Category Archives: SEO

The Death of Guest Blogging?

If you run a website that publishes content there is a high change that you have received an email like this before:
Guest-Blogging-Tombstone

I would like to express my interest pleasantly to become a part of your eminent platform as a Guest Blogger. I am confident about that you will definitely like the following Guest blogs with exclusive title/topic. Currently, all these posts have become the most liveliest conversions among the readers. The blogs offered are

  • 100% original
  • Well written
  • Relevant to your audience and
  • Exclusive to you

I’m sure that you will love to read my proffered featured blogs & you would emphatically admire my quality-rich, precise, keyword-oriented & search engine friendly write-ups on different topics on your website. The blogs, offered by me for your website, are absolutely free of cost. And as rewards, I just would like to gain backlinks for www.myclientsdomain.com from your end.

Please Note: Hopefully, I will get your reply as early as possible (expected: “within 3 days”), else my forwarded content will be sent for publishing on the other websites.

Guest blogging, as it’s called, in exchange for a back link used to be one of the most popular way to get links after Google started to pay attention what kind of links the websites were getting, instead of just counting the number of the links, or purely relying on the Pagerank of the linking page.

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Online Marketing Recap of 2013 and Takeout for 2014

Marketing-Term-CloudThe year 2013 witnessed a number of course changes in online marketing. Along Search with Google algorithm updates, the changing social media features and the number of new channels growing rapidly, multiple screen becoming the trend word, the online marketing stage is set to keep changing faster and faster. As a marketer it’s a confusing field to be working in, but at the same time it offers vast number of opportunities.

Here’s a brief recap of 2013 and some takeout for 2014.

Google Search

In 2013 Google launched some major algorithm updates such as the Panda, Penguin 2.0 and Hummingbird. Panda focused on penalizing weak content sites, such as “content farms” and “scraper sites”, and lifted up those with regular original content. Penguin 2.0 as it’s predecessors was aiming to hit hard on web spam and highlighted even further website authority. With a new letter started algorithm – Hummingbird – Google is now able to recognize full-question searches instead of just parsing specific keywords, and are able to appropriately rank answers to these long-tail question searches. If that wasn’t enough Google announced September that all keyword data would encrypted, not only logged in user data. Although there are still ways to gauge keyword data, it’s not as easy as it used to be.

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Headlines matter (except this one, it sucks)

economic-headlines

Article headline matters. Not just for the obvious reasons – getting attention, shock the reader etc. – but also from search engine ranking point of view. Creating catching headlines has been the art of newspaper editors since day one, but the change from offline to online has put even more pressure on creating article headlines. In some ways it has gotten more difficult. Not only does it have to convert the reader, but it also has to help the article to rise as high as possible for wanted keywords in search rankings (of course there are other factors that effect this too).

Social media has adds some extra spices to the soup as well. A good headline gets a lot more attraction for an article and can gain a lot of shares, retweets etc. (the content obviously plays a role as well…), which can be a major traffic driver. And speaking of social media, now that we have tackled the reader and search engines, twitter adds another challenge: 160 character limit. In case the original header is longer, might be wise to think of a shortened version for twitter as well.

I started to learn the importance of an article headline, when I first started working on SEO back in Agoda days, but it was only when I started writing, I realized how difficult it actually was to create a good headline.

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