Nile Marketing

How To Get 100,000 Twitter Followers with Tweet Adder

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 00:23:00 +0000

In this post, I will teach you How To Get 100,000 Twitter Followers with Tweet Adder ?? Lets first begin with a brief description of Twitter. Twitter is a great platform for you to promote your website and services. In order, for Twitter to be an effective social media platform you must first build a substantial list of Twitter followers. The Twitter followers must be from a specific niche for it to work. The biggest mistake many people make using Twitter is building a list of followers but not targeting their market.

Why Profit From Twitter?

Twitter is a free micro blogging platform that allows you tweet 140 character or less. The social media platform is free to join and can be set up within a couple of minutes. The primary ways to make money with Twitter are by promoting your business, sponsoring affiliate products, selling your tweets, and many more. I personally use Twitter to promote my website and grow my mailing list. There are tons of case studies of individuals who make over 2,000 a month using Twitter per month.

How To Use Tweet Adder?

I recommend using software automation named, Tweet Adder. The vast benefits of using Tweet Adder are an automated system that helps you get quality Twitter followers. Tweet Adder can be use as a tool to build your Twitter Followers to 100,000 in a short period of 30 days. Majority of serious users will grow the Twitter Followers to 1 or 2 million in the time spam of 12 to 18 months.

Tweet Adder: helps you filter individuals by

Keywords
Location
Recency
Language Spoken
Ability to remove profiles with default pictures
Ability to remove profiles with URLs in tweets or biography

Tweet Search: Locate users to follow who twitted a particular keyword or filter

Mentioned an user
To a user
Not from a user
Containing a hashtag
Exact phrase
Contaiting multiple words
Containing a word

Tweet Posting / Direct Messaging: The automatic tweet helps your Twitter account to be active and enganging in autopilot. The automated software does the following:

URL Shortener
Re-Tweets
RSS Tweets
Post Tweets to Facebook
Automated Tweets
Link History
Post Tweets with random time delay

Multiple Twitter Accounts: The Tweet Adder helps you run multiple profiles concurrently. The software helps running multiples accounts easier since it does everything for you automated.

Tweet Adder is a great way to promote your business, services, and make tons of money. Buy Now!

Free Software Updates And Support
License Is Good For Up To 3 Computers

Top 15 Tips to Write a Good SEO Article

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 17:42:00 +0000

1. Understanding the target audience

Know thy audience. This is the basis of writing a good SEO article. Think from the audience point of view. You will get to know what they expect from you.

2. Research

Perform a thorough research on what you are going to write. Your readers will probably know the basics of the topic you are going to write. So writing some general and vague content won’t help. Your article should give a thorough knowledge to the reader.

3. Title Selection

The title of an article is what people see first. The time you spend on selecting your topic will affect the end result of your article. Use some catchy phrase which the reader finds interesting and probing them to read further. Also from SEO point of view, remember that a keyword in the title gets more importance. But make sure that you don’t spoil the effectiveness of your title.

4. Engage real experts

If the research you performed hasn't yielded the resources you need, feel free to get the help of experts from online forums or blogs. This will cost you nothing and will improve the quality of your content to a great extent.

5. Originality

Original article always attracts readers. Be sure that the article you write is your own. Copying contents from other sites is illegal and you’ll be detected by Google and get penalized.

6. Usage of keywords

Always remember that you write article for readers and optimize it for robots. Keyword density of more than 3% makes the reader lose interest in your article. Write quality content for readers and help robots to find them. Perform keyword research and find what people are searching for.

7. Body of the article

This is where you give all your thoughts. Keep readers interested. Stay on topic and make sure you retain your readers till the end. Concentrate on the flow of information.

8. Length of the article

Your article should ideally have 400-500 words. Be sure that you keep the readers engrossed till the end. Even though your article has more than 1000 words, readers skipping your article afterthe first paragraph won’t help your cause.

9. Flow

Your article must have a good flow from its introduction to conclusion. It should tempt the readers to read till the end of your article.

10. Article description

First impression is always the best impression. Article description is what that shows up when people search for your article from a search engine. This should tempt your readers to click the link and read further.

11. Use statistical data

Using statistical values in your article improves the credibility of your article and readers tend to read credible stuff. These statistics will improve the quality of your article to a great extent.

12. Post in high quality article directories

Once you are done with writing, you've to post it in good quality article directories. These directories will have a lot of members and this in turn will provide good traffic to your website. Some examples of popular article directories are www.ezinearticles.com www.goarticles.com etc.

13. Read and follow publishing guidelines

Before publishing your articles in any directory, read and understand the publishing guidelines of the particular directory. There a few ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in every directory. Submitting your article after going through these guidelines will prevent your article from being rejected.

14. Promote your article

Just writing a good article and posting it in good directory won’t give the popularity your article deserves. Promote your article in social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

15. Embed some widgets

Embed some widgets like Facebook comments, shares, Google+ , etc. so that readers find it easy to share your article on social media platforms.

SEOprofiler Helps You To Get High Rankings And More Sales

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 03:13:00 +0000

SEOprofiler

New: Get top 10 rankings on Google

Easy to use, comprehensive and affordable: the new full-featured SEO solution that helps you to get high rankings and more sales.

You get access to multiple SEO tools:

»	Detailed ranking checks on Google, Yahoo and Bing with actionable items.
»	Proven optimization tool that leads to top 10 rankings on Google.
»	The most detailed competitive backlink, ranking and AdWords analysis.
»	Powerful backlink buildings tools, sophisticated link manager.
»	Comprehensive keyword research tools for SEO and SEM.
»	Wow your clients and your boss with impressive white-label PDF reports.

7 Advanced Link Building Strategies for a Competitive Edge

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 31 Aug 2013 20:44:00 +0000

We all know it’s not worth our time to build sub-par links anymore. It’s time to get innovative with our link building tactics. We previously shared a few lesser-known link building techniques and post panda/penguin era link acquisition strategies here, but we are of the opinion that you can’t have too many.

So, here are a few more techniques that will help you push the envelope and approach link building with the mindset of a serious marketer:

1. Coin a Phrase and Set Up Alerts

The idea behind this strategy is to invent a new buzzword, try and get it to catch on, and then capture links as a result. Since not everybody who uses the phrase is going to send a link your way, you can set up Google Alerts to capture mentions of the phrase. If it’s clear front context that they’re talking about the buzzword you coined, this can be a great opportunity to build a link.

Now, if your site doesn’t quite have the exposure to get a buzzword out there, this might seem like a pointless exercise in futility. However, all it takes is $50 to get your article in front of 1,000 people on StumbleUpon.

If your campaign is targeted toward the right people, and the phrase is catchy enough, this could well be enough to start getting the phrase in use by many in the online community.

2. Produce a Resource and Set Up Alerts

Similarly, you can put together a video, white paper, or infographic, set up Google Alerts on the topic, and start contacting people. Any time a question about the topic comes up online, this is an opportunity to answer their question with a link to your resource. This is a great option because the answer is completely on-topic.

If you use this tactic, be sure to be as helpful as possible. The resource itself should be tremendously helpful, of course, but if it doesn’t answer every aspect of the question, make sure you address those directly in your comments, emails, etc. Don’t make it feel like a sales pitch, offer a genuinely useful answer.

3. Update Somebody Else’s Content

You know those pieces of content that seem to just keep on giving? This is the content that you want to keep investing in with updates, corrections, etc. to keep it relevant. It’s common practice to revisit your best content, keep promoting it, and keep improving it.

But fixing up your old content can be also be a chore, and that’s where you come in. Instead of submitting a guest post, why not contact a blogger with an interesting fact or update that will help keep one of their top posts fresh and interesting?

Try doing a search for some of the more broad terms related to your keywords, and visiting some of the blog posts you come across. Focus on the ones that already seem to have massive appeal. Read through, and catch yourself if you start thinking this reminds me of…

As soon as that happens, get in touch and let them in a surprising piece of information that’s relevant to the article. This can be a great opportunity to earn a link.

4. Customize a Widget

You might not be a coding master with the ability to put together a master widget that everybody’s going to want to download. However, odds are pretty good you have the coding or design skills necessary to customize a widget so that it fits a site’s branding and appearance.

Try seeking out blogs in your niche, or peripheral niches, that use widgets you recognize. Give the widget a tweak so that it fits the site better, place a link, and offer the new take on the widget to the blogger. This is especially powerful for popular blogging topics that aren’t centered around the tech industry.

That said, be ethical, and make sure the blogger is aware of the link back to your site. There’s no reason to hide this. As long as you understand how to work with people amicably it shouldn’t be a problem.

5. Buy Display Ads

Carson Ward from Distilled recently ran an experiment where the purchased ads as a method of building links. He discovered that, by far, the most effective ads were display ads. (AdWords ads, on the other hand, were the worst.)

With display ads, it’s possible to target sites where bloggers and site owners are most likely to lurk. This way, you can put your site in front of the audience that has the most impact on links and online influence. You only need to pay when the visitors actually click on the ads, and each visit from this type of visitor is much more likely to result in a link than a visit from the search engines.

Many SEOs are averse to spending money on ads because they generally only produce short term benefits, but if you can use ads to build links this objection doesn’t make sense anymore. The only question you should be asking is whether your time is better invested in paying for ads or outreach (or some combination of both).

6. Work with Experts

There’s no reason to produce content in a vacuum. In fact, most of the best content is the result of collaboration. Involve experts in the creation, fact-checking, and refinement of your content before it goes live. The more experts you work with, the more opportunities you have for additional links.

Don’t try to scale this too much. The more people you try to involve, the less commitment you can get from each of them, especially if you are automating your outreach. Instead, customize your outreach emails and be clear about why you are contacting them. Don’t ask for too much from them, and make it clear that they will be getting something out of the exchange as well.

7. Get In Business Directories

Most “link” directories are useless (though exceptions like DMOZ and AllTop are worth your time). However, getting added to relevant business directories is certainly a worthwhile effort, since these links are from reputable organizations and are a good sign of trust. These kinds of links can come from:

The Better Business Bureau
The Chamber of Commerce
Your local library
Other relevant city and state government resources
Accrediting organizations
Business memberships

Focus on links from reputable business lists that people actually use and care about. Avoid directories that exist simply to provide links for search engine authority, since these are the least likely to offer any real search engine authority.

Can you think of additional alternatives? If you can, pass them along, and if you liked this, be sure to pass it along as well.

Posted At Search Engine Journal

Top 50 Expensive Keywords for Google Adsense

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:33:00 +0000

If you are an Adsense Publisher, you always want to increase your earning through clicks. Sometimes it happens that you have good CTR, I mean you are getting a good number clicks from Adsense but your estimated earning is low. For example, you gave got 40 clicks and your estimated earning was $0.77! It’s really an unexpected earning.

You aren’t responsible for this low earning. Actually Low CPC (Cost Per Click) is responsible for it. You might have noticed that Adsense shows Ads according to post contents. Specifically we can say that Ads are related with post’s keywords. CPC is related with these keywords.

Google won’t pay you an average rate for clicks. Sometimes you will earn $3 for a click where sometimes they won’t pay you $3 for 50 clicks. Here is the point. It depends on the Ads that people clicked. If people clicked on a high paying ad then you’ll get a good payment. As I said Ads are showing according to your content’s keywords, if you have high paying keywords in your post you will get high CPC.

So you want to know which are high paying keywords? Wait, in this post I’ll share 50 high paying keywords for Adsense. Before we move to the keywords here some advise for you.

It’s obvious that all of these keywords won’t be suitable for your niche. Just find the keywords that are related with your blog and try to use them on your blog post. Never abuse these keywords.

