Free Tools vs. Paid Tools – When Should You Pony up the Big Bucks?

Ryan Burglehaus, May 20, 2013

The SEO world we work and play in has no shortage of available tools promising everything from page one results to doing your laundry for you and ensuring bags of cash will show up on your doorstep. All as a result of using “just this one” SEO tool. Sometimes the pitch pages get to the point of being pretty ridiculous.

Having spent more money and time trying SEO tools than I care to admit, I’ve started putting new tools I’m considering adopting through a more careful screening process. Sure I’ll try a tool here and there on a whim, but ones that I consider part of my SEO arsenal, I want to make sure live up to some sort of standard beyond just the stated promises.
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Is Your SEO Ready for Penguin 2.0?

Nick Stamoulis, May 15, 2013

Matt Cutts confirmed it on May 10^th—Google Penguin 2.0 is coming in the next few weeks. In case you’ve been living under a rock this past year, or are brand new to the SEO game, Penguin was Google’s webspam update last year that went after sites with low quality link profiles and changed the world of SEO for good. Although the signs had been pointing that it was going that way for some time, the Penguin update made it official: the number of links a site has in its link profile is no longer more important than the quality of those links. Do you have 100 valuable links from trusted, authoritative sources or 1,000 links from blog networks? If you’re link profile looks more like option B you’re out of luck—Google actually deindexed those blog networks (among other things) and a lot of sites got hit hard for past link building activities. Even if your site was directly penalized from the update, if enough site in your link profile where whacked your SEO could have taken an indirect hit.
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Backlinks: To Disavow or Not to Disavow? Anyone?

Pat Marcello, May 14, 2013

With all the Panda and Penguin updates that ran last year, some webmasters are still scratching their heads wondering if they backlinks they have are helping or hurting them in organic search. Sometimes, the problem didn’t come from anything the webmaster did, but from other sites linking to them without their knowledge.

Remember all the paranoia about UpDowner last year, which indexed and linked back to nearly every page on a site, multiple times even? Yeah, sure. I was paranoid, too. I had like 6,600 links pointing back from that site, and wondered if those weren’t why I lost traffic after the update on May 26, 2012.
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The Why and How of SEO Site Audits

Thom Craver, May 9, 2013

Site audits are a great way to determine how your site is faring in the search engines. But when should you audit your site? And how do you get started? What kinds of situations should you look for? Essentially, the purpose of a site audit is to discover all the items that may be blocking a search engine spider from crawling and indexing your site. These include a variety of technical on-page factors, server side elements like redirects and even your content itself. Once you’ve identified any issues, you must then list actions that must be taken to remedy them. Similar to analytics, discovering what’s wrong is only one part of the story, and you must also take action.
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How to Drive Traffic & Generate Leads with Pinterest

Gloria Rand, May 8, 2013

Pinterest made great strides in 2012 – boasting the largest increase in unique visitors and time spent on-site over any other social network. And it’s now the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide – sending more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ combined.

If you’d like to start leveraging the power of this social networking site for your business, here are a few tips on how you can drive traffic to your site, and generate leads:

1. Create boards – When you first get started on Pinterest, spend some time setting up a few basic boards to give your followers a clue about what your business is all about. Don’t be afraid to be creative with the board titles either. A catchy title can help grab someone’s attention. Here are a few boards to get started with:
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Inbound Marketing, Agency-Side

Ruth Burr, May 6, 2013

It can be difficult to do SEO for a client when you’re working at an agency. Not being on-site can make SEO feel like an afterthought, and getting buy-in and staying in the loop are always challenges.

In the modern world of online marketing, agency SEO becomes especially hard since in many ways, everything that happens with a website affects SEO. Building a holistic brand presence – one that’s larger than just search results – is key to tapping in to the way users search now. It’s time for marketers to start thinking beyond the query to the search session.
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User Generated Content: Comments

Pat Marcello, April 30, 2013

Last week, the search world was abuzz with the idea that Mozilla had been targeted by Google. They had been smacked with a manual penalty for UGC or User Generated Content. UGC is any content that is created or uploaded to a website by the general public. Some examples are YouTube, comments, article directories, etc.

What Google had its knickers in a twist about was the fact that one page on their site had an overwhelming number of spam comments. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web Spam team said that there was 12M of spam from 21,169 different comments. So, Google penalized that one page on Mozilla’s more than 22 million pages of content. It was really no big deal for Mozilla, but it seems that everyone loves it when one of the big daddy sites is busted. I don’t get that, but there you are.
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Ecommerce Startup Marketing 101: How to Build Your Site, Drive Cheap Traffic, and Watch the Sales Come In

Adam de Jong, April 29, 2013

So you thought it was going to be easy to build that drop shipping website, didn’t you? All you had to do was get a seller’s license, sign up with a few a wholesale distributors, customize a website template and do a little SEO and PPC. Certainly your site was going to start ranking, your Adwords campaign was going to drive traffic.

But several months go by, and you’re still waiting for the flat line of revenue to turn into that hockey-stick growth and show a positive return on investment.

Unfortunately, this is a common tale for so many e-tailers. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men… It turns out that an ecommerce business is much tougher than it looks. Sure, you can sign up with the distributors and wait for the passive income to roll in. But driving traffic is pretty damn difficult. And driving traffic that converts isn’t so simple, either.

But here’s the good news: you were right about ecommerce; it’s a great mode, if done right. But you must create a systematic approach to Internet marketing to build a successful business.
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SEO Archetypes with Powered by Search

Troy Boileau, April 25, 2013

When I started as an SEO I looked around for a role model. I wanted to find the most successful digital marketer and explore their methods and thoughts until I had a good enough grasp to venture off on my own.

Instead of finding one, I found many, all of whom had fantastically different ideas of what was the best way to do online marketing. Some used complicated systems on each client, some revelled in creating incredible content experiences for consumers and industry partners, some had their heads stuck in spreadsheets and came out with miraculous solutions. Some were dreamers or had a knack for leveraging whatever was available. Some made others stand out, work together and find great fulfillment in their work.

I broke these down into specific ideals and named them accordingly. I explored them and defined them. I was having so much fun putting them together that I wanted to share them with my team, and that created such a fun atmosphere that I wanted to share them with my other friends in SEO.
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Coming up: Promodo’s SemCamp Seminar in Kiev!

Kerin Foster, April 24, 2013

On the 11th of May in Kiev, Ukraine, Promodo will host a practical seminar on the trending issues of SEO and online marketing within the Western markets.

• 1 day
• 6 speakers
• 9 presentations
• 3 hours of live communication
• 150 attendees
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