segment the report further to see which mobile devices/browsers customers are using to access your site. This will tell you if your site is performing poorly on some devices.

Accessing this report is easy: Just go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview.

This will show you how your site does on different platforms:

You can add more dimensions here as you see fit. Take careful note of bounce rate, time on site and page views to see whether your user experience is failing on one or more mobile channels.

2. Traffic Acquisition Report

Want to know if people are actually clicking on your ads? That guest post you published earlier — is it generating any traffic to your website? How about your SEO strategy? Is it actually working?

The traffic acquisition report will tell you all this and more. For many marketers, this will be their first step in the reporting process.

This is a standard report, so you can find it by going to Acquisition -> Overview.

This will give you a quick breakdown of your traffic sources.

Of particular insight here is the “Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

Clicking on a referring website will show you the exact pages visitors used to enter your site.

3. Content Efficiency Report

Do you generate a lot of content on your website and find that tracking it is getting a little overwhelming?

Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and a Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, created this report to solve this exact problem.

This report tracks entrances, page views, bounces and goal completions to help you answer questions like:

Which content is engaging your audience the most?
What type of content (images, videos, GIFs, infographics, reviews) performs best with your readers?
Which content converts readers into customers?
Which content is shared most by your users?

Here’s a quick overview from Avinash himself:

You can get a more detailed explanation of the report here. To grab a copy for yourself, check thislink (you’ll need to log into Google Analytics first).

4. Keyword Analysis Report

Getting organic traffic from Google is great. Unfortunately, ever since Google started encrypting search data in 2012, your organic traffic keyword report has mostly shown this:

However, you can still gain a ton of insight about your visitors by tracking the performance of unencrypted keywords.

This report created by eConsultancy analyzes the most popular (and available) incoming keywords to your site. It shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each keyword.

Use this data to figure out what keywords are working best for you, how many of them are actually contributing to your goals and what keywords you need to optimize for in the future.

5. New vs. Returning Visitors

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Usually, the metrics for new and returning visitors are quite different. Returning visitors tend to stick around longer and have lower bounce rates.

6. Landing Pages Report

Your users will enter your site from all sorts of pages. Some will type in your home page URL directly, some will find a page through search engines, and some others will click on a link shared on your Twitter feed.

This report will tell you which pages visitors are landing on when they first enter your site. Based on data from this report, you can figure out how users are interacting with your site.

For example, if the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high bounce rate pages more engaging.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

7. Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate Report

“Bounce Rate” is the percentage of visitors who don’t take any action and leave from the same page they landed on.

“Exit Rate” measures the percentage of your visitors who browse more than one page on your site before leaving.

This report compares the bounce rate vs. exit rate for different pages on your site.

You can find it by going to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages:

Next, select “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.

This will give you a visual comparison between bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).

Over to you

Google Analytics is an essential analytics tool for any marketer, but making the most of it can be challenging. By using a mixture of pre-created custom reports and standard reports, you can gain valuable insight into your users.

Google Analytics’ Solutions Gallery is particularly useful for someone new to analytics. Here, you can import expert-created reports into your Analytics account to build powerful dashboards quickly. You can also use these reports as guides to help you understand this incredible tool better.

Advice to those considering SEO as a career

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:24:00 -0700

“In my day, there was no such thing as digital marketing. You studied Comp Sci, used QuarkXpress, made magazines, and you liked it!”

I was recently asked by a colleague to present on “How to break into a career in SEO” to students in her college-level advertising course. As I planned my presentation, I actually found it a difficult topic to advise on because, as I like to say, I’ve been doing SEO since there was such a thing back in the ’90s. Back then, there were no courses in digital marketing, no internships and definitely nothing like professional certifications available.

Today, there are courses available on digital marketing — but even with those, is a formal education really what impresses me as a hiring manager? And what should someone interested in SEO know about pursuing a career in the field?

In today’s post, I thought I’d tackle the questions above for the benefit of those entering the SEO job market, to help guide them in their exploration of the (potentially) lucrative and exciting world of SEO.

Starting a career in SEO

My intent is not to tell you the right job boards to watch; it is to tell you the things a digital marketing agency or business are likely looking for in an entry-level SEO hire.

Would it be good to have an official degree in digital marketing, communications or computer science? Sure. But would it be enough to impress the manager and beat out others with a similar degree? Perhaps, but not likely. What is likely to make a difference?

Your actual skill set. Give me someone who knows SEO basics, can read or code HTML, is a good writer and can have an intelligent conversation any day over someone who “only” has a degree. If you have some familiarity with analytics, even better.

An ability to be client-facing. Of course, you can’t merely just depend on your skills — that’s only half the job. The other half is communicating what’s important to stakeholders. This means being able to talk about big-picture business objectives, not just about how cool AngularJS is.

Any work history (job or internship) that involves working on a website, or even an offline publication. It could be that you’ve worked in tech as an editor, a copywriter, a general marketing assistant, posting photos to social media, or something else. This is valuable as long as it shows you’ve worked on a team. Yes, I know there’s a catch 22 — to get a job, you need experience, but to get experience, you need a job. But your ability to show you’ve worked with others in some form of media is important. It’s not often I need a knowledgeable hermit… I need someone who will show up every day and be able to complete assignments.

No job history? Hone your skills on your own. I know there’s only so much a classroom can teach and only so much experience you can have walking into an entry-level opportunity. Those who will succeed in SEO are self-starters and, by nature, curious. A good signal that you, as a job candidate, have those skills is by showing that you’ve developed a website or a blog on your own with some specific focus. Maybe it’s a Tumblr site with crafting how-tos; perhaps it’s a fully developed travel blog; maybe it’s even a website for a favorite local charity or church. (And, no, just liking Facebook and “being online all the time” isn’t enough.)

Certifications. Any Google certifications you can get will be a huge differentiator — Google Analytics individual qualification, in particular. Also of note: SEO Training Course by Moz (free), SEO 101 by Distilled (paid) and Bruce Clay SEO training (paid).

An interest in/familiarity with industry blogs and thought leaders. The ability to keep up with the changes in the discipline is important — but more than that, your curiosity and willingness to learn are signaled by your self-directed “research” on sites like Search Engine Land. I will ask you what things you read and what you think is “next” in SEO.

The best way to start is by learning digital marketing “hands on.”

Is digital marketing the career for you?

Being prepared for a job is one thing, but enjoying it enough to make it a career is another. What are some of the pros and cons of working in SEO day in, day out that may determine how well-suited you are for the “SEO lifestyle?”

Pros

Always something new to learn — constant change. This isn’t just a cliche; something big will happen every few weeks that you must learn about. Don’t get overwhelmed thinking you have to be an instant expert, just understand that you should know why something new matters (not necessarily how it all works).

If you have an idea and plan to test and measure, seniority doesn’t matter. This is true of many tech-related fields. If you have a good idea, innovation or copy “hook” you think will grow traffic and revenue, only a fool for a boss wouldn’t listen just because you’re young.

It is a “test and learn” culture. As long as you’re watching/measuring, surprises, and even setbacks, are seen as a path to improvement.

Chance interact with cool people in the industry (Well, as long as you think nerdy is cool). People in digital marketing are usually an interesting bunch who are fairly laid-back and free with the knowledge they’ve gained.

Fly all over the world. It’s all caviar and champagne, don’t you know? Well, not really, but if you’re in an agency of any size, it’s likely you’ll make a trip or two during the year to attend a client meeting, presentation or conference.

Cons

Always something new to learn — constant change. The speed of change isn’t slowing, it’s accelerating. The constant need to stay informed and leave old tactics behind can be taxing.

Hard to maintain work/life balance. This is probably the biggest challenge — because we love it, we are thinking about or working on SEO all the time. Sometimes, bosses even think that because you think it’s cool and you’re young, it’s not really like work if they give you impossible deadlines to meet. Well, it is real work, and even if you love what you’re doing, it’s possible to burn yourself out without anyone else pushing you. Know that you are a limited resource and there will always be some reason to work late or skip a vacation. Be smart, and get off the computer as often as you can.

You won’t be management overnight. Sweet SEO skills alone won’t make you a manager, director or VP — it’s your ability to communicate, maintain an even temperament and focus on client needs (not SEO tech-ery) that will help you rise up the ranks. Those things are only gained over time and in situ.

Clients and CEOs can have unreasonable expectations. There are definitely those who think SEO is like magic, and, if you just sprinkle some on their project, success will come overnight. Even with guidance, patient counseling and careful presentation of progress, you sometimes cannot reset those unreasonable expectations. This is closely related to the next item…

Many have misconceptions about how SEO works. Part of what makes SEO cool is that a lot of people don’t really know what you do or how SEO works. But that can also be dangerous; they may have misconceptions about the level of skill required to execute a good SEO campaign or the time it takes to see results.

You’re likely to step on toes. While it may be tempting to jump into a new project and start ordering SEO-based code changes or say that it’s SEO’s job to provide the language used in copy development, be aware that there are likely IT and PR departments in the room who think those things are their job. My advice: Before calling their baby ugly, always acknowledge the necessary role of IT to provide a good code base and/or PR to craft the brand’s message — then explain how SEO can enhance, not replace, their work.

Final thoughts

Is SEO for everyone? Definitely not. If you like learning a way of doing things that you can execute until retirement, don’t get into the field. If you like figuring out the way things work — and you can recognize when talking about your SEO ninja skills should take a back seat to the business needs of the project — then jump in and stay humble.

Google says page speed ranking factor to use mobile page speed for mobile sites in upcoming months

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:21:00 -0700

Gary Illyes from Google said at the Search Marketing Summit today in Sydney that Google will be updating the page speed ranking factor to specifically look at the page speed of your mobile pages when it comes to the mobile-friendly algorithm.

This report came from Jennifer Slegg, who said Gary Illyes from Google said this is months, but not years away from happening.

The issue today is that many of the ranking signals Google uses today for mobile rankings are based on your desktop web pages, not mobile web pages. So if you have a really fast desktop web page, but the mobile version is really slow, it currently doesn’t hurt your mobile rankings.