Google Adsense High Paying Keywords 2013

Keywords	CPC
MESOTHELIOMA LAW FIRM	$179.01
DONATE CAR TO CHARITY CALIFORNIA	$130.25
DONATE CAR FOR TAX CREDIT	$126.65
DONATE CARS IN MA	$125.58
DONATE YOUR CAR SACRAMENTO	$118.20
HOW TO DONATE A CAR IN CALIFORNIA	$111.21
SELL ANNUITY PAYMENT	$107.46
DONATE YOUR CAR FOR KIDS	$106.01
ASBESTOS LAWYERS	$105.84
STRUCTURED ANNUITY SETTLEMENT	$100.8
ANNUITY SETTLEMENTS	$100.72
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES COLORADO	$100.93
NUNAVUT CULTURE	$99.52
DAYTON FREIGHT LINES	$99.39
HARDDRIVE DATA RECOVERY SERVICES	$98.59
DONATE A CAR IN MARYLAND	$98.51
MOTOR REPLACEMENTS	$98.43
CHEAP DOMAIN REGISTRATION HOSTING	$98.39
DONATING A CAR IN MARYLAND	$98.20
DONATE CARS ILLINOIS	$98.13
CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEYS FLORIDA	$98.07
BEST CRIMINAL LAWYER IN ARIZONA	$97.93
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES UTAH	$97.92
LIFE INSURANCE CO LINCOLN	$97.07
HOLLAND MICHIGAN COLLEGE	$95.74
ONLINE MOTOR INSURANCE QUOTES	$95.73
ONLINE COLLEDGES	$95.65
PAPERPORT PROMOTIONAL CODE	$95.13
ONLINECLASSES	$95.06
WORLD TRADE CENTER FOOTAGE	$95.02
MASSAGE SCHOOL DALLAS TEXAS	$94.90
PSYCHIC FOR FREE	$94.61
DONATE OLD CARS TO CHARITY	$94.55
LOW CREDIT LINE CREDIT CARDS	$94.49
DALLAS MESOTHELIOMA ATTORNEYS	$94.33
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES MN	$94.29
DONATE YOUR CAR FOR MONEY	$94.01
CHEAP AUTO INSURANCE IN VA	$93.84
MET AUTO	$93.70
FORENSICS ONLINE COURSE	$93.51
HOME PHONE INTERNET BUNDLE	$93.32
DONATING USED CARS TO CHARITY	$93.17
PHD IN COUNSELING EDUCATION	$92.99
NEUSON	$92.89
CAR INSURANCE QUOTES PA	$92.88
ROYALTY FREE IMAGES STOCK	$92.76
CAR INSURANCE IN SOUTH DAKOTA	$92.72
EMAIL BULK SERVICE	$92.55
WEBEX COSTS	$92.38
CHEAP CAR INSURANCE FOR LADIES	$92.23

So there we given the most wanted list of high paying Google AdSense keyword .Remember using keywords that doesn’t suite your blogs posts and also doesn’t comes naturally could be a disaster for your blog. So do not use those just because they are giving high CPC till you have enough knowledge about it.

1. MESOTHELIOMA LAW FIRM : Mesothelioma law firm is a keyword which is staying on the top for a long time.If you have this keyword then Google pays about 179.01$ per ad clicks.But it’s quite difficult to get ranked for this keyword.Mesothelioma simply means a rare form of cancer which is developed from themesothelium cells.

Writing That Seo Tips for Audience Directly - Internet Marketing Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 14:04:00 +0000

A list of the best SEO practices to increase site traffic and views (and ultimately land money in your pocket)

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is done once the article is finished may be more important than the work done while working on the article. At least as far as traffic for the article is concerned. There are many powerful SEO practices for increasing traffic that must be done once after the article is completed. The following is a list of the most important SEO tips for increasing traffic to online articles.

Social Bookmarking

This is another great way to get backlinks. Social Bookmarking is saving your article to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon and Delicious. When you save your article to a social bookmarking site you are also creating a backlink from that page to your site. This creates a "vote", though a slightly weak one. But if you think of how every other person can then save that link too, this can become potentially powerful. Social Bookmarks are an important SEO tool for increasing traffic to online articles.

Keyword Research and Utilization

Keywords are the short phrases that search engines will find and rank. Articles need to be written with an understanding of how these keywords will rank. That is keyword research. It is all about knowing how difficult it is likely to be to get your keyword or phrase to rank on the top page of Google. The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page.

Backlinks

Backlinks is a big topic. It is really THE topic when it comes SEO techniques to increasing traffic to online articles. First of all every single backlink creates a pathway that someone can follow to your doorstep. That is not SEO, but that does make a great way to generate traffic.

Since backlinks are so important to this topic the following is a list of everything that needs to be known about backlinks to fully understand increasing traffic with SEO.

1) No-Follow/Do-Follow: There are two different types of backlinks. No-follow and Do-Follow. No follow means that the "spiders" or "bots" that come from the search engines and follow these links to your site are not supposed to count these as backlinks. Basically they Do Not Follow the links. These backlinks are still worth but of lesser value.

2) PageRank: Page Rank is basically a vote of confidence that Google gives to a site over time. This page ranking is mainly based on how many "votes" it has from its own backlinks (among other things). Page Rank is scaled 0-10. Every increment of PR that a site increases means that it can pass along a more powerful "vote" to any site that has a backlink attached to it. So 1 PR5 backlink is worth dozens of PR0 and PR1 Backlinks

3) Relevance: Relevance isn't new, but with the release of Google "Caffiene," Google stated that they will be putting a premium on relevance for their search results. Relevance means that you get a better "vote" from your site about the BMW if you have your backlink from a site on "cars" and you get an even better "vote" if it comes from a site that is also about BMW's.

4) Anchor Text: When you make your backlink you do so with 1-4 words usually. These words are your "Anchor Text" they should be close variations of the keywords for the site you are linking to. It is desirable to have some variation in your keywords used for anchor text, but staying close helps with the relevancy and is good SEO.

5) Blog Commenting: Blog commenting is one of the most popular ways to try to get mass backlinks. Making sure the comments are "do-follow" is step 1. A good step two is finding blogs that are both commentluv and keywordluv enabled. Commentluv is a addon that allows a post from YOUR blog to be displayed after your comments. If the blog is dofollow this is a backlink. Keyword love allows you to change your name where you sign in to keywords of your choice by typing in "name@my keyword". All keywordluv blogs must be dofollow.

Negative SEO : How to Uncover an Attack Using a Backlink Audit

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 18:44:00 +0000

Ever since Google launched the Penguin update back in April 2012, the SEO community has debated the impact of negative SEO, a practice whereby competitors can point hundreds or thousands of negative backlinks at a site with the intention of causing harm to organic search rankings or even completely removing a site from Google's index. Just jump over to Fiverr and you can find many gigs offering thousands of wiki links, or directory links, or many other types of low-quality links for $5.

By creating the Disavow Links tool, Google acknowledged this very real danger and gave webmasters a tool to protect their sites. Unfortunately, most people wait until it's too late to use the Disavow tool; they look at their backlink profile and disavow links after they've been penalized by Google. In reality, the Disavow Links tool should be used before your website suffers in the SERPs.

Backlink audits have to be added to every SEO professional's repertoire. These are as integral to SEO as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. In the same way that a site owner builds links to create organic rankings, now webmasters also have to monitor their backlink profile to identify low quality links as they appear and disavow them as quickly as they are identified.

Backlink audits are simple: download your backlinks from your Google Webmaster account, or from a backlink tool, and keep an eye on the links pointing to your site. What is the quality of those links? Do any of the links look fishy?

As soon as you identify fishy links, you can then try to remove the links by emailing the webmaster. If that doesn't work, head to Google's disavow tool and disavow those links. For people looking to protect their sites from algorithmic updates or penalties, backlink audits are now a webmaster's best friend.

If your website has suffered from lost rankings and search traffic, here's a method to determine whether negative SEO is to blame.

A Victim of Negative SEO?

A few weeks ago I received an email from a webmaster whose Google organic traffic dropped by almost 50 percent within days of Penguin 2.0. He couldn't understand why, given that he'd never engaged in SEO practices or link building. What could've caused such a massive decrease in traffic and rankings?

The site is a 15-year-old finance magazine with thousands of news stories and analysis, evergreen articles, and nothing but organic links. For over a decade it has ranked quite highly for very generic informational financial keywords – everything from information about the economies of different countries, to very detailed specifics about large corporations.

With a long tail of over 70,000 keywords, it's a site that truly adds value to the search engine results and has always used content to attract links and high search engine rankings.

The site received no notifications from Google. They simply saw a massive decrease in organic traffic starting May 22, which leads me to believe they were impacted by Penguin 2.0.

In short, he did exactly what Google preaches as safe SEO. Great content, great user experience, no manipulative link practices, and nothing but value.

So what happened to this site? Why did it lose 50 percent of its organic traffic from Google?

Backlink Audit

I started by running a LinkDetox report to analyze the backlinks. Immediately I knew something was wrong:

Upon further investigation, 55 percent of his links were suspicious, while 7 percent (almost 500) of the links were toxic:

So the first step was to research those 7 percent toxic links, how they were acquired, and what types of links they were.

In LinkDetox, you can segment by Link Type, so I was able to first view only the links that were considered toxic. According to Link Detox, toxic links are links from domains that aren't indexed in Google, as well as links from domains whose theme is listed as malware, malicious, or having a virus.

Immediately I noticed that he had many links from sites that ended in .pl. The anchor text of the links was the title of the page that they linked to.

It seemed that the sites targeted "credit cards", which is very loosely in this site's niche. It was easy to see that these were scraped links to be spun and dropped on spam URLs. I also saw many domains that had expired and were re-registered for the purpose of creating content sites for link farms.

Also, check out the spike in backlinks:

From this I knew that most of the toxic links were spam, and links that were not generated by the target site. I also saw many links to other authority sites, including entrepreneur.com and venturebeat.com. It seems that this site was classified as an "authority site" and was being used as part of a spammers way of adding authority links to their outbound link profile.

Did Penguin Cause the Massive Traffic Loss?

I further investigated the backlink profile, checking for other red flags.

His Money vs Brand ratio looked perfectly healthy:

His ratio of "Follow" links was a little high, but this was to be expected given the source of his negative backlinks:

Again, he had a slightly elevated number of text links as compared to competitors, which was another minor red flag:

One finding that was quite significant was his Deep Link Ratio, which was much too high when compared with others in his industry:

In terms of authority, his link distribution by SEMrush keyword rankings was average when compared to competitors:

Surprisingly, his backlinks had better TitleRank than competitors, meaning that the target site's backlinks ranked for their exact match title in Google – an indication of trust:

Penalized sites don't rank for their exact match title.

The final area of analysis was the PageRank distribution of the backlinks:

Even though he has a great number of high quality links, the percentage of links that aren't indexed in Google is substantially great. Close to 65 percent of the site's backlinks aren't indexed in Google.

In most cases, this indicates poor link building strategies, and is a typical profile for sites that employ spam link building tactics.

In this case, the high quantity of links from pages that are penalized, or not indexed in Google, was a case of automatic links built by spammers!

As a result of having a prominent site that was considered by spammers to be an authority in the finance field, this site suffered a massive decrease in traffic from Google.

Avoid Penguin & Unnatural Link Penalties

A backlink audit could've prevented this site from being penalized from Google and losing close to 50% of their traffic. If a backlink audit had been conducted, the site owner could've disavowed these spam links, performed outreach to get these links removed, and documented his efforts in case of future problems.

If the toxic links had been disavowed, all of the ratios would've been normalized and this site would've never been pegged as spam and penalized by Penguin.

Backlink Audits

Whatever tool you use - whether it's Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OpenSiteExplorer – it's important that you run and evaluate your links on a monthly basis. Once you have the links, make sure you have metrics for each of the links in order to evaluate their health.

Here's what to do:

Identify all the backlinks from sites that aren't indexed in Google. If they aren't indexed in Google, there's a good chance they are penalized. Take a manual look at a few to make sure nothing else is going on (e.g., perhaps they just moved to a new domain, or there's an error in reporting). Add all the N/A sites to your file.
Look for backlinks from link or article directories. These are fairly easy to identify. LinkDetox will categorize those automatically and allow you to filter them out. Scan each of these to make sure you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, as perhaps a few of these might be healthy.
Identify links from sites that may be virus infected or have malware. These are identified as Toxic 2 in LinkDetox.
Look for paid links. Google has long been at war with link buying and it's an obvious target. Find any links that have been paid and add them to the list. You can find these by sorting the results by PageRank descending. Evaluate all the high PR links as those are likely the ones that were purchased. Look at each and every one of the high quality links to assess how they were acquired. It's almost always pretty obvious if the link was organic or purchased.
Take the list of backlinks and run it through the Juice Tool to scan for other red flags. One of my favorite metrics to evaluate is TitleRank. Generally, pages that aren't ranking for their exact match title have a good chance of having a functional penalty or not having enough authority. In the Juice report, you can see the exact title to determine if it's a valid title (for example, if the title is "Home", of course they won't rank for it, whether they have a penalty). If the TitleRank is 30+, you can review that link by doing a quick check, and if the site looks spammy, add it to your "Bad Links" file. Do a quick scan for other factors, such as PageRank and DomainAuthority, to see if anything else seems out of place.

By the end of this stage, you'll have a spreadsheet with the most harmful backlinks to a site.

Upload this Disavow File, to make sure the worst of your backlinks aren't harming your site. Make sure you then upload this disavow file when performing further tests on Link Detox as excluding these domains will affect your ratios.

Don't be a Victim of Negative SEO!

Negative SEO works; it's a very real threat to all webmasters. Why spend the time, money, and resources building high quality links and content assets when you can work your way to the top by penalizing your competitors?

There are many unethical people out there; don't let them cause you to lose your site's visibility. Add backlink audits and link profile protection as part of your monthly SEO tasks to keep your site's traffic safe. It's no longer optional.

What is Google Penguin 2.0 Update ?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:25:00 +0000

Webmasters have been watching for Penguin 2.0 to hit the Google search results since Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March. Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out late Wednesday afternoon on "This Week in Google".

"It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam," Cutts said on the show. "It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

In a new blog post, Cutts added more details on Penguin 2.0, saying that the rollout is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well. Cutts wrote:

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

Webmasters first got a hint that the next generation of Penguin was imminent when back on May 10 Cutts said on Twitter, “we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”

Then in a Google Webmaster Help video, Cutts went into more detail on what Penguin 2.0 would bring, along with what new changes webmasters can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.

He detailed that the new Penguin was specifically going to target black hat spam, but would be a significantly larger impact on spam than the original Penguin and subsequent Penguin updates have had.

Google's initial Penguin update originally rolled out in April 2012, and was followed by two data refreshes of the algorithm last year – in May and October.

Twitter is full of people commenting on the new Penguin 2.0, and there should be more information in the coming hours and days as webmasters compare SERPs that have been affected and what kinds of spam specifically got targeted by this new update.

Let us know if you've seen any significant changes, or if the update has helped or hurt your traffic/rankings in the comments.

Google's Pure Spam Manual Action: Matt Cutts on How to Fix it

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 23:56:00 +0000

Google has released a series of seven videos designed to help webmasters resolve specific types of spam issues that have been identified on their site. With Google Webmaster Tools offering more specific details about why a website might be penalized, these videos are designed to help you know exactly what kind of manual spam action your site has been impacted by, and the specific steps you can take to correct the issues in Google's eyes.

What is Pure Spam?

Google considers pure spam to be anything to spam that anyone with a bit of tech savviness can tell that it spam. Often called "black hat", Cutts said this includes such things as “auto generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping, throwaway sites, or throwaway domains, where someone is more or less doing churn and burn where they are creating as many sites as possible to make as much money as possible before the get caught.”

Cutts said this is that type of spam that Google takes the most action against. He added that it's rare for people to actually file reconsideration requests for sites that are classified as pure spam, because many webmasters approach them as churn and burn.

For example, here's an image of auto-generated spam site Cutts included in a blog post a number of years ago:

Image Credit: Matt Cutts Blog

Fixing Pure Spam on a New Website

Sometimes there are legitimate cases where site owners have purchased the domain only to discover that there is a huge amount of spam in the domain's history, making it difficult for a new owner to then create something legitimate on that domain. People can look up a domain's history on archive.org and see what kind of spam issues had been happening, so it will become a priority to ensure that the new owner is starting with a clean slate with none of the spam content anywhere to be seen.

If this sort of thing happened to you, you must take special care to ensure that the new site you're putting on the previously spamming domain is high quality and nothing that could be remotely confused with being spammy. You essentially need to create actions within the site that gives Google signals that the site is now trustworthy and should be included in the index.

Fixing Pure Spam on an Existing Website

If your site has been flagged as being pure spam, this is probably one of the more difficult spam flags to overcome, because it is reserved for the spammiest of websites. That means, when you file your reconsideration request, you need to ensure that there is nothing anywhere on the site that could be remotely considered spam.

When you're trying to clean up, ensure everything that violate the Google webmaster guidelines has been removed, and that the quality guidelines are being followed to the letter. You should look at it from the perspective of building an entirely new site with new quality content.

Cutts said it's important for webmasters who are trying to clean up from a pure spam warning that they document everything they do, whether it is having purchased the domain from a previous owner, discovering and then removing spam you didn't realize existed on your site, or just simply not knowing better when you created what you thought was a fabulous auto-generated site.

When you finally file a reconsideration request, be sure that you include the steps you took to clean it up and when, so that Google can investigate and decide if the site has really turned over a new leaf.

10 Free Backlink Checker Online Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 19:09:00 +0000

Finding and analysing Website backlinks is an easy way to build quality backlinks to your website, the more you get backlink reports, the more you'll have data about website back links. Backlink checker tools are important and you should use it in the right way because you need links information that pointing to your competitor website. It also helps for your own website, because you need to know that from where you're getting backlinks?, what is the anchor text that linking to your site? how much ? what is the type of backlink you're getting?

There are online Web applications built by high quality professional teams that allow you search backlinks for a website and get free reports. Before we search out all website backlinks. let's clear the concept of quality backlink.

What are Quality Backlinks?

If you have thousands of inbound links but not quality and relevant then they won't be that much important as one quality and relevant backlink. Backlinks are of quality type if they are relevant, for example for a Blog publishing "Free Online Tools" will have have good type of backlinks if they are from relevant blogs.

Blogs that are based on online tools contents, now if they are from Blog having higher page rank then they will be quality too.

Finding and Evaluating backlinks

Finding Backlinks are easy, once you done the first then the last phase would be evaluating and gaining for yours website.

We'll be using Backlink checker tools to find out all backlinks for a website, note that we can search out not just own website backlinks but also someone else (Competitor), checking own website backlinks will be important for gathering back-links data, for competitor website checking it will be good for us too because we want also to have backlinks from websites that our competitor have already.

Once we get a list of all backlinks of our website, then we have to evaluate the type and how they are linked.

For example suppose you found a backlink then the it is important to know is it nofollow or dofollow?, what is the anchor text (keyword) that is linked.

The more you've quality backlinks the more you'll have ranking in Google Search, Finding and checking Backlinks are essential , because this is the effective way to evaluate the type of backlink and get backlink reports.

Free Backlink checker

Now we're going to use online tools to check website backlinks and then analysis it.

There are numerous tools available online to search backlinks, following are some of them.

Ahrefs- Site explorer and backlink checker tool, allow you get free reports of all backlinks pointing to your website, the best thing about this tools is you it show you diagrammatically all data, for example a graph showing the date when you had an amount of backlinks, and were they increasing or decreasing, how much backlinks and the type of backlinks that is- how much of them are nofollow and dofollow. The best think I like in ahrefs is that it shows anchor text cloud which demonstrate the overall picture of most linked keyword (anchor text) as well as graphic representation of phrases.
Open Site Explorer- Developed by SEOMoz (Now Only Moz), most of the features and reports are similar to ahrefs, allow you check backlinks free and get analysis reports. An advance tool help you find backlinks that're linking to your own website, you can do the same for your competitor and can get benefits by getting links from the websites that your competitor getting.
Backlink Watch- Another Backlink checker tool, uses Ahref (World largest Backlink reporter) API, a simpler interface, give you list of your website backlinks. Show you the top domains that are linking to your site as well as the anchor text that is linked.
Small SEO Tools - Compared to other Backlink checker Small SEO tool backlink check is a bit slow. The best thing is that it is free and give you all backlinks report, some backlinks may not show, because their database does't frequently update.
Majestic SEO - The best one in terms of efficiency and reports, simply you search your homepage URL, and get all backlinks by pages anchor text and profile. To access the advance features you've to subscribe and pay.
Analyze Backlinks- Allow you filter the search reports by checking the boxes that says Backlinks from the homepage Only, specific anchor text, total links and outbound links.
WebConfs- The down side of this tools is that it will show you only the dofollow backlinks of your website and won't repeat from other pages, means if you are getting many links from a blog, then it will be counting only once. it will also show you the page rank of the website that is linking to your blog.
Rank Signal- A free backlink checker tool allow you easily check site backlinks with analysis, this tool also show you the rank of the site linking to your site as well as how your site is linked by image or text, if it is anchor text then it will also show you the most used anchor text pointing to a website.
Web SEO Analytics- The slower one, a free version have limited features, but still you can check backlinks free by entering the URL of your website. compared to other link checker tools mentioned in this post WEB SEO analytics tool won't show you graphical representation and thus is't convenient. it is best if you want to copy all backlinks of a website and then do analysis further.
Monitor backlinks- Another free backlink checker tool allow you get website backlinks reports as well as monitor them, to monitor you'll have to upgrade to pro version. if you're getting more than one links from a website, it will show you them only once.

So these were some of the Free backlink checker tools, i hope you like them and that it will be useful for you, if you want to check social media links of your website then you can useSEOCentro. Backlinks are of quality type if they are relevant.

What Is Pay Per Click Marketing ? Learn About Pay Per Click Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 17:23:00 +0000

Learn About Pay Per Click Marketing!

Pay Per Click most commonly known as PPC is the process of purchasing keywords or key terms from search engines in order to publicise a websites products or services.

Similar keywords and key terms are linked to small text ads that are displayed within the sponsored link sections of search engine when the keyword or key term is searched for by a user within a search engine.

As particular keywords and key terms are highly competitive search engines set a predetermined minimum rate on any given word or term, according to its popularity. As there is limited space within the sponsored ad sections of a search engine (and everyone wants to be on the 1st page) PPC users must bid on keywords or key terms in order to achieve a more desirable position.

The Cost Per Click (otherwise known as CPC) is not the only factor that search engines take into consideration when displaying sponsored ads relating to a specific keyword or term. They also look at the relevancy of the text ad, its contents, its popularity with other users (has it been clicked on before) and whether the text ad destination page is relevant to the keyword or key term they typed into the search engine in the first place.

Why Should I Use PPC?

PPC is a great way to target online users directly with timely and relevant information. When users perform a keyword or key term search within a search engine, they are looking for something in particular. By producing relevant ads that meet the searches needs, you can direct highly relevant, higher converting users to your website.

PPC Benefits

PPC marketing is great way to market your company’s products or services to online users in a direct and relevant manner. By bidding on keywords and key terms that clearly define your business and creating highly relevant text ads, you are delivering an almost immediate solution to online users that may have not previously known your website existed.