When Google updates their mobile-friendly algorithm, they hope to add mobile-specific page speed as a factor and not rely on the desktop version.

As you may remember, page speed became a ranking factor back in April 2010. In June 2013, Matt Cutts hinted that a negative factor would come to slow mobile pages. Then a year ago, Gary Illyes said they are working on mobile-specific page speed, and now, he said it is months away.

But Gary also said on Twitter it is in the planning phase, so hopefully, it is still months away.

It is just logical for page speed, as well as other factors, to be mobile-dependent and not desktop-dependent. This seems to be Google’s plan.

Huge Changes Coming to AdWords & Other Top Stories from May

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:18:00 -0700

Search marketers the world over watched with baited breath last week as Google finally unveiled a whole raft of new features and improvements coming to the AdWords platform.

Although you could technically lump everything Google announced under the same banner, there was so much new information to digest, there was no way we could condense everything into one post (not that we’d want to). For this reason, the various changes coming to AdWords dominated the WordStream blog in May, so if you missed the big reveal and what it means for your campaigns, read on.

Of course, there was a bunch of other exciting stuff going on at the WordStream blog this month, but in light of Google’s epic announcement, we won’t be offended if you overlooked it – kind of like if a nifty new tool were released on the same day as Godzilla was sighted off the coast of Japan, for instance.

1. 5 Big Changes Coming to AdWords: Everything You Need to Know: This was the story in digital marketing this month. Google unveiled a host of new features that advertisers and marketers can expect to take advantage of as early as next year, including location-based ads in Google Maps and new responsive display ads. Larry was at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, for the announcement, and this detailed summary of the impending changes should be at the top of your reading list.

2. 5 Brilliant Competitive Advertising Strategies to Outsmart Your Competition: Some businesses shy away from directly competing with other companies in their space, favoring a less confrontational approach. However, as Larry explains in our second-most popular post from May, going straight for the throat can be a remarkably effective advertising strategy. Check out this post for five ways you can go after your competition – and win.

3. 7 Excel Tricks to Make You a Power User: Let’s face it – Excel will never be a “sexy” application. Although few people are impressed by pivot tables and other Excel features, that’s not to say they’re not incredibly powerful. In this post, Larry highlights seven cool tricks you can use to level up your Excel skills.

4. Google Expanded Text Ads: 10 Things You Need to Know: Last week, Google announced the biggest change to its text-based PPC ads we’ve seen in 15 years – but what’s going on? Find out in our fourth-most popular post of the month, in which WordStream’s Fearless Leader Larry Kim highlights what you can expect from Google’s newly expanded text-ad format, and how you can leverage these new features for maximum gain.

5. Why You NEED to Raise Organic CTRs (And How to Do It): In the world of PPC, most marketers are primarily concerned with the CTRs of their paid campaigns, an understandable position. However, if you’ve been neglecting your organic CTRs, you could be in big trouble. Larry drops some knowledge in this post about why you need to start focusing on your organic CTRs, too – right now.

6. 3 Landing Page Optimization Myths EXPOSED: Conversion rate optimization is arguably the hottest trend in digital marketing since content. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad information out there, including some stubbornly persistent myths and misconceptions about what landing pages should be and do in the first place. In our sixth-most popular post of May, yours truly debunks three of the most common landing page myths, and offers several suggestions on what to focus on instead.

7. Easy AdWords Bidding Strategies for Newbies and Math Haters: Getting started with AdWords is easy. Grasping complicated bidding strategies is another matter entirely. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a doctoral candidate in applied computational mathematics to start leveraging the power of AdWords’ bidding options, as Erin expertly demonstrates in this post. Essential reading for those hoping to exert more power and control over their campaigns.

8. These Coding Skills Will Make Every PPC Specialist More Valuable: These days, it seems like everybody’s learning to code. Even if you don’t know a string from an array, or couldn’t declare a function in JavaScript if your life depended on it, you can still learn fundamental coding skills that will make you considerably more valuable to employers and clients as a PPC specialist. In this post, guest author Frederik Hyldig of Denmark’s s360 agency shows you how to do just that.

9. 7 Totally Underrated Free AdWords Tools: You could be forgiven for thinking that you don’t need any more free tools to help you manage your PPC workflows. While you might be right, these seven free AdWords tools are seriously underrated, and Erin shows us why in this post. You never know, you may just find the tool that could save you hours of time.

10. 9 Easy Ways to Improve Your Marketing Resume: Looking for a job in marketing? Have you optimized your resume? No, I’m not kidding. In our final post of this month’s round-up, Elisa explains why you should absolutely include keywords in your resume (yes, really), why listing Microsoft Office “skills” is a waste of space, and other great tips to help your resume stand out from the crowd. A must-read for new and experienced marketers alike.

SEO and the White Hat approach

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:14:00 -0700

SEO has a long history. It’s simply not something new. And before it became this technical, it was merely a matter of content, which is the main focus of White Hat (or sometimes known as organic) SEO. When SEO was yet unconscious, content was almost everything. And right now, content is still one of the main driving factors when it comes to SEO.

When content mattered most

‘Content is King’ as they say. And SEO will not argue with that statement. Content may still well be king even up until now but what’s a king without the queen and their subjects?All the other factors that a Google spider verifies such as meta tags, image alt text, keyword density, backlinks and whatnot are just as important.

White hat SEO focuses mainly on content – basically on how user-friendly and information-packed your content is. When your content is good, people will buzz about it in Twitter, Facebook and all the other social media tools and online tools that are available to the internet users today – which will, in turn, drive traffic to your website.

White hat SEO is the way to play it safe. It obliges in all of the terms of agreement of social media, it implements good, clean, Google-approved strategies in order to gain higher page rank and get better search engine visibility. Compared to it’s counterpart, which is black hat SEO, the white hat method will ensure your brand’s reputation in the web.

If you are aware of your online reputation and brand then you will probably choose the white hat method. The only thing about being a white hat practitioner is that it takes longer for clients to see your results. Businesses pay for fast, easy-come results. They don’t pay for slow, time-consuming processes which will have them wait for them to see the results (which is exactly what white hat is all about!)

Yes, it will take time – a lot of time. My SEO services have a minimum contract of 6 months (yes, I’m a white-hat practitioner, and yes, I am paid per month) for you to start seeing the results. That’s how long it takes for you to just see the results of the white hat method. But it’s also much cheaper than the black hat method even if the black hat method is quicker to get your page rank up.

To make it simple for all of you guys, white hat method is the good, clean way which makes quality, competitive, information-packed content it’s main weapon and tool. While black hat method is the ‘how-to-go around the rules’ method which uses doorway pages, invisible texts, keyword stuffing and comment spamming. It abuses artificial and technical loopholes as it’s main route to attain higher page rank.

Here’s a table taken from the site: Silverdisc.com that explains the difference between a white hat and black hat approach to SEO

	Black Hat	White Hat
Content and Links	Search Engines	Humans
Visibility to Humans	Hidden	Visible
Quality of Work	Hidden	Visible
Search Engines	Enemies	Nothing / Friends
Domains/Brands	Disposable	Cherished, Primary Domain
Site & Relevance	Apparently Improved	Actually Improved
Results	Yes, “Short” Term	Yes, “Long” Term
Ethical Techniques	No	Yes
Legal	No?	Yes?

Tips for Keeps:

If you are trying to build your brand or company online, then the White hat method is what you want. Start a blog for your company or online brand and create good, quality content that people will love and need. If your article information is good, it will definitely create buzz.

White Hat SEO Tutorial - How to Improve Search Performance While Maintaining Your Integrity

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:12:00 -0700

White Hat SEO is a practice used to improve search performance that is in line with terms and conditions of a search engine. In this tutorial, you'll learn:

What White Hat SEO is, exactly
How White Hat SEO can affect your website and business
How to Implement Effective White Hat SEO Tactics Without Breaking the Rules

So, What is White Hat SEO, Anyway?

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, White Hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search performance on a search engine results page (SERP)while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines' terms of service. These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. Examples include:

Offering quality content and services
Using descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
Making your site easy to navigate

Why Are White Hat SEO Techniques Important To You?

Not engaging in White Hat SEO can get your site banned from Google and other search engines!

As the number one search engine, Google is visited by hundreds of millions of people per day, and each visit presents the potential for your site to be discovered by a new user. Google is an undeniably powerful source of traffic to your website, and being banned can result in a drastic drop in website traffic and even business. Consider all the work that goes into your website and then think about what it would be like to be banned from the internet's most commonly used search engine. What's worse, once you're banned from Google, there is no guarantee that they will ever re-list you. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences.

Why risk it? Check out a complete description of Google-approved SEO techniques at Webmaster Guidelines. Google's Webmaster resources are the go-to place to learn Google white hat SEO practices.

Should You Implement White Hat SEO Methods?

Definitely! Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical, sustainably successful website and business. Does this mean you can't use automation in your search campaigns? Definitely not!

WordStream has the best of both worlds: intelligent, cutting-edge automation that makes it easier to rank your site, as well as tools like an SEO keyword tool that enable you to observe Google's guidelines. Let's revisit Google's suggestions for SEO best practices and take a look at how WordStream can help:

Offer Quality Content and Services

WordStream's Keyword Discovery Tool and Long Tail Keyword Tool provide content ideas and product enhancements. These tools work together to grow your keyword list and content suggestions by recording search queries that brought people to your website and automatically adding them to your WordStream keyword database for your review.

Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags

By organizing your keywords based on relevance, our Keyword Grouping Tool works as a guide for meta tags and meta keywords, including common misspellings and different variations of your keywords.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Use the software's Search Engine Optimization tools to visualize and implement keyword hierarchy and Information Architecture. Once keywords are grouped by relevance and popularity, it's easy to see which of your pages should receive higher prominence across your website.