The great thing about PPC marketing is that its impact is directly measurable. You will be able to control the amount you spend on keywords as well as being able to monitor the benefits you receive from the users that click on your ads.

Did they convert to a sale or lead; does this sale or lead revenue outweigh the cost spent on driving the traffic to your site?

Whatever the impact, with PPC marketing you are able to monitor the impact of your marketing efforts, refining and optimising your campaigns whenever you wish.

How do I set up a PPC Campaign?

The main PPC services are offered by the top search engines. These include Google AdWords and Yahoo Search engines, other search engine options include MSN and Sensis search.

What Is Search Engin Optimization ? Learn About Search Engine Optimization!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 14:18:00 +0000

Learn About Search Engine Optimization!

Search Engine Optimization most commonly known as SEO is the process of driving organic traffic (free traffic) to a company’s website through search engine results.

Why Should I Use SEO?

Most internet users use search engines to find information, products or services that they are looking for, in fact ‘93 percent of users worldwide use search engines to find websites’ - Forester Research.

Search engine optimization techniques allow you to be found amongst the millions of web pages available on the internet. Many of your competitors will already be using these techniques and benefiting from the traffic that this online marketing is producing.

SEO allows search engines to find your website easily, identifying the content available on the site and its relevancy to search engine users. Search engines aim to deliver the most relevant search results to their users, so they use a variety of techniques to assess website content to ensure that they are delivering the most relevant search results for their users.

Some SEO techniques that are assessed include:

Page Meta Tags
Page Content
Internal Links
Inbound Links

How Does SEO Work?

Search Engines have things called spiders, or bots that crawl the internet servers to find content on websites that it then stores in its index. Websites are then filtered according to the search engines algorithms which then store the information that fits its criteria. When a user is performing a search, the search engine will access this index to find the most relevant information it has for the user based on their search keyword or key terms and deliver it to them.

There are a variety of factors that are assessed by search engines to determine the relevancy of the content delivered to search engines users. These include:

Page Rank - Google page rank value base on website popularity, age and content
Website Links - This includes inbound and outbound links
Page Content - Meta Tags, alt tags and on page content

SEO Benefits

The process of performing SEO is lengthy but has great benefits for those that can achieve 1st page rankings in top search engine results such as Google or Yahoo for keywords or key terms that best define the contents of their site.

What is the Difference between SEM and SEO?

Search Engine Marketing commonly known as SEM is the process of driving search engine traffic through paid Pay Per Click (PPC) and unpaid methods, such as Search Engine Optimization. SEO is solely the process of driving traffic to a site through organic search engine results.

How do I Perform SEO on My Website?

SEO is an ongoing process that can take time and effort to master. A combination of SEO techniques will help your site to rank highly with search engines, ultimately driving more traffic to your website.

How to Improve Your Link-Building ?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 14:05:00 +0000

As SEOs, we’ve all used common anchor text and more generic links in the past: it was, after all, just how things were done a year or two back. However, things have now changed, and we’ve all got to focus on throwing a bit more variation and invention into our lead generation campaigns. If the old style links aren’t proving effective anymore, then where should we be focusing our effort?

Co-occurrence. It’s been voiced (most notably by Bill Slawski), that ranking for a term could now occur without the main keyword being used at all, simply because the link has a direct relevance to it. For instance, creating content based around Bishop’s Finger or Old Peculiar could lead to a site being ranked the phrase ‘Real ales’, simply because the two former terms are individual brands of a drink. Enough relevant terms that aren’t direct variations of the keyword could be a great way to build reputation whilst avoiding the dreaded link penalties.

Synonyms. Sure, the word might sound like the evil company from a dystopian sci-fi novel, but focusing on synonyms can give your link building campaign a real sense of variation. For instance, if you’re building a football blog, then build up links based on ‘soccer’ too. If you’re creating an image database, then include links focused on ‘pictures’ and ‘pics’, as well as image formats like ‘JPGs’. You’re still building a reputation for the same things, but adding far more depth to your reputation. You’ll also pull in a lot more searches when you begin to rank for all the terms.

Partially matching. As far as we’re concerned, the very best way to include natural links is to write your content first, then worry about the links afterwards. If you’ve written a top drawer, 1000 piece article that would grace the New York Times, then added a link to the phrase ‘locksmith’ – with your site’s main keyword being ‘locksmiths based in NY’ then you’re going to see far better results than having two links with the exact keyword within a 200 word knockoff article. Remember: article first, link second!

Link out. I’m always amazed when in 2013, SEOs still don’t see the value in linking externally to authority sites. Outgoing links, when relevant, are a serious way of building authority. If you were discussing the merits of the war in Iraq (to use a random example), then you would likely cite arguments given by other, higher authorities who agreed with your cause (‘Well, Christopher Hitchens said…’ etc). This is just as applicable when applied to building good content. If you’re writing a piece about Michael Jordan, then link to videos of him playing. If you’re writing about Hemingway, then link to some of his greatest quotes. It’s relevant to your content, so it’s good for your reputation.

How SEO Will Help Your Business

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 01:49:00 +0000

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is now one of the most admired internet marketing strategies being implemented by one or the other internet marketing company around the globe. SEO is the process of setting up a website so that it appears as high as possible in the Search Engine Ranking Pages or SERPs’.

The largest selling point of the professional SEO Services is that these services are helping high traffic levels to the sales funnel and ultimately producing new customers to existing as well as new businesses. The search engine optimization is helping organizations to increase the visibility of their customer service as well as creative informative content that is valuable and helpful to their customers and business clients.

An organization manufacturing different consumer products or services and having a website with SEO as an internet marketing strategy builds market awareness that in turn increases its sales and improve the concerned organization’s reputation among key stake holders. Most of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and AOL etc display ten results on a page and research show that the results on the first page are more likely to be looked at. Therefore, the higher the ranking a website appears, the more visitors, or users will visit the organization’s website.

Depending upon the objectives for the website, an effective SEO will benefit the business in the following ways:

Build a reputation among customers, suppliers, employees and other shareholders,
Broaden awareness about the product and services in new market sectors or new geographical areas,
Public awareness will be enhanced about the firms services or products,
Businesses can sell their products and services directly to customers from their website.
Customer service gets improved by delivering online customer support,
Organizations can start a dialogue with their customers, business clients through forums, blogs, and feedback pages that can be used to improve products or services and address any issues.

SEO has helped small businesses to compete successfully with large firms and has helped them reach a larger audience with little effort. However, smaller businesses must be aware while choosing various SEO packages offered by SEO service provider as choosing a package that is not suitable for their specific business needs will defeat the entire purpose of opting for an SEO service and its merits.

It is advisable for businesses to choose SEO Company or SEO service providers after a careful and thorough investigation. One can compare the various services offered by multiple SEO service providers before making the right choice. The other important thing to note when choosing your SEO service provider is their reliability and credibility.

Four SEO Tactics That Still Work After Google Penguin Update

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 01:17:00 +0000

Have your websites been penalized by Penguin 2.0? You are not alone. An important fact to know about this Penguin update is that it is an algorithm change. This means SEO tactics which have been working before might not be working now.

“About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice.” –Matt Cutts

So, what SEO tactics are still working? Here, I will discuss about 4 SEO tactics that I am still using to maintain my page 1 rankings on my website.

1. Press Releases

An old school SEO tactic that have been working for ages. Press releases are articles that get syndicated or distributed across multiple news websites. The cool thing about press releases is that every article you write will be allowed a backlink and as your article gets distributed among the other news websites, your backlinks will increase as well.

There are multiple ways you can get press releases, one of them is by using a service called PRWeb. PRWeb service helps distribute your article to across 100+ different websites including Google News (PR 8), USA Today (PR 8) and Market Watch (PR 8).

The best thing among these press releases is not only the page rank of these websites but the traffic that you will be getting from them which potentially can be up to the thousands.

2. Guest Blogs

Guest blogging is another SEO tactic that is still working wonderfully well after Penguin. Even though, Google targeted guest post spammers in the past, you can still rank your website just with guest blogs. One advantage of guest blogs is the relevancy of the links you get and after Penguin 2.0, link relevancy is a very important factor in Google ranking factors.

There are a few ways you can easily get guest blogs. The first way is to use the manual way which is by searching Google for terms like: “become a contributor” and “write for us” + (your keyword).

For example: “write for us” + travel, “write for us” + SEO

An easier way to get guest blogs is to use guest blogging platforms like MyBlogGuest and BloggerLinkUp. These platforms connect bloggers who are looking for more posts with guest bloggers. That way it is much easier to get a guest post going instead of contacting each website owner on the search engine for a guest post opportunity.

3. Relevant Blog Comments

Most blog comments tactics have been destroyed by Google over the past year with their previous Panda and Penguin updates. This is because link builders are using automation tools like Scrapebox to spam the whole web with their backlinks.

Google has put a tight filter when factoring blog comments to rank websites. However, relevant guest blogs still work in ranking your website.

A good way to get relevant blog comments is to go to Alltop.com then find your niche websites there and finally find pages to comment on.

Another way to find relevant websites to post on is by searching Google with this query: intext: leave a reply + SEO

Just by leaving 5 relevant blog comments linking to your website everyday can do wonders to its rankings.

4. Diversified Anchor Text

The fourth SEO tactic I use is not a link building tactic but a SEO strategy instead. Every backlink that I place I will diversify my anchor texts on that backlink. Meaning I won’t leave the same anchor text over multiple websites.

For example: when placing blog comments, 20% of the time I will use link building, 30% backlink building, 20% learn more here and the last 30% I will use link building after penguin.

After Penguin 2.0, Google has placed a lot of spam filters on websites with the exact same anchor texts linking back to them. Therefore, be sure to use this anchor text strategy for the backlinks that you are going to build.

Wrapping Up

Press releases, guest blogs, relevant blog comments and diversify your anchor text are the SEO tactics that I am using to maintain my page 1 rankings after Penguin 2.0. The best thing about these SEO tactics is that they have been working for a long time now unlike most of the other SEO tactics that you hear about.

5 Online Marketing Trends You Don't Want to Miss

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 11:34:00 +0000

Online marketing has gone through several overhauls in accordance with the evolution of technology, which then makes us wonder, “What are the Internet marketing trends you should be focused on?”
Check out the following list of Internet marketing trends that are already making 2013 one of the most exciting years ever. These may be more than trends - fundamental shifts in online marketing that are change the way we do business online. Be sure to read the entire post and comments to see how these influences are shaping our online marketing, today, tomorrow, and into the future...

1. Mobile marketing frenzy

By “mobile frenzy”, I mean we can’t ignore that, according to mashable.com, 75% of the world currently enjoys access to mobile devices. The modern Internet marketer knows the value of offering mobile value for their clients and brands.
Last year, mobile Internet marketing was all about making your website, making it easy to use, and searchable on mobile devices. Now, with talk of responsive design and creating a consistent user experience across every device, mobile is gaining momentum that can't be ignored. This year, it goes a step further- it's all about having a mobile app version of the website available that engages your customers and prospects alike.

2. The evolution of attribution

Attribution tracking is the process of giving a specific value to an Internet marketing action, such as a click, that ends up in a conversion. The future of Internet marketing holds continued evolution in creative approaches to tracking how different channels affect each other. Existing large analytics service providers will proceed to innovate their current offerings and will make them more available to the rest.

3. “Gamification”

Another must-consider Internet marketing strategy is the “gamification” of your brand by applying a game-design mode of thinking when producing non-game applications for today’s engaged users.

4. Hooray for ‘inbound marketing!’

With the growth of social Internet marketing through the use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, marketers are starting to invest in a new kind of value. Instead of paid advertisements, this year’s budget should be spent on richer content, beautiful web design, and inbound analytics to draw in your customers. Expect to see new software, as well as upgrades to current tools.

5. Internet marketing for customer loyalty and brands as influencers

By now we are all informed of the fact that attaining a customer is more costly than retaining one. Finding yourself a way to make your customers feel appreciated and satisfied in the early stages of the Internet marketing roadmap should now be a breeze. Customers nowadays have never been so connected, and with the dozens ways in which they are able to share their opinions customer loyalty is a crucial and valuable aspect to Internet marketing. Thanks to platforms such as Facebook and Foursquare, brands have been able to build followings of enormous sizes. So, jump into the pool and engage.

With the continuous evolution of the Internet, Internet marketing is bound to develop endlessly, and the list of trends just continues to grow. In summary, these technological advances in Internet marketing prove that content and design is king, brands are becoming social influencers, small businesses are going mainstream, analytics and customer loyalty are the key, and there would be more Internet marketing trends to look forward to and watch out for.

Internet Marketing Strategies Defined at MozCon Once Again

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 21:30:00 +0000

It’s been several weeks since the 2013 edition of MozCon has come and gone in Seattle, Washington. Attendees have flown home and returned to work after joining over a thousand of the best and brightest, not to mention most passionate, internet marketers in the world underneath a blanket of blue light and incredible speakers. Although days have passed, the connections made and inspiration felt from the conference are far from being lost in twitter newsfeeds of the past. Mr. Moz himself, Rand Fishkin, kicked off the conference as the first speaker with his presentation about this year in SEO, marketing, and Moz. His conclusions? Brands are dominating the web and Google’s preference for them are not going anywhere so becoming a brand is your best bet to thriving as an online entity. Web marketing is more competitive than ever and it’s becoming increasingly crucial to know how to use both interruption marketing and inbound marketing. Rand wrapped it up with the newest in Moz and the first day of the conference began after his energetic introduction. Matt Peters, another member of the Moz team, spoke about 2013 ranking factors and pointed out the fact that “40% of customers will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.” He also emphasized the importance of Google+ and Google Authorship for ranking. While the average Joe or Jane may not see the need to engage in Google+ it’s absolutely necessary to realize the weight that it can carry on the web. Karen McGrane from Bond Art + Science spoke about the power of mobile internet access and the necessity of building valuable mobile sites. “There’s no such thing as ‘how to write for mobile’ there’s just good writing,” Karen said, continuing the constant emphasis on content at the conference. Her bottom line was, “You don’t get to decide which device people use to access your content. They do.” One of the speakers that especially stood out was Kyle Rush. If you aren’t familiar with the name, perhaps you know a bit about the work he’s done. Kyle headed the online fundraising for the Obama campaign, a campaign that raised a whopping $690 million ONLINE. Rush presented the three secrets to his online success; experimentation, observation, and data gathering. His ability to test and optimize without fear of failure led him to become an incredible landing page optimizer. Pete Meyers from Moz started off the last day of the conference with a presentation projecting the future of ranking. He reiterated that to survive on the web you have to become an entity. Google’s job is to model the real world and because of that he said, “Our tactics don’t have to change, but the way we approach them does.” Other notable speakers included Google’s Avinash Kaushik, HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, and SEER Interactive founder Wil Reynolds. Company culture was also a hot topic throughout the conference. Sarah Bird, Moz’s chief operating officer, gave a heartfelt presentation about company core values and creating a strong company culture. It was impossible not to think about what kind of a thriving and passionate industry internet marketing is becoming. To steal the title of Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s book, it’s all about delivering happiness. In a world dominated by Google and powered by technology, it’s inevitable that internet marketing is going to become not just big, but huge. We’re glad to be a part of it. Download MozCon 2013 presentations here: http://moz.com/mozcon-live/agenda

Think Beyond Links, Build Compelling Sites with Rich UI and UX

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 09:53:00 +0000

No serious SEO can ignore the elephant in the room: black hat works. For every post informing us that we need to create compelling content in order to rank, there are hundreds or thousands of junky posts ranking on purchased links, private link networks, and tiered linking schemes. Black hat doesn’t work for long, but it does work.
So why are we sitting here telling you to “think beyond links?” Are we just industry sheeple, regurgitating Google propaganda about how you need “great content” in order to show up in the SERPs?
No.
We’re here to tell you that compelling sites take you further than rankings alone, and that UI and UX are musts if you want to optimize any relevant KPIs, as opposed to just optimizing for search. If you still aren’t convinced, take a look at our full explanation.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to do it.

1. Embrace Responsive Design

At the end of 2012, Mashable redesigned their entire site. The content now resizes itself if you adjust the size of your browser. They’ve done this to respond to their changing user base. As more people switch over to tablets and mobile phones, fewer of them are willing to put up with sites that force them to use horizontal scrolling or zooming just to use the site.
Mashable is far from alone in recognizing this need.
2013 is the first year where projected PC sales are expected to be lower than the previous year. One hundred million tablets are expected to be sold by the end of the year, and smartphones already outnumber traditional cell phones.
Meanwhile, very few businesses will be able to design apps accessible from every device. Apps are certainly a good way to put yourself in view among your core customer base, but it’s much more difficult to convince a user to install an app than it is to convince them to visit a website. Add to that a huge number of conflicting platforms and it starts to get very difficult to reach as wide an audience with apps alone.
Using media queries, you can determine the resolution of the user’s browser and adjust the presentation accordingly. Some screens are too narrow to accommodate side bars or large images.
In addition to responsive design, “adaptive design” is another important element in the future of site development. With adaptive design, you detect the type of device and adjust features accordingly. You may want to enable swiping, or adjust button sizes to accommodate fat fingers as opposed to tiny cursors.
Simply saying “we need responsive design” isn’t enough, though. You need to eliminate age-old habits you didn’t even know you were using. You can’t just create a mockup of what you want the site to look like and let the designer make all the calls. You’ll need to do things like:

Assign a hierarchy to each page element
Assign a hierarchy to each part of the content (because lorem ipsum just isn’t going to cut it)
How does navigation change on smaller screens?

It’s not just a matter of making things smaller so they fit the screen.
Smashing Magazine recommends starting with a mobile wireframe design that makes the hierarchy and priorities immediately clear. You can then hand this mobile mockup to a designer. A good designer should be able to immediately envision what the desktop size version should look like. (Here is there example, starting with a PDF of the mobile version and ending with the hi-res desktop version.)
It’s much easier to design for mobile and envision how things will adjust when the screen gets larger than it is to go in the other direction. This is central to effective responsive design.

2. Understand Split Testing

You’re not going to maximize conversions, user engagement, or create the most positive user experience if you don’t perform split tests, or don’t perform them correctly.
Danny Inny at CopyBlogger compared split testing to sex in high school: everybody says they’re doing it, most of them aren’t, and most of those who really are probably aren’t doing it right. Truer words have rarely been spoken.
Here are a few of the biggest mistakes people make when they split test their pages:

They don’t care about statistical significance
They test more than one thing at a time
They don’t test the alternates at the same time
They don’t actually measure the results that matter
They don’t keep track of past experiments

Statistical significance is not some vague feeling that you’ve run the test long enough to verify that one page works better than the other. When you ignore statistical significance, you surrender to statistical flukes and your own biases. You need to reach 90 or 95% confidence before you decide that one page is working better than the other. If you don’t know how to do that, you can take advantage of this free tool by Firepole marketing, you can learn what a two-sample t-test is, and you can take advantage of Google’s own split-tester right in Google analytics, or use the Premise WordPress plugin right from the WordPress menu.
You need a lot of traffic to spot small changes. 100 impressions is only enough to spot a 20% difference between two results. It takes 10,000 impressions before you can spot a 2% difference between options. That’s why, unless you can afford to pay for the traffic, you should start with major changes like:

Entire landing page concept
The headline
Price
Content
Images

Some will argue with me on the first point, but I think that’s unwise. I maintain that changing the entire page is still “changing one thing at a time,” and it’s probably the very first thing you should test. The landing page concept contains within it hidden assumptions about how your audience acts. You need to test what kind of audience you’re working with before you test individual things.
Testing individual page elements will help you get the best version of a page, but it will not get you to the best page concept.

3. Behaviors Speak Louder than Words

Split testing is great for maximizing conversions, time on site, etc., but there is another kind of testing that is absolutely vital for UI and UX: usability testing. It’s very important to understand that usability testing is pretty much nothing like split testing.
The purpose of usability testing is to see how users actually use the interface. It’s user-centered design at its best, and it helps you build an interface that accommodates the way people actually expect it to work. This results in an intuitive user experience that flows naturally.
So how does usability testing work?
In usability testing, you present users with the interface and ask them to perform a series of steps. Their interaction with the interface is recorded, observed, and documented.
Unlike split testing, a very small number of users are actually needed in order to arrive at conclusions. The reality of the situation is that most people, especially those relatively inexperienced with technology, will respond to the interface the same way. It almost never takes more than ten users to spot a design flaw or opportunity, and typically takes fewer than that.
User testing is not market research. It is not about asking users what would make them like the interface more or asking for feedback. It is entirely about observing behavior. The truth is, people rarely know what they want or what would make the interface work better…at least not consciously. It is only by observing their behavior that you can learn what the product is missing, or where opportunities lie.
Jakob Nielson of Sun Microsystems popularized the concept of a large number of very small usability tests during development in the ‘90s. All that is typically necessary is five or six random users. This has come to be called “hallway testing” because of the implication that the users to test will be random people picked up off the hallway.
Put simply, as soon as you spot two or three people struggling with the interface, you don’t gain very much by watching hundreds or thousands of other people go through the same problem.
Statistically speaking, samples this small aren’t really representative of the general population, but that’s not the point. You can almost always spot problems of some kind with samples this small, and it’s pointless to test further until the problem is fixed. Testing larger samples is unnecessary until no problems can be detected with such small samples.
The point is to focus on iteration. Usability testing is much less scientific than split testing, and is driven primarily by the experience and intuition of the designers, combined with the behavioral data of users. With enough iterations, the overall sample size does become large, but the benefit of using this method is that initial problems are resolved early on and never encountered again, so that smaller problems can be uncovered by subsequent tests.
Usability testing can be made more effective and efficient by using tracking software, heat maps, and eyeball tracking tools.
It doesn’t have to be expensive, however. One method that is being advocated for startups is called paper prototype testing, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. This involves using paper mockups, which may even be hand sketched. It involves a user, who interacts with the paper mockup, a facilitator, who takes notes and delves into the problems with the users, and a “human computer,” who is familiar with the interface and manipulates the mockup to simulate the final interface.
Such paper prototype testing has been working quite effectively since the ‘80s and is unlikely to go out of fashion any time soon.
While usability testing isn’t the same as market research or qualitative questionnaires, it can be useful in some cases to mix them together. Face to face interviews tend to be most useful, particularly right after a user testing session. These interviews can help uncover the root issue behind the behaviors. They can be very informative, as long as you remember that behaviors speak louder than words.