At the end of the day, it's usually good to play it safe. After all, getting on Google's bad side doesn't really help anyone. White Hat SEO practices produce effective, long lasting and ethical improvements to your website and are always good business practice. However, running with the crowd has its consequences too, especially if you want your website to stand out from the competition. If you follow White Hat SEO practices in the same way everyone else does, you're not doing much to stand out, and you may not achieve the search results you desire.

What you want is a mix of White Hat and Black Hat: Think creatively to get ahead of others without breaking the rules. Learn how to think outside the box while minimizing risk on our page regarding Grey Hat SEO.

11 SEO Tips to BOOST Your OpenCart Online Store.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 2 Jun 2016 01:08:00 -0700

#1: Optimize every page in your OpenCart store

OpenCart is designed in a way that all of its pages can be indexed and identified in search engines. So by providing the identification information through Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta keywords, you are making it easier for search engines to get your store data.
Just login to your OpenCart dashboard and follow these steps to get it done:

Optimizing for your Home page: Go to System > Settings > Edit > tabStore, fill out in the Title and Meta Tag Description box, then clickSave.
Optimizing for your each Catalog: Go to Catalog > Categories > Choose category to edit or insert new > fill out in the Category Name, Meta Tag Description and Meta Tag Keywords box, then click Save.
Optimizing for your each product: Go to Catalog > Products > Choose product to edit or insert new > fill out in the Product Name, Meta Tag Description and Meta Tag Keywords box, then click Save.

Notes: To get better ranking on search engines, remember the rule of thumb is only 70 characters for Title tags and150-160 characters for Meta Descriptions. And it’s better if you insert your product keywords to them. Do keyword research carefully for your store using Google Keyword Tool!

#2: Optimize URL’s Structure

The OpenCart default URL’s such ashttp://worldwebsolutions.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=40 will destroy your effort to get high ranking on Google and other search engines. So you need to make your OpenCart website has shorter, friendly and meaningful URL’s.
Follow these steps to do it now:

Login to your OpenCart dashboard > Go to System > Settings > Edit > tabServer > Set the SEO URL’s radio to “Yes” and save your settings.
Go to your hosting control panel and rename the file .htaccess.txt to.htaccess
Finally, you need to enter SEO keywords for every page, information, product and category you want to have URL rewrite (You can find the field for the SEO Keywords under the Data tab when editing and creating items).

Recommend: To get more features and better optimize your OpenCart website for search engines, you should install the OpenCart SEO extensions such as Opencart SEO Pack.

#3: Avoid Duplicate Content

There are two ways to access your OpenCart site, one ishttp://Worldwebsolutions.in and the other ishttp://www.YourOpencartSore.com. It shows search engines that you have 2 sites with the same content. And this will kill your site on SERP (search engines’ result pages).
What is the solution?
All of your links MUST go to one place!
By default, OpenCart doesn’t handle this redirect for you. You have to do that manually. But how?
Simple, you just need to edit your .htaccess file which can be found in the same folder that you installed OpenCart on your server. Here is what the code looks like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END OpenCart

That is all you need to redirect your OpenCart site from the “www version” to the “non-www version”. If you want to redirect from the non-www to the www, then swap lines 3 and 4 with this:
Notes: You should make sure that your host allows you to edit the .htaccess file (most will) and remember to change Worldwebsolutions.in to your domain name.

#4: Create a Robots.txt File.

When a search engine crawler comes to your OpenCart site, it will look for a special file on the website. That file is called robots.txt and it tells the search engine spider which pages of your OpenCart should be indexed and which pages should be ignored.
That’s why you should have a robots.txt file for your OpenCart site (click here to learn more about the robots.txt file and then create your one).
You still don’t know what to do? (Sorry the robot.txt thing is way too complicated).
So just copy and paste this code in an archive called “robots.txt” and upload it to your Opencart root directory:

#5: Create XML Sitemap for your Opencart website.

Although OpenCart has created an HTML sitemap for you, you should still create another XML sitemap to get better ranking. Why?
With a XML sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. That’s why it will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your OpenCart web pages.
To create a XML sitemap for OpenCart,

#6: Use a clean OpenCart Theme

A clean OpenCart theme? It’s a theme which has valid XHTML code, and has a CSS stylesheet that is EASY to modify.
After I have worked in the SEO field for a while, I found that using a XHTML valid theme is very important for getting high ranking on search engines. It helps the crawlers to easier get your website data, so your site will be index faster, and rank higher.

#7: Add Google Analytics to Your OpenCart Site.

Google Analytics is a FREE, popular, powerful reporting and metrics tool for any website owners. It provides a valuable insight into how your website traffic, even where is potential keywords. You will know what to do next to improve your website’s ranking. That’s why it is so IMPORTANT for your online business. So, go to Google Analytics, create an account, and add the code to your OpenCart site.

#8: Create a Blog for Your OpenCart Site

HubSpot’s Study shows that small businesses that blog gain 55% more website visitors, 97% more backlinks (inbound links – links from other websites to your website) and have 434% more indexed pages in average compared to those that do not blog.
It’s simple to create a blog for your OpenCart site by using an Opencart blogging module. If you care about this, we’d love to help.

#9: Let’s Get Indexed Faster

Your OpenCart site will automatically be indexed by the search engines. But it might take long time. You do not need to wait until then, just submit your URL to these search engines to see immediate results. So go to Google, Yahoo,Bing and tell them your OpenCart store is launched.

#10: Create a Video Channel on YouTube

No doubt, YouTube is a great marketing channel for your OpenCart store. You can attract a lot of potential customers through it. And one more thing that you might unexpect is that YouTube can help you improve your ranking. But how?
YouTube helps you get more backlinks and increase trust from search engines.
By adding a video clip to the blog post, you can keep your customers stay longer on your site. This will help the search engines evaluate your site has useful content, attract readers and therefore, you get higher ranking.

#11: BOOST Social Networking

The algorithm of search engines (especially Google) recently appreciate the links which are shared through social networks. That’s why when the link is being sent to the network such as Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter, then it would be indexed immediately and has an opportunity to get TOP ranking in search engines.
It’s easy to create your business profile on Social Networking sites and start build community, then share your store information.

10 Methods You Can Adopt To Promote Your Fiverr Gig

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 1 Jan 2016 23:26:00 -0800

Are you looking for various ways to promote your Fiverr gig? If you are, you are at the right place. In this article, we are going to look at 10 most effective and practical ways to promote your Fiverr gig. These ways are;

#1 Making Good Use Of Your Tags
If you do not have a working strategy, your dream of been ranked on top of other gigs will just be a dream that will never come to pass. As we know, there are a lot of Fiverr gigs out there fighting for the chance to lead in this network. Unless you are featured, it is unlikely that people will see you when going through their passive browsing activities. What do I mean? In simple, if you want more clicks, you must undertake a strategy that will take you on top of the Fiverr lists. One of the best ways to do this is by optimizing your tags. Optimization of your tags ensures that more people come across your gig account while they are browsing. If you want to know what keywords to use, you can search the Google keyword tools or look at other gigs that are more specialized than you are.

#2 Posting Videos
Unlike all other gigs that pass their information via plain text, you can try to be more unique by posting few videos to your gig. This strategy guarantees you more clicks and likes. Videos make you stand out from the other gigs since most of them, if not all, do not post videos. In addition, videos also allow you to pass more detailed information about events and products that cannot be explained properly by mere texts. Try out this winning strategy.

#3 Creating A Personal YouTube Channel
To promote your Fiverr gigs, you should be ready to get into the limelight. Do not hesitate to get in front of the camera and show your viewers what you really do. Publicize yourself and let people know who they are working with.

#4 Posting Of Relevant Forums
Even though it’s a prerequisites to post a certain number of forums in order to put a link in your signature, this does not encourage you to post on spammy forums. You should ensure that you post high quality forums that will allow you to build a good reputation. Having a good reputation plays an important role in increasing the number of viewers visiting your site since the word goes viral and attracts a lot of new visitors.

#5 Creating A Blog
When you create a Fiverr, you have the ability to link it to your personal blog. You can pack it with samples of your work and talk about other gigs in your blog. Use your blog to pass relevant information and not necessarily to market yourself. If you can no longer link your gig to your blog, try linking it to your YouTube channel and post videos about your work.

#6 Utilizing Your Friends In The Social Network

Create a fan page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites. This increases the chances to get more people to your gig. As we know, the social media network is one of the best places to market you. Ask your friend in the social networks to follow you on your gig.

#7 Commenting On Other Blogs

Be interactive with other bloggers by commenting on their blogs. This is a way of getting more exposure and marketing yourself. Just like with the forums, ensure that you post quality comments. This is likely to attract more visitors to your gig.

#8 Requesting For Referrals
If you have an established Fiverr gig, you can ask your follower to refer some of their friends to your gig. There is no harm in doing that.

#9 Utilizing Guest Posts
Take advantage of the lazy bloggers who have nothing to post but have a lot of visitors visiting their blogs. Trade guest posts with a link to your gig. Followers of the blog are more likely to follow you in your gig account.

#10 Purchasing Traffic From Fiverr
There are many gigs that are willing to offer traffic to your website for only a few bucks. It’s not a bad idea to try getting traffic from them as in the long run, the benefits you reap are more numerous than the money you spend. It’s a sort of investment to you.

To promote you Fiverr gig, always remember to be persistent and to try new techniques, methods and ideas to attract more followers. Never give up; you can go far with your online career.

9 Techniques to promote Fiverr GIGs In 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 1 Jan 2016 23:19:00 -0800

Fiver is a marketplace that gets close buyers and sellers over the world. A Gig is a task, service or product that seller offers to buyers. If you have not check out it then go right now! fiverr
There are hundreds of ways to make money on fiverr from which people make hundreds or thousands of dollars in a month. So, How they do that??? Check out some really helpful techniques to promote your fiverr gigs.

Here are TOP 9 techniques to promote your fiverr GIGs:

1. First Make perfect fiverr Gigs:

First start from your own gig which can appeal people. Your gig title should brief and state forward.
For example:
“I will Create a Professional Whiteboard Animation Video In 24hours for $5.”
You first have clear and to the point statement without errors about your gig description. Your gig image should be inspired and innovative. Your gig description is very important and try something that stand very impressive for the buyers.