4. Build Consumer Psychology into the Site

User experience is all about what is happening mentally, so it’s important to understand a few things about consumer psychology when you design the interface and decide on the content. We can start with Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence:
1. Reciprocity – Humans, in general, are more inclined to do favors for people who have already done favors for them. The more value your website offers to its users, the more inclined they are to offer value of their own in return.
2. Commitments – People are more likely to follow through on something if they make a commitment, no matter how small, and even if it is a mental commitment. For example, you are more likely to get a positive result in most circumstances if you ask “Will you…” instead of “Please…” Small commitments also open up the door to larger commitments in the future.
3. Authority – We tend to trust people with credentials and expertise more than people without them. A seal of approval, a group membership, or an endorsement from a trusted authority can go a long way. This is also the entire premise of content marketing: that you can become a trusted authority by offering valuable, helpful content on subjects that matter to your target audience.
4. Social Proof – We’re more likely to be influenced by somebody who is trusted by others, especially if they happen to be popular in groups that we associate with. This is even truer when somebody that we personally know endorses a product, organization, or person.
5. Scarcity – The more rare something is, the more valuable we tend to think it is. Unfortunately, this tactic has been used so often, and has become reminiscent of so many “don’t miss your chance” infomercials, that consumers rarely trust it anymore. It’s best to allow them to come to the conclusion that your brand is rare on their own, by producing content, products, and an online experience that is hard to come by.
6. Rapport – This is where market research and user targeting can get especially helpful. The more consumers feel like they have in common with you, the more likely they are to trust you, and to eventually buy from you.
In addition to these six principles, we can add 4 cognitive biases and heuristics that affect the way we think:
7. Loss Aversion – Generally speaking, the fear of loss is more influential than the promise of reward. We’re more willing to take a risk to avoid a loss than to earn a reward, and this is true even when the outcome is exactly the same. This has been scientifically validated many times. It’s the reason we fear the unknown, and it’s why stock market players hold on to losers too long and let go of winners too early.
8. Status Quo Bias (Default Bias) – If we’re given a series of options, we tend to choose whichever one seems to be the “default.” Anybody who’s ever been overwhelmed with decisions by the restaurant waitress (or the confusing menu) knows what I’m talking about. We like options, but don’t like being forced to make a decision. This is why smart restaurant menus highlight just a few dishes with special coloration and pictures, and why smart site designers make it clear where they want users to start.
9. Anchoring – Humans don’t think in absolutes. They think in relative terms. We tend to anchor things on our first impression or our most memorable (probably most emotional) one. As an example, if we see the highest price first, the lowest price will tend to seem lower. If we start with the lowest price, the highest price will seem much higher. The same goes for any other quality we might evaluate. This is why it’s important to be very careful with first impressions, and how we move forward from there.

Conclusion

Hopefully this introduction has given digital marketers something to think about. The careful balance between UI and UX is every bit as important as off-site SEO, and it is a crucial part of the buying cycle. Master these basics and you will be worlds ahead of the competition.
What are your thoughts on UI and UX strategy?

Learn To Take Advantage Of Social Media Networkeing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 04:33:00 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or an apartment with really bad wifi connection) it’s impossible to miss the affect that major events and holidays have on the twittersphere. While you may be watching fireworks from a beach, rooftop, or big city skyline, you’ll most certainly catch an additional glimpse of the show from every social media platform out there.

It’s easy to be aware of the impact that these kinds of festivities have on your personal life but it can be equally as easy to pass up the professional opportunity that they also create. Never underestimate the power of a good trending topic. Find the local trending topics that relate to your business. In the world of Google, content is king. This means that adding popular keywords to your site that have no relevancy to your actual business is a big no-no.

The key is to find ways to connect to the masses. Think about all of the details that surround a holiday like 4th of July. If you still can’t find a way to connect use it as a way to add personality and voice to your company. It’s ok to have a more casual post every now and then as long as it’s appropriate and positive. Major companies with booming social media platforms are extremely creative about their posts. The best part about casual posts is that they invite interactions and help boost followers.
Don’t forget, with great klout comes great responsibility. If you’re posting, tweeting, instagramming, vining, etc. from a personal phone or computer during a holiday, be careful. As the use of social media for companies increases, so do the amount of employees fired for making mistakes. Double check that you’re actually on your personal account and not your company’s account when you’re about to tweet that picture of your friends having one too many drinks.
The world of social media will continue to exist even after your office closes at 5 p.m. or your employees take off for a holiday like Independence Day. Make sure that you don’t get left behind by keeping your social media platforms relevant day or night, holiday or not.

Latest Hostgator Coupon Codes for July 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 06:53:00 +0000

The platinum standard for hosting has been Hostgator for many years and with these Hostgator coupon codes for July 2013 you can get hosting from a top provider at an affordable rate. These promo codes are all working for the month of July and you should take advantage of the discounts on offer while they last.

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These are currently the best discount codes available to the public. Out of all the coupons mentioned above the coupon "25OFF4U2DAY" is the most valuable code as it can help you save a large amount of money when choosing to pay for your hosting for 6+ months in advance. The longer the billing cycle the greater the amount saved.

I receive an email from Hostgator each time they release discount coupons for a greater value and this page is then updated immediately. If you anything like me and you try searching for the best discounts you do not have take up anymore time as these coupons are the most valuable promo codes currently available.

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Once you have entered your desired coupon, you can click the "continue to step 2" where you will be able to choose your billing cycle and view your discount.

All the best with your new hosting package from Hostgator! I am very confident that you will enjoy your experience with this host as they have proven to me and many others that they are a dependable hosting provider.

I have personally used over 25 web hosting providers over a span of three years and Hostgator stand-out like a glowing thumb :) compared to the other providers out there. Their service standards are unmatched and the quality of their servers is impeccable. Hostgator themselves have attributed their success to the fact that they place their customers ahead of everything else.

They do not hesitate to invest in new resources to ensure their end-users are satisfied. I have witnessed them via a forum conversation with a client where they revealed that they are hiring human resources above what they needed just to ensure they meet the demands of answering tickets and replying to customers via their online chat facility – this is unheard of in the industry and something that emphasizes why people continue to recommend this web hosting company all over the net.

Take advantage of the Hostgator coupons offered on this website and sign-up with a provider who truly cares about you and your website.

The 10 Best Alternatives to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:48:00 +0000

Ever since Google announced the impending demise of the AdWords Keyword Tool and their preference for its new avatar – the Keyword Planner, yet another hot discussion has sprung up in the SEO community. This time, strong adherents of the free-for-all ideology are riled at Google’s decision to make the Keyword Planner accessible only to marketers who’ve explicitly signed up to Google’s AdWords (which is one step more than having a Gmail account), taking it closer to being a paid tool in future! I don’t see this as a hindrance, because most other keyword (or other) tools require you to create an account and sign in before you can use them, even if they’re free. But if Google does it, we have reason to pounce on them, don’t we?
One possible problem is that although the Keyword Planner has some cool new features (including integration of the Google Traffic Estimator, which will be retired too), as of this writing, the indispensable Exact Match and Phrase Match features are nowhere to be found! Whole books will become useless without these, so I hope Google will eventually port them to the Keyword Planner. Nor do you see the “Include specific content” option, which is a life-saver for the adult industry, which spends the most on Google PPC.
We’re not here to dwell on the good and the bad of Google’s decision. I personally am elated that this debate has brought the crucial SEO function of Keyword Research into the limelight once again. There’s more to it than taking the first 10 results from the Google Keyword Tool and scattering them left, right and center in your content. Savvy keyword research is what separates strategists from headless chickens.
The team at Nile Marketing is taking this opportunity to analyze other significant (and free to use/try) keyword research tools out there. We are asking ourselves what data and logic should ideally go into keyword research, how this logic can be programmatically applied to the creation of tools, and what the best ways are to consolidate and use their output. Here’s a quick look at 10 other keyword research tools, some well-known and some you’d do well to know. These are not alternatives to the AdWords Keyword Tool on their own, but each of them performs some function of the AdWords tool in its own unique way, and all of them aid and abet your keyword research quite well.

We’ll start with a simple one that might soon fade away. Mergewords displays three boxes, where you can enter distinct parts of a long-tail keyword. You could use one for your primary product-related keywords, another for product attributes and the third for a location or query strings. Just press Merge! to see the assorted mishmashes. It’s now done in by the new Keyword Planner, because Google has incorporated a “Multiply Keyword Lists” feature that does exactly this and then clusters it into Ad Groups.

WordStream boasts of a trillion-keyword database and you can try 30 keywords for free. There are little checkboxes enabling you to customize searches by filtering adult keywords or “nichefying” results. There are more options for finding negative keywords and grouping your keywords. The full version spews out tens of thousands of results for many keywords, the top 100 of which are available for free.

SEMrush is a true heavyweight. Only the first 10 results are free, though. You can search by putting the keyword itself in the main box to see volumes, trends and other data across ten different Google regional domains and Bing. Or better still, you can type in your site or that of a competitor to see the top 10 organic keywords it ranks for.
So you get only 10 keywords right? No! SEMrush also indicates 10 organic competitors for the site! You can then go to these competitors’ profiles and get the 10 organic keywords they are ranking for. It might turn out that five or so of a competitor’s keywords may not be in the niche of your liking or will overlap with your results, but you can find use for the remaining five. Thus, you can grab about 50 valuable keywords, give or take a few. I don’t recommend going more than one level deep with competitors, because the keywords your competitors’ competitors are ranking for may not be closely relevant to you and you’ll tend to lose focus.

Powered by WordTracker, the SEO Book Keyword Tool shows you realms upon realms of data. So much that I can’t even decide on a screenshot. To call it exhaustive would be a gross understatement. You get search volumes from WordTracker, Google and Bing, data from Google Trends and Google Insights, traffic estimates Compete and Alexa, and much more. SEO Book points you to the 10 suggestions provided by Google Instant for your keyword, and then 10 more for each of those suggestions, and so on. It also delivers Yahoo! suggest results as returned by http://sugg.search.yahoo.com/sg/?output=html&nresults=10&command=keyword.
Finally, you can also click onwards to vertical search results including blogs, directories, answer sites, classifieds, videos and groups to form a holistic synopsis of your keywords and your competition.

This is the new kid on the block. Keyword Eye is a “visual” tool that displays keywords in increasing or decreasing sizes based on their search volume or AdWords competition. The Basic version offers 10 keyword searches per day on any of 10 different Google country keyword databases and 100 results per report. Keyword Eye is powered by SEMrush, and consequently gives you great data on competitors.

KGen is a nifty Firefox add-on that is somewhat like the Google Index > Content Keywords feature of Google Webmaster Tools. It can be viewed as a sidebar in Firefox and calculates the strength of keywords on the page you’re on by evaluating the number of times they’re used, the weightage assigned to them according to the HTML tags wherein they’re enclosed, and their positions in the text. You can take quite a few actions such as setting up negative words to be ignored, changing tag weights and exporting results.

Bing Webmaster Tools is becoming a force to reckon with with each passing day. It has some super-powerful tools that must be giving sleepless nights to Google were it not for Bing’s paltry market share. Click on a site added to your BWT, navigate to Webmaster > Diagnostics & Tools and click on the second one in the list: the Keyword Research tool. You can filter your search by country and language. You can also search for keywords that appeared in Bing results within a custom date range. I wish this tool wasn’t so tedious to access, what with you having to add a site to BWT before you can use it, even though your keywords need have no relation to the site in question.

In its own words, KeywordSpy enables you to “unveil your competitors’ most profitable ad copies & keywords” and “learn from time-tested ad campaigns.” It offers a magnanimous wealth of data; the “Related,” “Similar” and “Misspell” results taken together can give you keywords similar to Phrase match and Broad match results. Further, KeyWordSpy now allows you to comb most major Google country domains.
KeywordSpy is one of the best tools for competitor research. Like SEMrush, it shows you organic as well as PPC competitors. And there’s a bonus—you also get to see their ad copies! However, just like SEMrush, KeywordSpy displays only 10 results (Whoever said the best things in life are free… wasn’t a digital marketer!) and you have to resort to looking at your competitors’ keywords for more data.

One severe impediment to non-native English speakers in India, Europe and elsewhere is lack of vocabulary. If you hated grammar class in school but are now faced with the herculean task of keyword research, consider your problem half-solved. Head over to Thesaurus.com for synonyms and related terms. For example, a search for “interior design” returns terms such as décor, colors, furnishings of a place, adornment, color scheme, decoration, and ornamentation. It also returns a couple of “relevant questions” that your targets are likely to ask, such as “How to become an interior designer?”
I said your problem is half-solved because even if you don’t speak the Queen’s, you still have to know that “interior decoration” is a reasonable substitute for “interior design,” but “interior ornamentation” is not.

Show of hands – weren’t you wondering if I forgot Übersuggest with each passing tool in this list? Well I saved it for the end. The king of secondary keyword research, Übersuggest gives you all the terms “suggested” by Google for each letter after your keyword, in alphabetical order. It now offers vertical results for images, news, shopping, video and recipes.
There’s a clear explanation of how this tool works on the Übersuggest home page, so I’m going to skip on the duplication. Plus, its popularity and usage is probably next only to the AdWords Keyword tool.

There, now. We’ve given you a preliminary overview of ten cool keyword tools. Of course each of these has its own strengths and caveats, and at least for now, none can match the effectiveness of Google’s Keyword Tool, particularly in language, location, or device-specific results. Google gathers and analyzes vast amounts of data and as you know, the rich only get richer.
I also want to emphasize that Microsoft Excel and Google Docs perhaps play an equal, if not more important role in keyword research than any of these tools, because at the end of the day, the mountain of data you end up with is of no use if you can’t perform calculations, sort, filter, present or store it in a way that’s best suits the task at hand. Head over to Distilled for a comprehensive Excel for SEOs guide. Alternatively, bug this guy—he’s the Sensei who trains Excel ninjas in the dark of the night.
As optimizers and marketers, we have to constantly keep testing and fine tuning search terms. Tools will always be there to help us collect and organize data but only humans can fully understand human intent, even if you argue that husbands can’t understand wives!

Why Design and User Experience Come Before Link Building

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:26:00 +0000

This is not a misinformed diatribe about how design and user experience are more important ranking factors than links. Without a doubt, enough of the right kind of links can still rank low quality junk. That said, we’re pretty much with Google’s Matt Cutts on the link building obsession:

“A lot of people think about how do I build more links, and they don’t think about the grander, global picture…you get too focused on search engines…If you look at the history of sites that have done really well…you can take anywhere from Instagram to Path, even Twitter, there’s a cool app called Yardsale, and what those guys try to do is they make design a fundamental piece of why their site is advantageous to go to…If you really get that sweet spot of something compelling, where the design is really good, where the user experience just flows, you’d be amazed just how much growth and traffic and traction you can get as a result.”

No, not even Matt Cutts is saying that user experience and design are more important ranking factors than links here. He’s simply pointing out that the most successful sites on the web put so much effort into design and user experience that they couldn’t care much less about search engines, because they’re going to stay successful with or without rankings.
We’d like to elaborate on why we think design and user experience should always come before link building, assuming you’re anything other than a churn and burn affiliate sales autoblogger.

Conversion rate optimization brings permanent results for all traffic sources

For the vast majority of sites on the web, it’s much easier to double your conversion rate than it is to double your traffic by building links. Obviously, this isn’t true for a site that’s already optimized for design and user experience, but most sites haven’t done that.
Link building improves performance in the search engines, but CRO improves performance across the board. No matter where the traffic is coming from, paid or earned, if you put user experience first, you boost the lifetime value of each visitor.
Now, some people will argue that CRO and user experience are two different things. There’s some truth to that, but I think it takes serious imagination to believe that they aren’t intimately connected.
The better the user experience, the better your conversion rate. Clean, intuitive, purposeful design undoubtedly does the same. Unbounce wouldn’t have written a stellar ebook called Conversion Centered Design if it didn’t. Here are the takeaways they have to share, and we can’t help but find ourselves nodding in agreement with:

Encapsulation – Techniques used to draw the user’s eye toward the content that is most likely to convert.
Contrast and Color – Contrasting colors draw the eye and are more likely to encourage a click.
Directional Cues – Use abnormal angles to point users through possible objections and then to your call-to-action.
Whitespace – Don’t overwhelm the user with clutter, and give page elements room to breathe.
Urgency and Scarcity – Create a feeling of limited time and limited supply (under the right circumstances)
Try Before You Buy – Let users scrutinize your product before payment to build trust and display confidence in the product.
Social Proof – Demonstrate that others have been pleased with the product to build trust. In particular, when possible, the social proof of people who happen to be just like the user is most effective.

We also like Unbounce’s 36 real life examples of converting landing pages to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t.
At the same time, we agree with Stephen of Conversion Factory and what he’s said at Moz. The largest jumps in your conversion rate really do start with user experience, not design. Start with the question “why aren’t users converting?” When you phrase it that way, it starts to sound bizarre to answer it by saying “because our button is the wrong color.”
Start by thinking like the customer, then start setting up Crazy Egg heat maps to figure out how they behave, employing user testing from places like UserTesting.com, using Survey Monkey to test non-behavioral assumptions, and setting up your split tests. Focus most of your attention on a small number of metrics that truly matter, only bothering with the other metrics if you spot a noteworthy correlation. (Sometimes a dramatic boost in your microconversion rate has no impact on your overall conversion rate.)
You can learn just as much from your big losers as your big winners. A landing page that does especially badly can also tell you how to reverse things and get a big win.
Put simply, find out why users aren’t converting, and fix it. Don’t complicate the process.

User experience creates repeat customers

Experience has trained most marketers to recognize that it’s very difficult to capture a consumer who habitually gives their money to one of your competitors. Habits die hard. It’s so much more important to retain your existing customer base than it is to get new customers. Churn and burn strategies only work for businesses that sell a single kind of product that only needs to be bought once.
If you want to stay in business long term, it’s almost always better to retain those customers, develop a new product, and sell to them again than to focus exclusively on obtaining new customers.
Even if this isn’t your plan, repeat visitors are more likely to keep you in mind and recommend your brand to a friend.
How can you build repeat visits? Well, we keep coming back to tools and communities because of their incredible power. For example, we love what Blue Fountain Media did for Smarties, which grew the Facebook Fan count from 900 to over 40,000 and dramatically boosted their repeat visitor count. They did this by giving users an immersive, interactive, gamified experience.
The potential for link earning here is unavoidable as well. Smarties earned an Interactive Media Award and got featured in SmartBlogs.
NASDAQ, on the other hand, chose to grow its repeat visitor count by building a strong, tight-knit native community (PDF link). They incorporated the ability to rate stocks, personalize content, view articles that meet user-defined criteria, view activity walls, and utilize other social components. They picked up 3,000 registers within 6 weeks and saw an improvement in repeat visitor count.
Think of the sites that you visit more than once and that you navigate to directly without using the search engines. What kinds of sites are these? Odds are, you don’t just visit them, you use them and interact with them. This is where too much emphasis on “content” as it is currently defined by the industry can actually be a bad thing.
Content is static, but tools and communities are not. They are inherently engaging. They take the user out of the passive, hypnotic state that they would get from a television set, and into the active state of mind. The more control the user feels over their own experience, the more memorable that experience becomes.
This is why the most successful sites on the web are all about doing.
Give your users something to do, and repeat visits will inevitably follow.

Earned popularity is always better than manufactured popularity

We mean several things when we say this.
From a pure ranking standpoint, it’s always better to have a genuinely popular site than it is to have a large, marketer-placed link profile. Genuinely popular sites generate natural link profiles and thus remain more or less protected from Google algorithm updates and data refreshes. Manufactured link profiles generally leave patterns, and when they don’t, more work is involved than in attracting a genuinely natural profile.
This goes beyond rankings, though. Earned popularity means that you have a customer base that actually enjoys what you do and is willing to recommend you to a friend. It means that it’s going to take a lot of work for a competitor to snatch your customers away, and it means that customers will feel like they naturally chose to do business with you, which is good for conversions and retention.
In this sense, manufactured popularity in the form of ad purchases and other forms of interruption marketing has disadvantages. It makes consumers feel like they were forced into a purchase, they may feel cheated afterward, and they are less likely to become repeat customers or to recommend your services to others.
This isn’t to say that PPC, display ads, and push marketing in general don’t have advantages of their own. They undoubtedly work faster, and in today’s age of targeted advertising, they are great for capturing hot leads. But these consumers are fickle unless you can also earn their trust. Those profits may be temporary, unless you invest them back into more long term marketing strategies.
I’ll say this. I think this industry is guilty of drawing an artificial line between inbound and outbound tactics, and even though we borrow this terminology, it’s important to keep in mind that all of this lies on a continuum. You can use outbound techniques to earn popularity.
User experience is where trust is earned. It may happen on your site, your social presence, or your email list. The location is not as important as the experience.

Yes, natural links do happen

It’s sort of amazing how often certain segments of the SEO community like to argue on this point. If you live in the fat-head of highly competitive, word-for-word keyword matched search terms, then yes, you’re going to see a lot of unnatural links. And yes, sites that use them are still ranking. We don’t live in a fantasy world where that’s not the reality of the situation.
But if you look at the link graph of the web at large, and most of the real industry thought-leaders, that’s not what you’re going to see.
Just take a look at the link profile of virtually any page on Cracked.com. Cracked talked about 5 scientific reasons a zombie apocalypse could actually happen, it earned them links from 434 domains, and it got mentioned in Smithsonian Magazine. That’s how most links on the web happen.
Or look at the link profile for OMGpop’s Draw Something. They created an app with great user experience, and they picked up links from Gigaom, The Verge, ReadWrite, TechCrunch, The New York Times, and a total of 606 domains. They didn’t email these people and ask for links. They became newsworthy.
We’re not arguing against guest posts or link building outreach. We do it. It works. We’re just saying that when Google says you can attract links by creating a memorable user experience, they’re not blowing smoke.
When you do it right, it also happens to work much faster.

Design and user experience can be measured and tested with provable results

This is a big one for us.
We won’t argue with the fact that link building produces real and measurable results. It is, however, much more difficult to separate the junk and wasted efforts from the things that actually play an important part in the algorithm. We know that Moz domain authority correlates fairly well with rankings, and we know anchor text and page relevancy have some influence, but it’s more or less impossible to separate the folklore from the real ranking factors. You can measure the success of campaigns, but it’s hard to eliminate wasted effort.
Design and user experience, on the other hand, are readily measured and testable at a moment’s notice. You can quickly compare two landing pages and find out which one generates the most conversions, which one is more intuitive to users, which one keeps people on the site longer, and so on.
It’s not that difficult to measure strategies are useless. That’s a very naïve, by the books way to think about marketing. And gradually, over time, you certainly can eliminate some of the wasted efforts from your link building strategy. Intuition can go a long way and I’m not going to argue against it. More innovative and advanced measurement techniques are also available, which is why it’s worth having a statistician onboard if you can afford it.
All that said, hard numbers and proven results are irresistible to clients, and the ability to test and refine strategies quickly and easily without needing to backtrack is priceless.
The way users interact with your site and its design is the same way that influencers are going to interact with it. If you’re optimizing for users, you’re also optimizing for outreach. A page or tool that wows users is going to wow the people who can link to you. It’s much easier to just point an influencer to something amazing than to use hand-waving voodoo to convince them to link.
How’s that for a measurable, testable SEO strategy?

The most successful sites on the web put design and user experience first

If you actually take a look at the highest rankings sites on the web, you’ll note that pretty much all of them (Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, WordPress, Adobe, Blogspot, etc.) are tools and communities that people would keep using if Google completely stripped away their rankings.

Dedicated Servers vs. Cloud Platform

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 01:56:00 +0000

Are you a small or large company wondering if you should move from dedicated servers to the new cloud computing platform? Learn the pros and cons of each technology to see which is a better fit for your company.