2. Take advantage of tags in gig:

Tags are very important part of a gig. Fiverr is a large platform and have less chance that people will go across your gig through browsing unless you feature and optimize your tags. If don’t know which tags to use then look at popular gigs or use Google’s Keyword Tool. It is important for ranking in Fiverr search result and a great technique to make money on fiverr.

3. Offer plenty of relevant Gigs that grabs people’s attention:

Substantially same gigs are not allowed in fiverr but you can make gig that are relevant in different ways. If they have different text and images then it is allowed. For example, you can offer a gig of header illustration and another gig of web graphics illustration.
Don’t copy other gigs, try your own innovative ideas.

4. Get Social traffic:

You can make fan page where you can promote your fiverr gigs or tweet to your followers. If don’t tell anyone they will not get that. Traffic has always good impression. Use local media resources because many people still don’t know what is Fiverr. So promote your profile and gigs in your social circles on Facebook, twitter, and others can make more clients for you.

5. Add a video in your gig:

Adding a video in your gig that is relevant and reveals your efforts and impresses your clients is very effective way. You can more describe your gig in a different way and client will click and interact with your service and there will be more chances that they will hire for a job.
This is a good technique to promote fiverr gig.

6. Create a free blog at blogger:

When you make new gig, you can promote this gig on your personal blog as your sample work and you can also share views about your other gigs. In this user of your blog will also know about your related skills.

7. Comment on blogs:

In fiverr forums, you can comment of high quality and more chances that people would like to see what you offer and what are your services and may your client increase.

8. Request For Referrals to promote Fiverr gigs:

After creating a Fiverr gig, now ask your followers to refer their friends and family to your gig. There is nothing illegal in this way of promotion.

9.Press Release to promote Fiverr Gig:

The URL of profile of Fiverr can be listed in search engines by adding keywords related to your gigs and it is effective. Write short Press Release to announce and submit to some free press release sites when you get some winning gig.
As bloggers are searching for fresh content and so as the media does. Things that did right viral really work for promotion of your gig.

Final thoughts:

Try some creative, get inspired with popular services but follow innovative ideas but don’t waste a lot of your time on a single gig when little is going to return.
Best of luck and follow these techniques, I hope they will give you a long-run benefit.

How do I promote Fiverr Gigs and how to make my gig visible in Fiverr search ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 1 Jan 2016 23:11:00 -0800

The best way to rank a fiverr gig and make it visible in Fiverr searches is to optimize your gig for Fiverr's searches. How would you do it? keep your eye on this piece of content.

Most of people would tell you to blog about your services and so on. But let me tell you that Fiverr is not a search engine. It doesn't require SEO that we usually relate with blogging.

I have put a link to an article in the 1st line that will give in depth detail of ranking your fiverr gig for more sales.

However, Fiverr gig SEO involves the following:

Title Optimization to the buyer's perceptions
Optimization of image or making a video client pitch
Description relevancy to the Title
Category tagging
Algorithm signs to rise up the gig in searches (Important)

The algorithm signs are very much important these days. However, earning excellent rating is an advanced way to giving signal to the Fiverr's algorithm, but here the say is about driving real hits that can give the signal to fiverr that the people are interested in your gig and viewing it. Have a look on it. Remember these stats are only showing the activity of last 30 days. I think 60 orders in 30 days are well enough.

So the question might get your mind that how could you increase the views of your gig?

As discussed earlier the link to the article in the first line has more in-depth information of promoting Fiverr Gigs and how to make your gig visible in Fiverr search.

But here is a snapshot i want to give to all here.

Promoting your gig over different social media platform is very much effective. But nothing can beat the LinkedIn and Twitter. These 2 platforms will not only promote your gig but they will also promote your business and will find you clients outside the Fiverr.

5 Ways to Promote Fiverr Gigs in 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 1 Jan 2016 23:07:00 -0800

Fiverr has got popularity as the best marketplace for freelancers where you can sell any kind of service in the form of a Gig. A gig is simply a page showing your service. Gig optimization is important and if you can’t do that learn how to promote a Fiverr gig. In my view, Gig optimization is a bit difficult therefore I decided to share some ways to promote Fiverr gigs. Before you promote your Fiverr gigs, your gigs must have:-

Mind blowing description
Attractive images or videos
Simple (but attractive) and understandable title.
Some free bonuses so that users may order immediately.

Ways to promote Fiverr Gigs

Hmm, Why you want to promote your Fiverr gigs? I know you want to increase your sales, want to increase Fiverr earnings and more!. All right, I am gonna share 5 ways o promote Fiverr gigs.

1. Facebook Groups

There are many Fiverr related groups on Facebook. You can promote your Fiverr gigs in Fiverr related groups. It may not increase your sales, but it can boost your gig views & impressions. One year ago in 2014, when I was looking for sales on Fiverr, I just shared my gigs in Facebook groups. Then I saw a sudden increase in my sales. I took it seriously and started sharing my gigs in Facebook groups. Try to share your gigs in Facebook groups (Fiverr related), you may increase your sales. Some keywords to search while looking for Fiverr gigs promotion:-

Fiverr Gig promotion
Fiverr Gig promote
Fiverr community

2. Popular Blog – Secret Trick

You can promote your Fiverr profile or gigs via a blog. If you are a blogger, then try to promote your Fiverr profile with your blogs. You can promote your Fiverr profile with a widget officially provided by Fiverr itself. Try it out here:-

3. Twitter #Hashtags

One of the best was to promote Fiverr gigs and profile is to use Twitter #hashtags. Try #hashtags like #Fiverr #Fiverr_promotion #Fiverr_gigs #Gig #Gigs and post tweet by pasting the gig URL in it. You will get hundred of views to your gigs. No doubt, you can increase your sales too. Just try this method and share your results in comments.

4. Create YouTube Channel

YouTube is another way to promote Fiverr gigs and profiles. Create a whiteboard animation or attractive video showing your services. Upload that video on YouTube. In the description, put your Fiverr gig or profile’s link. Use annotations to show links to the video. This method is for those who don’t want to invest in promotion. If you want to invest, You can promote your video by Google AdWords.

5. Fiverr official Forum

Hmm, that’s a great way to promote a Fiverr gig or profile. Fiverr forum is an active forum where almost all Fiverr sellers and buyers are registered. Here you can share gigs’ links, ask questions promote your profile’s and so on. It can help you in promoting your Fiverr account & gigs. It works!

Some other recommended ways to Promote Fiverr gigs

Blog Commenting

You can use blog comments for promoting your gigs. It works! You need to find blogs that publish Fiverr guides. Visit all the blogs later on and put your gig links in the comments section. Simply, You are converting their blog readers into Fiverr buyers or clients.

Promotion is just promotion, where you find a place to promote, just promote, no fear

Guest Posts

You can increase your Fiverr sales by guest posting on Fiverr related blogs. How?? :O

That’s so easy, Man! Just guest post on related blogs and in author bio put your Fiverr gig links. Now, you’re going to transform Fiverr buyers into clients. Good Luck

Reddit

Reddit is not a platform to promote Fiverr gigs but a page exists, where Fiverr users promote their gigs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FiverrGigs

Log in to your Reddit profile, move to that page and start submitting your gigs there. That’s so easy, isn’t it?

In 2015, Your Job As An SEO Isn’t Actually SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 5 Sep 2015 09:54:00 -0700

OK, I’ll admit right now I wrote that title just to get clicks. It’s not my proudest moment, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t done it before.

Regardless, the title is accurate — in a sense. Yes, you are still responsible for driving organic traffic. That isn’t going anywhere. But because the way to drive organic traffic isn’t anything like the way we used to drive organic traffic, SEOs have to become more cross-functional. These days, when you say you “do SEO,” you really do about a million other things that historically aren’t considered SEO.

If that’s the case, then what else is in our job description?

Content Developer

This part of an SEO’s job should not come as a surprise to you given how ingrained “content is king” has become in our heads.

There is no way you can rank well in search engines without good content, and I see more copywriters being directly integrated into the SEO team rather than living on a different team. In many cases, the requirements of being a non-technical SEO now include content writing.

Quality content can be hard to create; it’s not exactly something you can teach. There’s no formula you can follow (although Nate Dame does have a pretty good list of what makes quality content), and it does take a lot of time (I’ve spent 15 minutes on one Facebook post), so don’t assume that good content is something we just have lying around.

User Experience Advocate

SEO and user experience (UX) got off on the wrong foot, and I blame SEO. The spammy things we were doing years ago to manipulate the algorithm were the furthest thing from a good user experience, so it’s no wonder UX professionals hated us.

Things are totally different now. Search engines want to see what users want to see.

Though Google hasn’t come out to say that good UX impacts your search rankings, there’s a lot of speculation that it will be adding mobile UX into its algorithm. That means that if you want to drive more organic traffic to a page, that page has to provide a good user experience.

Digital Strategists

Over the past year or so, I’ve noticed a fundamental change in how SEOs operate — specifically the marketing side of SEO, not the technical side.

We’re becoming more thinkers than doers. Instead of taking direction from what others have decided will change on the site, we’re getting more involved in shaping that conversation. If you’re not, then you need to push to be.

We spend so much time on the site and so much time obsessing over every data point on how customers are using our site that it’s completely fair to say we know what’s best for the site. Of course, I’m not advocating for SEOs to be the sole decision maker, but SEO today means playing a larger role in overall site strategy, and that’s something we need to be prepared for.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who view SEO in a silo, so it’s up to us to not pigeonhole ourselves into just keyword research or title tag updates.

Creative Marketer

It used to be so easy to get links: a few directory listings, some press release submissions, a handful of articles posted to EzineArticles. Mindless work, yes, but boy was it easy.

There is definitely no such thing as easy link now. Every link, whether manually or organically acquired, requires a lot of thought and a little bit of work, and we have to be more creative in the way we’re getting links.

Instead of “building links,” we’re building things people naturally want to link to, and that’s forcing SEOs to think more like marketers. What does our target audience want?

Thinking like this, you’re not creating SEO campaigns or link building campaigns; you’re creating marketing campaigns that build brand awareness, boost social mentions, generate PR buzz and yeah, builds some links. Here are some great examples;

The You vs. John Paulson campaign MahiFX ran in 2011 (Moz has a good write-up of the case study).
Expedia’s Find Yours Campaign – 68 linking root domains (LRDs), 196 total links, ~1,000 social shares.
Froont’s brilliant GIFS about responsive design – 273 LRDs, 2,473 total links, ~11,000 social shares.
Union’s employee appreciation day – 56 LRDs, 468 total links, ~12,00 social shares. (Sadly, the Vimeo link got all the action, but all the press buzz secured a handful of home page links.)
Obviously, you can’t run things like the above by yourself. You’re going to have to rely on other departments — and that brings me to probably the most important job of any SEO in 2015….

Cheerleader

One of my boss’ favorite sayings is, “The best SEO’s will put themselves out of a job.” While that’s not exactly motivating me to be the best SEO (I kid), the point is that the best SEOs have done such a good job at educating other teams on SEO that, after a while, there doesn’t need to be someone advocating for “right thing for SEO” because that’s naturally been weaved into the fabric of every digital professional’s job.

Do I think we’re ever going to get to that point? Not in the next 10 years, but the fact remains that SEO in theory isn’t hard, no matter how many people try to tell you it’s a Jedi magic trick.

Everything you do online could have some effect on your organic traffic, so SEOs have to rely on other teams to understand how their actions affect our KPIs. You have to rally these evangelists in creative, in social media, in development, in IT, and in copywriting, educating them on how what they do is actually SEO. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to meet your goals.

Social BOOKMARKS : Samples

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 9 Aug 2015 16:31:00 -0700

I Will do 20 Pr10 BOOKMARKS With 50 Blog Comments Manually for $5

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 1 Aug 2015 04:55:00 -0700

♚ Exclusively On Fiverr BEST GIG ORDER NOW ♚

✇ Social Bookmark Sites 20 PR-10 To PR6
✇ Twitter
✇ Facebook
✇ Reddit
✇ Stumbleupon
✇ Folkd
And many more sites.
✇ (For Social Bookmark We Accept Unlimited Title And Description:)

✇ Blog Comments 25xPr2 - 10xPr3 - 5xPr4 - 5xPr5 - 5xPr6✪ On First Order Get 20 EXTRA Pr2+ Blog Comments ✪

➲ Q: How We Do Our Work?

➲ Ans: We choose those sites who still have high authority in Google’s eye. We Make variations in titles - Write unique descriptions every time - Add deep, related tagsThis is the strategy We use to create social bookmarking “Be Creative, Do Creative”. That will be safe in Google’s eye for sure.

➲ Q: Why You Order This Gig?

➲ Ans: We make use of only white-hat tricks and techniques to earn an increased traffic and rank for your website. We make sure that the traffic generated is 100% organic and targeted and our strategies do not offend Google or other search engines.

✔ 2015 Algorithm Penalty safe
✔ 100% Manual Do-follow Links
✔ 100% Penguin 3.0 Panda 4.1 Safe✔ 100% Search Engines Friendly✔ 100% Pure Hand Made Submissions
✪ Full Detailed work will be provided At The Time Of Delivery.

Click Me For The Link

Use fivr.co to shorten that long Fiverr gig URL

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 13:04:00 -0700

Most of us know how it feels to hit the submit button on that shiny new gig that you just spent 2 hours typing up, just to be denied because your description is too long. With 1200 characters enough can be said, and I understand Fiverr’s objective to keep it simple and smooth, but sometimes simple isn’t what’s making money on our specific gig. Sometimes a few extra characters in the description can save you a message or two, or maybe even push a sale.

If you are like me and have gigs that directly relate to other gigs, and you want to leave a link in the description, you end up with something like this: http://www.fiverr.com/yourusername/your-long-gig-title-full-of-important-keywords. Just one link takes up around 80-90 characters. I sometimes need to leave 2 or 3 links. This is over 20%
of my allotted description space! This is just one reason why I am excited to introduce to the fiverr community a new tool at the fingertips of sellers.

FIVR.CO – A URL SHORTENER FOR YOUR FIVERR GIGS!

Unlike most URL shortening services, at fivr.co you can customize your URL, ex. fivr.co/customurl. Therefor not only shortening your gig URL but making it a memorable one. You can also use it to point to your profile: ex. fivr.co/yourprofile, yet again saving you a few precious characters on your printed media such as business cards (imagine writing the long URL of your gig down on a napkin at the bar).

Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew for sure where exactly we were going before we click that ominous ‘bit.ly’ link on Twitter, just hoping that it doesn’t have malware or something worse on the other side. This is a major reason why advertising your gigs on Twitter can be difficult (even if you have got conversions from bit.ly or goo.gl links, there was most likely a few leads you missed out on). The team at fivr.co insures us all that links that are not relevant to fiverr will be blacklisted, so fivr.co URL’s will forever be associated with Fiverr.com gigs and related material.

Can you think of any other great reasons to use fivr.co to shorten your gig URL’s? Let’s hear it in the comments!

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 12:28:00 -0700

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is
good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of link building are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, Jasmine Directory and others quality directories is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

Fiverr - The X-Factor Of Skill

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:49:00 -0700

Fiverr is a great concept that really works. It is perhaps easier to think of it as the X-Factor for skills. However, unlike the real X-Factor, with Fiverr you have ample opportunity to come back and perform once again if you failed the first time. As the end user, the Fiverr concept will ensure you save serious amount of money compared to getting an equivalent service from the 'high street'. Equally, for the seller, the system will ensure great income if you are good at what you do and have fantastic customer care skills. Fiverr is great for both the seller and the consumer.

On the Fiverr website, you can post your skills description for absolutely free. When you come to perform your skill for someone, it is known as the 'gig'. The word Fiverr is a play on fiver since most gigs cost a mere 5 USD. However, this price may just be a start point, a basic service with options to purchase extras if you need.

The X-Factor analogy comes into its own when discussing judging and grading the gigs. In the real show the judges and the public rate the skills of the people in front of them. On the Fiverr website, the judges are the consumers of the gigs and they are encouraged to rate the performance of the service received. The service here means the quality of the product and the accompanying customer service. So it naturally follows that if you were the seller, the better your service, the higher rating you will obtain which in turn will attract you more customers. On Fiverr, since each seller is selling the gig for very similar price, the rating attributed to them is what will make or break a deal.

If your rating is bad because you did not provide a great product and/or customer service and you do not do anything to improve on it in future gigs, then you are in danger of falling in to a vicious circle downwards from which you may not recover. Because, once your reputation is crushed it may be really difficult to resurrect it again. However, if after your first bad gig you took action to improve on your weakness, then not only will you survive but you could go onto thrive on Fiverr.

So what type of services would you expect to receive on Fiverr? Gifts, graphics, videos, social marketing, travel, writing, advertising, music and audio, fun and bizarre, tips and advice, business, technology, programming and more are amongst the services on offer on Fiverr.

The process of obtaining a gig is very simple. Just get to the Fiverr site, search for the gig you require and if you like what you see, just place the order. It's as simple as that! The services offered on Fiverr would benefit many new internet marketers who are on a really tight budget as well as those who just don't have the time or resources to get important tasks done themselves.

For instance the making of a video is one area where Fiverr is aptly suited to assist. Videos as mediums of information are ever pervasive these days. Visitors using the internet expect to see a video on a task they wish to perform. Videos are able to convey complex information in a short time and usually in a fun way. However, making a good video requires skill and experience which is what new marketers don't have. On top of that the software and hardware required to shoot a quality video can be pricey. For a new marketer, the cost alone can make do-it-yourself video out of reach.

Then, there is the question of camera shyness. If you are of a gregarious nature then go ahead and make that video. Just ensure you have a good script and you do not veer off it. But for many, appearing in front of their own camera is just not an option especially at the beginning of their internet marketing career. In that case, the solution is clearly Fiverr.

In fact, some of the sellers of video products on Fiverr are professional actors, so camera shyness is absolutely not an issue with them. Furthermore, because they produce videos day in, day out they have most likely invested in professional camera equipment and software. So you can be assured of a professional quality video. You may just have to provide a script and some direction on what you would want to see in the video.

Every Fiverr gig provider is vetted by moderators and given a grading according to what they have achieved. For instance, 1st level sellers are those who have created 10 orders. The next up, 2nd level sellers are those who have delivered 50 orders with impeccable customer service. The highest level sellers are referred to as Fiverr Rockstarr and are handpicked by Fiverr moderators. You really have to be exceptional to achieve this status. The quality is therefore maintained and conveyed through the grading system.

The Fiverr platform is successful in bringing together two communities which are in great need of each other. Those individuals who really want to monetise their skills and those who want product or service at a price that is anything but reasonable.

Whether you are a seller or a buyer, the Fiverr platform has the potential to provide you with a great online income wherever you happen to be.

To your internet business success!

The Value of Manual Submission

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:41:00 -0700

It is important to submit your pages manually to ensure you achieve the desired search engine rankings and to avoid any penalties for over-submissions, which can happen when using some of the auto-submission software tools. Manual submission is effective and inexpensive when you limit your hand submissions to the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search). But beyond those few sites, the return on investment diminishes due to the time requirements; thus, it is advisable to use an automated tool.

Before we talk about submitting URLs to search engines, a quick review of the prior search engine optimization steps is in order. It is recommended that you complete the steps below before submitting your pages to the search engines.

Site review
Competitive SEO analysis
Link tracking
Identification and analysis keyword phrases
Addition of keywords to content through SEO copywriting
Placement of identical keywords in page content, META title, description, ALT and Keywords Tags
Submitting Pages to Major Search Engines
After performing the above tasks, you are ready to submit your pages to the major search engines. You can use our URL ADD page page with links to the add pages for the major search engines when submitting to the top few.