Disaster Recovery

Servers

In order to recover data if your server goes down, you will need to reinstall OS, restore the files and databases from backups. This process can take hours, consume IT man time and reduce productivity.

Cloud

Recovering data with the cloud is a bit simpler. You will need to power on the cloud server backup image and your cloud server will be back and running in a matter of minutes.

CPU and Disk Scaling

Servers

To upgrade the CPU or disk space, you will need to shutdown the dedicated server. This will cause significant downtime to your company. You can easily do this on a weekend or at night…that is if your business does not run 24/7.

Cloud

This new technology allows you to add CPU power and disk space without any interruption to your business.

Hardware Upgrade

Servers

To upgrade to a newer server, you will need to reinstall OS and device drivers. This again causes downtime for your company.

Cloud

Cloud makes it a bit easier to upgrade because the same cloud server can run on different hardware.

Backing Up

Servers

Dedicated servers require a initial setup time and scripting. After the initial setup, backing up files is easy.

Cloud

The cloud platform allows you to back up your data entirety with easy in the initial phase and beyond.

At the present time, it really is up to what is best for your company whether you want to adopt the new cloud technology now or upgrade your servers to ones that are newer and faster.

It is still in the early stages where you could opt to get new servers. Just keep in mind that as technology improves and progresses, one day you will have to leave the clunky designated servers behind and change over to the cloud.

Is Convincing Your Boss SEO Very Important ??

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 01:50:00 +0000

Are you having a hard time convincing your boss that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for the company? Well you are not alone.

It seems there are a lot of companies with upper management staff that just do not understand the importance of the internet. Perhaps they grew into their careers when traditional marketing was the only option or they do not know much about online marketing and SEO to make an intelligent decision.

Unfortunately, it is up to you to educate them and sell them on the importance of having a powerful SEO strategy that spells success for the company.

Here are a few tips to get you started.

Visual Aids

Nothing says ‘I did my research’ like charts, infographics, diagrams and analytics. Not to mention some people are visual so spelling it out with words and images is definitely the way to go.

Show the Numbers

Remember that you are asking for a budget, so you will need to show some numbers and analytics to back up your SEO proposal.

Gather as much information as you can about what the competitors are doing and how much they are spending on their SEO strategy. No boss wants to be outdone by their competitor.

Online Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing

Your next step is to get your boss to understand that online marketing is the way to advertise a company this day and age. Sure traditional marketing may still work but companies need to also do online advertising.

More and more consumers are turning to the internet to search for the items they want to purchase. They are also using the internet to communicate to their friends whether they like a brand or product.

Free Tools

So who doesn’t like getting things for free…am I right? Since you are asking for an SEO budget, make sure to point out that some of the SEO efforts will be free. Let your boss know about all the cool and FREE SEO tools that are available such as: Google Keywords tool and Wordtracker.

When you’ve gotten your SEO budget approved, we are here to assist you in developing and implementing a successful SEO strategy.

The Ultimate Guide to Using Twitter for Influencer Outreach

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 01:42:00 +0000

Picture the following scenario. You are interviewing someone for a job and they spout off all sorts of wonderful things about themselves. You call their last boss and get a less than desirable recommendation. Whose words do you believe?

Or how about this. You are at a cocktail party and a stranger comes up to you and starts telling you how cool their marketing software company is. A little while later you are having a conversation with another stranger and they tell you that they recently purchased and are loving a different marketing software company. Whose recommendation are you more likely going to check out?

See the theme here? We humans are wired to believe a recommendation about a person or brand from a third party than from a person or brand themselves.

What does this have to do with influencers? Well, you can look at influencers as the third party people who recommend your brand to an audience who trusts their words. After all, it’s tactless and ineffective to tweet about how cool your own brand is, right? But when someone else does it, it’s okay. In fact, it’s the best form of marketing you can get—word of mouth.

You know you need influencers for a successful strategy and you know that Twitter is one of the channels that amplifies an influencers message making Twitter outreach a logical component of your marketing strategy.

Once you get through this guides and its links, you should be a professional at identifying the right influencers for your brand, locating and engaging with influencers on Twitter and reaching out to them.

Maximize Your Twitter Profile

Before you start reaching out, you need to ensure that you appear seriously and professionally when people read your Twitter profile. Hence, right now is a great time to check in on your own Twitter profile before you do anything else.

Give your bio a good edit to make sure there are no typos. Put in keywords that explain what you would hope to be found for in a Twitter search.

Make sure your bio is concise. Tell exactly what your specialty is. But don’t let it be too dry, it’s okay to throw in a fun fact about yourself!

Don’t bog your profile down with self-promotional links. Honestly, you may just want to link it to either your company or your portfolio.

Give yourself a legitimate location. While listing your location as “funk town” or “earth” may be funny, I am not sure you’ll be taken seriously.

When someone is checking you out on Twitter they are going to look to your most recent tweets so make sure you only tweet useful information. A good strategy before you ever hit “tweet” is to think about whether or not someone viewing your profile for the first time would want to follow you based on that tweet.

Make sure your head shot is professional and of good quality. A blurry headshot screams laziness.

Define the Who

Before you can locate an influencer on Twitter you need to know what they look like. Thus, you need to outline your influencer and give it an image.

First, think about the types of Twitter users your target audience would follow. For example, if I’m promoting a book on parenting toddlers, I’m not going to reach out to Twitter users who actively tweet about raising teens because their audience is there to read their advice and anecdotes about teenagers, not babies.

When you think you’ve got a grasp on what type of person your audience would follow on Twitter then fill out the following three categories so that you can choose influencers who can speak to your ideal audience for you.

Context: A contextual fit is first and foremost the most important factor when defining who to reach out. For example, if you are looking for influencers to tweet about your marketing automation software, you wouldn’t reach out to someone who tweets about fashion all of the time. Even if their bio says marketer. Because their audience is clearly there to read about fashion so you’ll need to refrain—no matter how many followers they have!

Reach: Reach determines how far your influencer’s tweeted words carry. You may want to set a minimum number of followers that your ideal twitter influencer has before putting them on your target or reach outreach list.

Influencer type: When you read a tweeter’s bio, you should get a feel for their personality type. Maybe you are working on a nonprofit campaign and need an activist, or maybe you are advertising a fashion garment and need a trendsetter or perhaps you are enlisting a campaign for a technical piece of software and you need an authority on your niche.

Once you have outlined who your ideal Twitter influencer is, it’s time to locate them.

Tools to Help Your Twitter Searching

Searching for the ideal influencers manually using Twitter’s search function is not very helpful. Because of this there is an exhaustive amount of tools available to aid in your Twitter scouting. Here are some of the more popular ones.

Follower Wonk is probably the most popular. This tool allows you to search for influencers by keywords in their Twitter bios. You can even find Twitter influencers by location if your campaign involved your influencers going to a specific place like a restaurant to review or trade show to tweet about.

Social Bro is getting a lot of buzz and good reviews lately. Among many organization features, it will allow you to search for influencers based on whatever criteria you see fit.

Twellow is a free tool that allows you to search for influencers based on keywords they have in their Twitter bios and will return results with follower metrics for people in categories that you search for.

Commun.it helps you find influencers, cultivate relationships and manage your Twitter outreach. It has a basic free plan and you can upgrade to a more premium plan if you see fit.

Following hashtags will reveal influencers in a targeted genre or niche. If you are looking for influencers who actively twee about fashion then you would follow fashion related hash tags to identify who is talking loudly about fashion.

Use Fakers to ensure genuine followers. The world of social media is transforming communication and marketing in many good ways. But with any good thing there come negativities. We already know that some “influencers” have fake followers so using Fakers can help you run them through the filter of “sincerity.”

Staying Organized

Keeping your outreach campaign organized from the very beginning will provide a strong backbone that will strengthen every step of your campaign. Organization in Twitter outreach primarily revolves around nurturing and maintaining your relationships with your target influencers.

Here are some tools to help keep your organization intact.

Use Twitter Lists, a list that you can put any Twitter user in to, to monitor your relationships with influencers. You can view tweets by list which will allow you to more closely monitor your targets and interact with them.

HootSuite is free if you are only managing one account but upgrading isn’t terribly expensive. HootSuite allows you to stay organized, follow hashtags, schedule tweets, track who is mentioning your brand and more.

Buffer helps you manage your Twitter account and allows you to schedule your tweets. Their free plan is awesome.

Unique Tweets to Grab Attention

Active engagement on Twitter with your targeted influencers will lead to awareness of your brand’s presence which leads to a much better response rate when you reach out. Reaching out to gain a relationship through a single tweet can seem a bit abrasive; sometimes you need to be creative in your tweets to grab your targeted influencers’ attention. Here are some creative ways to do so:

Incorporate a tweet or link to a blog post of theirs (if they have a blog) in your own blog post. You can then tweet at them that you recommended their words in your post and include the link of course! This strokes their ego and puts you on their radar.

Instead of simply retweeting their posts, write your own shout out and tweet their posts with their Twitter handle so that they see it.

Respond to the posts they tweet with a question that sparks a discussion. This has proven to be one of the most effective ways to get an influencer to engage with you.

If you are following certain hash tags, you know some influencers in your space are following those hash tags as well. By tweeting often—but not obnoxiously—using these hash tags will be sure to at least make your influencers aware of your existence.

Be bold and tweet at your targeted influencer a simple introduction or invitation to collaborate.

Don’t Overlook Advocacy

It’s been established that tuning in through your Twitter tool of choice can help you find influencers. Organization and Twitter monitoring can help you get to know your influencers. Creative tweets can help you grab their attention. But one thing that too often gets overlooked is brand advocates aka influencers that are already in place!

By following mentions of your brand, you have probably already seen people tweeting about how much they love your brand. Reward or at least acknowledge these mentions in order to keep them coming. You can do this by tweeting a sincere thank you to sending them a product from you company to offering a commission for those mega advocates.

Advocates are often your loudest influencers because they have aligned themselves with your brand organically. They also are obvious in their passion for your brand which shows in their mentions and makes their own network want to look in to your brand to see what all the fuss is about.

Reaching Out

After you’ve engaged with and stroked the egos of your targeted influencers, it’s time to reach out and be transparent about your goal. If, through your tracking of your targeted influencers, they’ve posted links to their personal blogs or have a link in their Twitter bio, check out the blog and see if you can find their email address. You need more than 140 characters to appropriately reach out. Because any “pitch” or “post engagement contact” should contain the following:

Find the person’s first name and address them by it
Get to the point and state why you are reaching out
Don’t ask them to just do something for you, offer something to them as well
Reference a tweet or post that says why the two of you are a good fit to work together

If you can’t locate an email address, tweet your request. Keep it friendly and to the point. Here are some examples:

Hey @twitter_user, I think we should collaborate, what do you think?
@twitter_user, I love your stuff, can we talk about working together?
@twitter_user how does one perfect fit such as myself go about working with you?

Stay Informed

You’ve already grasped by now how quickly social media and marketing trends change. Here are some resources to keep you informed as well as to stay in the loop concerning Twitter outreach.

In the event that you are new to Twitter and need help setting up your account and grasping the basics before reaching out, check out this guide on Kissmetrics blog.

Social Media Explorer, a resourceful blog will keep you up to date on all the tips, best practices and tools when it comes to all things social media.

Social Media Examiner is a great blog to follow for any marketer who wants to increase their company’s sales and improve their brands image with the help of social media.

Sprout Insights has some great tips on Twitter.

Check out this guide from HubSpot on best practices when using Twitter hashtags.
Do you have any resources, tips or tricks to share on Twitter outreach? If so, let’s get a discussion going in the comments below!

Post Source : E2msolutions.com