Sometimes search engines discard submissions without processing. Thus, you need to resubmit until all your pages are processed. But you can't resubmit blindly. Check to see which pages are indexed and resubmit only those not listed in the search engine database. Some indexes give preference to “fresh submissions,” determined by the date of your last update and your last submission date. Therefore, it is wise to update your site often, adhering to prescribed natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. Resubmit at least twice per month (but not more often) until you are listed in each index.

How Long Does It Take to Get Indexed?
You should allow two to four weeks for each search engine submission to be indexed in each of the major search engines and directories (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search,). If you do not show up in an index (which is a common occurrence), then resubmit, following our guidelines. If you are indexed but unhappy with your search engine ranking, then go back and review your keyword usage, increasing or decreasing frequency until you achieve the desired SEO ranking results.

Note that being indexed and being well ranked are two different things. It takes much longer to be well ranked in the organic listings, taking months to years.

Getting Listed in Yahoo!
When suggesting your site to the Yahoo! Directory, register regionally rather than nationally; you'll get registered sooner and Yahoo! will add you everywhere as well. Familiarize yourself with Yahoo!'s guidelines on How to Suggest a Site.

You can use Paid Inclusion to get listed quickly in the Yahoo! Directory. Yahoo! Directory Submit provides an expedited review of your site for a fee. This is recommended for all commercial sites because of the time it takes to get listed in Yahoo! by suggesting a site.

Yahoo! claims to reach over 330 million unique users each month on a local and global level. These are all potential customers for your business that you'll want to reach ASAP rather than experience the normal submission lead-time, especially if you have a new website. Yahoo! Directory Submit promises a review in seven business days. Your listing request is reviewed, and the Yahoo! editorial team responds promptly for a review fee of $299 per year and a recurring annual fee to maintain the listing. Once listed, you can manage your account online, making changes, upgrading your listing or submitting additional sites.

HOW PEOPLE SELL REAL TRAFFIC ON FIVERR ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:38:00 -0700

Fake Followers, Views, and Likes on Fiverr.com

For the longest time, there were a collection of Fiverr gigs that I didn’t understand. They had titles like:

I will send 1000 visitors to your website.
I will give your Facebook page 500 likes.
I will provide you with 1000 Twitter followers and 500 Retweets.
I will give your YouTube video 10,000 views.
How in the world can someone afford to send me 500 Facebook likes for just $5?! That seemed crazy to me.

And then, sadly, I discovered the secret. These views and followers were fake. People develop programs (or “bots”) that can visit your websites. Additionally, other people create many fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then run programs that will cause these fake accounts to automatically like or follow your page.

Therefore, I firmly believe that these activities are cheap, deceitful, and a waste of money.

But What About “REAL” Followers, Likes, Views, and Tweets?

I thought that I had figured out the secret to these massive views and likes gigs, when I started seeing something different. I started seeing gigs that offered the tasks I had seen before, but using the word “real”:

I will give you 200 real twitter followers.
I will give you 1000 real YouTube views.
I will give you 100 real Facebook likes.
I will give you 500 real Twitter retweets.
This word “real” really cramped my style. How in the world could people send “real” likes and views to a website for just $5?

Although I initially thought that these people were lying, I have finally discovered their secret!

It IS possible to sell REAL followers, views, and likes on Fiverr and make money from it. And it’s more legitimate than I would have thought.

How People Can Send You Real Followers for $5

Through my online wonderings, I came across a type of site known as the “social exchange”. Maybe I’m behind the times, but I had never heard of these websites before.

Essentially, on a social exchange, I can use points to get more followers, likes, and views. I get these points from either 1) buying them, or 2) following, liking, and viewing other people’s websites.

Therefore, there are some people who are rapidly liking and following people across the web. They then earn a huge collection of points, and use these points to get the real traffic that they sell on Fiverr.

Are Social Exchanges Legitimate?

After spending a few hours playing around with several different social exchange networks, I would say that they are legitimate, but they are not perfect.

For the most part, the company’s try to keep bots away from the sites. However, I did notice a few fake (or at least “weak”) Twitter accounts that started following one of my accounts when I decided to use my points to get more followers. However, there were real followers and visitors as well.

Thus, I would place these social exchanges somewhere between organic followers, and fake followers. They are clearly real people – and there is a chance that your tweets will be seen. However, they are following you to get points, so most of them will probably not pay much attention to you.

The Best Social Exchanges I Have Come Across

If you want to try this services out for yourself, many of them offer a few free points for signing up. You can use these to send a bit of extra traffic to your website or gain a few more followers.

Who knows, maybe you’ll start selling these real followers as one of your gigs on Fiverr!

I would recommend checking out the following exchanges – if you sign up for all of them you can get about 500 followers or website views for free:

AddMeFast
Like4Like
LikesPlanet
Hit4Hit
SocialBirth
Mystery Solved!

I was ecstatic to discover how people are actually able to send REAL followers, likes, and views for under $5. I’m still debating whether or not this is a service that I would want to offer myself…

As for now, I’ll keep playing around with these social exchanges and, if I become convinced that their legitimate, I may offer my own “1000 likes” gig!A

Does Buying Traffic Hurt Your Google Rankings?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:34:00 -0700

On a site like this one, one of the first questions a savvy webmaster should ask is how the service you might buy affects your ranking. Buying traffic is one of those gray-hat techniques that isn’t particularly black hat, but isn’t necessarily white hat either. Will it hurt you in the long run, or even in the short term?

A Short Answer

In a word; no. Buying traffic will not earn you a search penalty or harm your search ranking in any way.

This is, of course, a disingenuous statement. Purchasing traffic is a multifaceted experience, and there are a few ways along the path that can earn you some form of penalty or hurt you in some way.

Essentially, when you’re buying traffic, you’re getting either good traffic or bad traffic. Good traffic emulates organic traffic and can benefit your site by increasing your exposure and buying your products. Bad traffic does nothing but inflate your hit counter without bringing you any actual benefit. Additionally, bad traffic can come from sources that hurt you.

Obviously, when you’re buying traffic, you want to buy good traffic. Unfortunately, the world of traffic buying is a minefield littered with low-cost scams and black hat techniques.

Characteristics of Bad Traffic

Bad traffic, as mentioned, doesn’t help you because all it does is inflate your view count. Sure, you can say “look, I have 10,000 hits per month from unique IPs!” The thing is, none of those unique hits are doing anything for you. No part of SEO actually measures your traffic, for benefit or detriment. This is because it’s so easy to inflate artificially; see how that works?

Characteristics of Bad Traffic
Essentially, bad traffic comes from robots or from people in third world countries hired to visit your site several times per day. You receive hits from unique IP addresses, but you don’t get the benefits you get from real people. Organic users will click your links and explore your site; robots will not. Organic users have the chance to read your calls to action and may convert; third world traffic sellers don’t.

There’s one way that bad traffic can actually hurt your site; links. If you’re buying bad traffic, there’s the chance that the seller funnels traffic to your site through a network of low-quality blogs that Google flags as negative. If this is the case, you would experience an influx of bad backlinks, which Google will see and flag as spam. This earns you a Penguin penalty and can take a long time to fix.

Thankfully, generally this is not the case. Most traffic sellers have side businesses selling links, and don’t mix the two unless you pay for both.

Buying Good Traffic

By contrast, purchasing good traffic is possible, though it is generally more expensive. Good traffic does everything it can to mimic organic traffic. These users are located in the same country you’re in. They’re potentially interested in buying your product. They’ll explore your site and read your calls to action. They are, in every sense, organic users with the one exception; you bought their presence.

Legitimate traffic sellers essentially run ad campaigns for you, using their own tried and tested methods and networks. They don’t hook you up with robots or send spam links your way. Rather, they just take the work of split-testing ads out of your hands. Sure, you pay more than you would for running the ad campaign yourself, but you don’t have to spend the time creating ad copy or digging into analytics.

The benefit of buying traffic legitimately is that it comes from existing, quality sites in your own niche, but not sites you already can run your ad campaigns on. You’re not just paying for someone to run your Facebook ads for you; you’re paying for access to a unique network of sites that aren’t used for advertising in any other way.

Google and Traffic Buying

Google-and-Traffic-Buying
If you’re worried about Google seeing your traffic, identifying it as unnatural and demoting your site because of it, don’t be. As mentioned above, bad traffic generally has no impact on search one way or another. Google doesn’t care how many views you get monthly, so they don’t care if you’re wasting money buying bad traffic. They only care if you’re buying bad links, which are a legitimate SEO factor.

You can also look at it this way; how can Google tell the difference between purchased traffic and organic traffic? Obviously, it’s easy to see the telltale signs of a robot refreshing a page, but again, they don’t care about that. Paying for good traffic is better, and it mimics organic traffic, so it’s harder to detect. To detect it, Google would have to identify a site selling traffic, identify the sites that are buying traffic, and cross-reference the users visiting each site; no easy task for no benefit to their algorithm.

A Note About Alexa

Buying traffic is often used to inflate Alexa ranks – or try to – but it’s not always a good idea. For one thing, Alexa is hardly useful for many purposes. Sure, some advertisers like to see a high Alexa rank, but you can monetize just as easily through other advertisers.

The reason buying traffic to inflate Alexa statistics is due to how Alexa records traffic. Essentially, the only traffic that counts is traffic from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. This number is only a small percentage of Internet users. If you’re buying organic traffic, you may get a boost; if you’re buying bad traffic, you almost certainly won’t. The exception is if you’re buying traffic specifically for Alexa boosts, in which case the seller probably forces their robots to use the toolbar.

The other problem is that Alexa isn’t an instant rank change. You would have to buy traffic consistently for months or years to see any long-term benefit in your Alexa rank. This can quickly outweigh any benefit you get from having that higher rank.

Ways Paid Traffic Can Hurt

There are two ways paying for traffic, even organic good traffic, can hurt your site. The first is if, along with the traffic, come unnatural links. Bad links can hurt your search ranking, as mentioned above.

The second way is if you’re using Google AdSense or another affiliate for monetizing your blog. Many of these affiliates specify that you can’t artificially inflate your traffic, lest you lose your affiliate status. If Google catches you inflating your traffic, particularly with bad traffic, you are liable to lose your AdSense account.

Other than those two reasons, buying traffic is generally safe and, if you use a good traffic seller, beneficial to your site.

How to Get More Traffic to a Fiverr Gig

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:31:00 -0700

too many low quality sellers scam webmasters out of their cash using black hat techniques that don’t work. While they is true, it has no bearing on being a Fiverr seller, as long as the service you’re selling is valuable and worth the five bucks you get for selling it.

How can you pull in more traffic to your Fiverr gig? Here are a few ideas.

Social Channels

Social media advertising is the go-to means of promoting your gig. How you go about it depends on your gig. If it’s part of your business, you can have your own business Facebook Page, and run a page dedicated to your gig and the industry surrounding it. This adds an air of legitimacy to gigs with shady reputations, like SEO gigs. It also allows you to accumulate a targeted audience.

You may also want to broadcast your message in groups dedicated to your industry, or to your personal friends and family, for additional word of mouth.

Beyond Facebook, Twitter is the biggest and best means of promoting gigs. You can also create Pinterest pins, Instagram photos and even YouTube videos. Figure out how much time you’re willing and able to spend running profiles, and manage as many as you can in that time.

Social media also provides opportunities for a little PPC. While it may not seem like a great idea to pay to advertise gigs that only earn you a few bucks, it’s all about volume. If you pay $5 per week to get your message in front of 1,000,000 people, if even 10 of those people are interested and convert, you’ve made a significant profit.

Accumulating Feedback

Fiverr is a land of shady characters looking to turn a quick profit through immense automation and extremely low cost production. Many people are wary of paying someone for a gig when they’re risking the future of their website, or wasting money on a terrible graphic, or something equally wasteful.

One way to combat this reputation is to earn – not buy – a large amount of feedback. Unfortunately, you can only earn feedback from people buying your services, so you need to focus on the satisfied customer. When you deliver your product or service, whatever it may be, ask the customer to leave you feedback. Over time, you’ll accumulate a critical mass of positive reviews.

When you write the description and introduction to your gig, you need to take advantage of both general SEO trends and trends on Fiverr specifically.

For SEO, keywords are a must. Without keywords, you won’t show up for relevant gig queries, and people searching through Google won’t find you. Avoid spamming your keyword, however; one use, maybe two, is plenty. Instead, think of natural variations to use.

For specific Fiverr tips, use an all-caps word in your headline and use graphical descriptions. Text is boring; the best converting gigs all use graphical designs or even videos in their descriptions. Videos aren’t important if, for example, you’re selling static images. However, if you’re producing something that needs a complex explanation, or if you’re creating or editing videos, a produced video example is a good idea.

Advertise on Your Website

This goes for anything you do; advertise it on any channel you own. If you have a website, if you have a blog, advertise your services through those venues. You don’t need to dedicate your time to a constant flow of advertising, but you need to mention it often enough that users can come in and know what you sell. This might be mention in your blog posts, it might be an ad in your sidebar, it might be a button in your navigation; whatever it is, it needs to be there.

Ping Your Mailing List

Unless you’re new to the online business world and are getting your start with Fiverr, you probably have build up a mailing list. You can use this mailing list to advertise your various products and services, including your Fiverr gig. The trick is to tell the user what you do in a way that makes them want to purchase. Thankfully, you have one advantage; users on your mailing list already trust you, so you don’t need to break that hurdle. $5 is also a very cheap price point for many services, so the jump to a conversion is small.

If you don’t have a mailing list, you should start building one. If you don’t have a website, you can do it through Fiverr; just ask for an opt-in when users make use of your services. Keep the newsletter going on a weekly or monthly basis, reminding people of your service, any new services you launch and any news you have to announce. You can use any number of programs to manage your list, but MailChimp is both easy and simple to use.

Create a Video Advertisement

Images are more compelling than text, and video is more compelling than images. Even if your users don’t always watch your video description, knowing it’s there can make a big difference. They know you put out the effort to make a video description, and the preview image shows its quality in a rough estimation.

You can also gain benefit from posting your video ad throughout the Internet. Host it on YouTube for the social activity, or on Vimeo for its unique community. Embed it on your website for additional traffic flow. Link to it in relevant discussions, rather than linking to your gig directly. Include a call to action in your video, to encourage off-site viewers to convert.

Buy Traffic from Fiverr

You can, of course, always buy targeted traffic from Fiverr itself. This isn’t recommended for website throughput, as you never know what the quality of your traffic is, but on Fiverr all you need is a couple of conversions to make your money back and then some. Investigate the track records of people who sell traffic and see if you can get them to direct a stream your way.

Is it Possible to Make Money by Buying Traffic?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:28:00 -0700

Follow this chain of thought for a moment. You want to make money from your website. To do so, you need to bring in traffic. You have a budget, so you consider buying traffic. The question is, how likely is it that you’ll make money with that traffic? You don’t want to spend more money than you make from the traffic you get. You also don’t want to miss an opportunity to turn a $2 investment into $100 in conversions.

Types of Traffic

The first thing to know is that there are essentially three types of traffic you can buy. They range in quality and cost, on a linear scale.

On the low end of both cost and quality, you have bot traffic. Bot traffic is traffic that comes directly from software, with little or no human interaction. It’s incredibly cheap, mostly because it’s generally ineffective. Bots have certain distinct characteristics, which an experienced user can see in their analytics. More importantly, ad affiliates – any site that pays by the impression, rather than by the conversion – recognize and know how to detect bot swarms. That’s not to say bots are completely useless; they’re just a black hat technique with little in the way of redeeming factors.

Also on the low end, but slightly higher in both price and quality, is the clickfarm style of traffic. A clickfarm is typically a group of real humans in a developing nation, such as Egypt, Bangladesh or Pakistan. These users are paid to click around a target site, imitating what a real human user would do. They’re harder to detect, because they’re actually human; they don’t have the same signs a bot swarm exhibits. On the other hand, they’re potentially easy to detect simply by using geolocation. A flood of traffic from India is going to exhibit the qualities of a clickfarm in virtually every occasion, unless you were intentionally targeting India and selling to that audience.

On the high end of both quality and price is legitimate traffic. Buying legitimate traffic is just another way of saying you’re running advertising campaigns. After all, that’s what Pay Per Click means, isn’t it? You’re paying for traffic, through legitimate sources, from legitimate people.

Making Money with Bots

In the world of buying traffic, you largely get what you pay for. However, it’s always a mix of traffic, even with the best high-cost PPC campaigns. Think of it like a sliding scale; the more you pay, the more bot traffic is filtered from the traffic you receive.

The idea of making money from bots is not new; in fact, it’s been put to use almost since the idea of paid advertising began. Even as recently as a year ago, large stories have been published about making money with bot traffic.

What you do is set up a website or network of websites. You run advertisements that pay you per impression, generally in the fractions of a penny per view or thousand views. You don’t earn much with these ads; growing your traffic slowly and organically over time would earn you a handful of dollars per year at best. The goal here is to select ad affiliates that are willing to look the other way or consider their payouts too low to bother filtering bot traffic.

Once you have these affiliates set up, you purchase the ultimate low-cost traffic you can find. If you earn two cents per thousand views, you want to be paying less than two cents for a thousand views. The ad affiliates gain nothing, but they pay you a pittance. You pay less than a pittance, and you make money in one way; sheer, absolute volume.

Of course, this is a solidly black-hat technique. The people selling you traffic will never acknowledge that their traffic is bots; they will simply say they can’t guarantee the quality of the traffic. The ad affiliates, if they ever look and audit your traffic, will very likely shut you down due to sheer violation of their terms of service. It is, in every sense of the word, fraud.

Making Money with Clickfarms

Clickfarms work in more or less the same way. The bot traffic you receive when paying for cheap traffic is engineered to look as human as possible, but there are still telltale signs, such as all traffic coming from the same browser with the same user agent. Human traffic, from clickfarms, can vary that with little additional cost.

The problem with clickfarm traffic is the IP range. Most clickfarms don’t bother to hide their IP addresses through proxies, so all of your traffic comes through Bangladesh or other middle eastern IP addresses. It’s easy to track and block, and advertisers often do just that.

Otherwise, making money with clickfarms is exactly the same. It’s still essentially fraud, and it’s still fraught with pitfalls. The thing you need to realize is that by making money with a black hat technique like this, you need to go all-in. You cannot mix clickfarm or bot traffic with organic traffic and hope it balances out. Buying clickfarm traffic for your legitimate website is a great way to absolutely tank its search ranking and ruin any organic SEO you’ve built.

Making Money with Ad Traffic

Buying traffic legitimately is possible, it just requires a bit more work, which of course means it’s more expensive. When you buy traffic through a third party service, what you’re generally doing is outsourcing an ad campaign. It’s just like PPC through Google AdSense or Facebook Ads, you just aren’t doing all of the work yourself.

To start, you set up a webpage and begin to populate it with legitimate content. Legitimate is the key here; you want to avoid scraped content or duplication from other sites. What you’re doing is building an organic audience.

You can monetize your website with ad affiliates, and you can even work with Google and other high-profile ad partners because you aren’t pulling in primarily bots. Your traffic is legitimate, so you can use high value ads.

Alternatively, you can monetize by selling premium memberships, ebooks, software or actual products. You are, at this point, running a web store. Buying traffic, whether through Facebook ads, Google PPC or a third party, brings in natural, real traffic. These real people are attracted by real targeted ads, and they stick around to read, click more ads or convert into paying customers.

So, can you make money by buying traffic? Of course. Buying traffic and coming out with a positive ROI is a time-honored tradition in web business. It makes no difference whether you’re contracting a third party to run your ads or you’re doing the work yourself to optimize them; as long as you turn a profit, you’re making money by buying traffic.

Why Buying Traffic From Fiverr is Harmful ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:24:00 -0700

The title somewhat spoils where I’m going with this, but bear with me for a moment. Pretend you’re a young entrepreneur and you’re looking to start a web business. You read hundreds of articles and gather advice from dozens of colleagues, from old business owners to other young entrepreneurs. After months of preparation, you feel like you’re ready to go.

You hire a talented firm and design a website. You hire a few writers and gather up a backlog of content. You carefully research your niche. You gather a list of keywords for a PPC campaign. Everything is in place; all you need to do is gain traffic. You launch your site.

Days pass; your hits number in the dozens. Weeks pass and your growth is stagnant. Clearly, something is wrong. People just aren’t showing up the way you need them to. It must be because you have such low traffic it can’t start to snowball. All you need is a jumpstart, an influx of traffic to get you going. It can’t wait for organic traffic to grow, you’re losing money with such low numbers.

Finally, you stumble upon the perfect solution; Fiverr. For just five bucks – an incredibly low fee – you can pull in two months of unlimited traffic! It’s a bargain, it’s a steal!

Don’t do it. When you’re buying traffic from a site like Fiverr, one of two things will happen. Either you get the traffic or you don’t. Trust me when I say; the first option is the worst of the two. If nothing comes in, you’ve wasted $5 and that’s it. If traffic floods your site, you could be doing damage that will take months to fix.

Your Visitors Are Fake

This is the first reason to avoid buying traffic from a site like Fiverr. The majority of the traffic you get is going to come from, essentially, a robot sitting on your domain and refreshing the page over and over. This robot makes your view count shoot up, but nothing else changes. The robot doesn’t click your ads. It doesn’t buy your product. It doesn’t share your site on social media. It doesn’t tell its friends about your business. Nothing that you actually want out of a visitor happens with a robot refresher.

Sometimes, however, it’s not a refresher robot that brings in traffic. Sometimes it’s a robot that posts your website link to hundreds of social bookmarketing sites to draw in the users of those sites. At first glance, this sounds like a decent idea, until you realize what it’s actually doing; spamming your link in places irrelevant to your business. If you sell shoes, you don’t need your link on a forum dedicated to automotive gearheads, do you?

Worse, those spam links hurt. Google will see them and easily determine they were purchased or spammed, and will penalize you site. You’ll have to go through weeks or months of penalized search ranking while you hunt down those links and disavow them.

Your Bounce Rate Skyrockets

Since the traffic coming in to your site is fake or coming from unrelated sites, those users don’t care about your product. Oh, maybe one in a thousand will be interested and might stick around, but the rest will leave your site almost immediately. Your bounce rate will skyrocket.

A high bounce rate and a low amount of actually engaged traffic combines to give you very little to go on when you want to grow your site. Of course, if you’re buying traffic through Fiverr, it’s going to drop off eventually. Pay for two months, and at the 61 day mark your traffic will plummet. You’ll be lucky to make it through with one or two legitimate users sticking around. A high bounce rate and such obvious traffic spikes are easily recorded by third parties and will stick around to haunt you.

Your Engagement Drops

Engagement is what you want out of your readers. Ideally, when a user visits your site, they’ll read a few blog posts and maybe click through to like your Facebook page or view your product. If your marketing is particularly effective, they’ll purchase your product. When you’re analyzing what works and what doesn’t, recording engagement levels is an important indicator of success.

With fake fans, your engagement numbers drop. As mentioned above, a fake fan will never click through your site. They’ll never buy a product. They’ll never view your ads, and might not even load them. All they do is boost your traffic numbers. Higher traffic with the same engagement means a lower engagement percentage, which is detrimental to maintain.

Your Ad Affiliates Block You

Many sites, both old and new, use affiliate marketing in some form or another to bring in some supplemental cash. Amazon Affiliates and Google AdSense are some common basic affiliates. Google in particular pays out based on views, not just clicks. If you’re buying thousands of hits per hour, you’re probably getting them all from the same few IP addresses. Google – and other affiliates like it – can see those IPs and will realize it’s only a few addresses refreshing the page.

In the short term, this might cause your affiliate partnership to be put on hold while they audit your traffic. They will withhold payments as long as you are perceived to be gaming the system. In the longer term, chances are very good that buying traffic while using an ad affiliate will get you blocked from that affiliate program. Any program that doesn’t care about buying traffic likely only pays out pennies per thousand views. You won’t even earn back your $5.

Your Link Profile Dies

That bit above about links is just scratching the surface. Backlinks from poor quality sites pass what is essentially negative influence towards your site. If a spam site links to you, it can hurt your page in the search rankings. If hundreds of spam sites link to you, it can be even more harmful.

Of course, Fiverr linkers always claim their links won’t punish your site and that they’re sufficiently obfuscated that they aren’t detectable. This is patently false in every occasion. Sure, you may see a temporary boost for a few days or weeks, before Google analyzes your link profile and assesses a penalty. Once that penalty hits, however, your traffic drops and you need to waste days or weeks recovering.

Your Reputation Sinks

Many popular sites have detrimental techniques like what’s used on Fiverr in the past on record. Often this is because, at the time, those techniques weren’t punished or penalized. The landscape changes from year to year; using the past performance of successful sites to guide your own site is a recipe for disaster. You need to adapt to the current trends, not use old information and hope it’s still valid.

Trust is hard to earn. Trust from Google is the only way to protect yourself from spam attacks. If you compromise your trust early on, you’re just digging a hole that will take months or years to climb out.

5 Unconventional Tips to Boost Your SEO with Fiverr Gigs

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:20:00 -0700

WARNING: You won’t find recommendations for link wheels or tiered links over here (it’s 2014 – please don’t tell me that’s what you were looking for?). As a matter of fact you won’t find any “black hat” recommendations at all. How’s that possible if paid links aren’t allowed under Google’s Webmaster Guidelines? Keep reading…

With Fiverr’s exponential growth and the ability for sellers to remain anonymous, the black hat SEO’s have found the perfect venue to earn extra income.

We talked last month on why startups shouldn’t outsource SEO, and I’d like to add a point that I didn’t mention in that post – it’s really difficult to outsource something you’re not familiar with. I’ve seen businesses time and time again make this mistake, not just through Fiverr but to anyone who’s approached them and said, “We can rank you for this, this and this.” Which leads us to our first unconventional tip you can use to boost your SEO with Fiverr:

1. Reverse Engineer – The point of SEO is to generate organic traffic… Well, who’s actually ranking on Fiverr? Who’s using their own tactics to drive traffic to their gigs? This is easy to find out with SEO tool SEMRush ($70/mo):

Fiverr SEO: Reverse Engineer with SEMRush

Lightly highlighted in yellow we find a seller than ranks #1 for “buy backlinks.” Running an additional report on that URL reveals that he also ranks for:

“So this Fiverr SEO seller is doing well, I should buy his social bookmarking package now right?”

Not so fast, consider this:

The point of this first tip is to find out what sellers are doing, and perhaps locate any white hat links that could arise out of the reports. With that being said, if you do utilize this tip, don’t point the links to your main website. Utilize a domain that you don’t mind getting penalized, even if that means forking over a whopping 99 cents to buy a new one at GoDaddy.
Utilize this tip on Fiverr SEO gigs where you could actually find white hat links that you could acquire – so link networks, guest blogs, etc. are out of the question. If you want to find out where people are submitting infographics, pdf’s, video’s, etc., this is the perfect avenue to do it. Make sure they provide reports.
Spend $20 and find a few high rated sellers and find out what they’re doing.
Takeaways:

What I found actually surprised me, we’re talking followed links from Apple, Amazon, HP, Microsoft, etc. Granted, they’re profile links – but they’re coming from authority domains, they’re easily attainable, and could give your new website a quick hit.

2. Steal your competitors links – If you’re looking for the quick hits, skip the link wheels and instead steal your competitors links. I mean, they’ve already laid out an outline of how they’re ranking for your keywords! Chances are, they have a lot of good links that you could acquire as well – you just have to find them. You don’t need to drop a few hundred a month on link explorers like Majestic, Ahrefs, and Open Site Explorer. Other people have already paid for that and are willing to run the reports for you for $5.

My favorite here is this seller, who not only provides an Open Site Explorer report, but an SEMRush report as well. SEMRush is by far my favorite tool as it shows exactly what your competitors are ranking for. This is perfect for finding keywords you might not have originally planned for, as well find long-tail opportunities for your content.

3. Hire a Writer – SEO is evolving into content marketing. Buying links is against Google’s Guidelines, but hiring writers to create content which can generate traffic and links is another story. But finding good writers on Fiverr can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Watch out for the content farms sending slightly spun articles that pass Plagium (or various other plagiarism checkers), believe it or not a lot of the highest rated writers on Fiverr do that. SEO’s can find use with it for Web 2.0’s, or affiliate sites.. but there’s a much greater ROI for creating super targeted long-tail articles than can generate high converting traffic. My recommendation for finding inexpensive writers on Fiverr is to:

a. Domain Expertise – If you’re starting a dog website, there are a few people who write specifically on the subject – that’s the person I’d want. Fashion? Food? Their are writers for that. Remember, Google returns answers, and people want their queries answered with useful content from people with domain expertise.

b. Avoid the top sellers – Just my two cents from testing out a dozen or so writers – people with less than 100 feedback tend to write better than people with over 1000. Why? Burnout. Top sellers on Fiverr are always busy because of their tremendous feedback which leads to burnout, rushing to meet deadlines, etc.

c. Common Sense – It boggles my mind how many “top rated writers” have grammatical errors in their gig listings.

4. Buy a Video – Whether’s it’s the always funny Professor Hans Von Puppet, or a promotional video for your business. Videos are something that can get your business talked about – and perhaps land a few links in the process. Oh, and you could always build a few follow links from video websites like Screenr.com (PR7) and myVidster.com (PR3).

5. SEO Report – This one is geared towards the non-technical business owner. Fiverr has plenty of sellers that offer a SEO report or audit, even a single tip could boost your SEO exponentially (I’m still shocked on how many small businesses don’t even set their homepage title tag).