Webmaster Blog

Unless you've been completely ignoring the statistics, the number one place to do business in 2014 is the worldwide web. Why? Perhaps because 97% of consumers now use the internet to find goods and services, which is a huge shift from when they'd simply head to a brick-and-mortar store. As you should be aware, the most effective way of tapping into the increasing number of eCommerce shoppers is by getting noticed in search engines --where 93% of all online experiences start-- generating high-quality web content, and creating a human, engaging social media presence. How Does Web Usage Translate to Sales? Increased web usage, as you may expect, has had a direct impact on the growth of eCommerce. Current estimates have American eCommerce levels set to grow by 13.8% until 2017, when sales will eclipse $440 billion. Likewise, mCommerce, digital sales made from a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device, are expected to grow by a whopping 28% to $113 billion by the same year. Clearly, not being online, or at least not being visible online, can be a huge blow to your business, regardless of your size or market. How Do You Tap into Growing eCommerce Revenue? Hearing about the wealth...

Most people today rely on search engines when they need to find important information. Global community meets everyday online as they converse and discuss relevant and irrelevant information. Further, people are hungry to find new products in the market, and also get updates on new means of solving life’s difficulties. Therefore, every business person who does not take advantage of online marketing stands no chance of making huge sales especially in the coming decades.   Why Do Some Web Owners Sell More Than Others? Thousands of websites are built and designed everyday. These websites may be selling the same product as everyone else, and they must know how to deal with the online competition. As such, they must use techniques, tricks and methods to ensure that they sell their products to the clients and keep doing so for a long time. SEO is one trick that helps many businesses to makes sales by ensuring that the sites are visible both by the clients and the search engines. If you are in Australia, it is not enough to call someone to build a website for you. This is because this will not automatically translate to sales of the products and services. As such,...

Blogging has become a crucial part of modern day communication and marketing. However, if you are like many in small and medium sized businesses, you may occasionally find yourself wondering 'What I'm I going to write about today?' Well, if you are having trouble coming up with new, enchanting top ideas this is article marks the end of your worries. We have researched about some 11 tools that can help you come up with original topics to generate content for and post on your blog. Not Able To Think Of Blog Topics That You Can Write On? Try These Awesome Tools AllTop AllTop features a list of posts that have been posted recently from all the top bloggers around the web. It is the brainchild of one Guy Kawasaki - a legendary business adviser cum author. Alltop makes it easy to sample different trending topics from literary every niche on the face of the earth. Some popular niches on this tool are mainly from finance, fashion, hair and marketing. But this does not mean that you cannot still use it to research about new topics featuring in your line of business. With Alltop, you select your niche and are shown posts...

Social media has much to offer, but free services can only get you so far. If you truly want to get the most out of your time and money, consider the following suggestions to plan your social media budget for positive returns in the upcoming year. Marketing Strategy Invest first and foremost in a social media marketing strategy. This strategy may be your biggest investment, especially if you need to pitch the marketing idea further up the corporate chain. With all the different and expanding aspects of social media, your company cannot afford not to have a marketing strategy. Consider spending a portion of your marketing budget on: Social media consultant: This person preferably has a communications background and an in-depth knowledge of social media tools and how to use them effectively. Social media marketing agency: This is an organization of specialists that focus on involving brand advocates and managing online communities and company promotions. Internal social media manager: This person makes sure that your own team understands the company’s social media program. Affiliate Marketing: Pay per click and SEO strategies are aimed at increasing your online effectiveness and boosting your conversion rate. If done right, these can be the game...

The last 12 months has perhaps been the most dramatic in history in the world of SEO. Google has rolled out a whole raft of algorithm changes, most named after cute furry animals such as ‘Penguin’ and ‘Panda’- no doubt the boffins at Google will be looking to name their next algo change ‘Kitten’ or ‘Puppy’. Don’t let the ultra cute animal monikers fool you though; these changes dramatically hit a whole raft of websites, relegating many to the lower divisions of the search engines. There’s no doubt that Google’s algorithm is becoming more and more sophisticated. In the past, many webmasters were able to establish high rankings on the back of dubious linking strategies- these included obviously spammy or ‘black hat’ links. Many other sites established impressive rankings simply through a high volume of anchor text rich links.  And whilst it is certainly true to say that many sites are still flourishing using such tactics, Google is rapidly catching up with them. Nowadays, it’s much harder to fool the ‘Big G’! And as I hope to establish in this post, you really don’t want or need to fool Google anyway! So, what kind of link-building strategy should you employ nowadays...

During the process of running a small business, you have to try out many different strategies to be able to reach your customers where they are. One of the best options to consider in this situation is creating a business website, and then using search engine optimization to get free traffic from search engines. If you are a small business, you might not have a lot to spend on an SEO company. Here are some tips to keep in mind when you're interested in search engine optimization for your business. Create Amazing Content Make Link Bait Start the Buzz Avoid Spam Links Take the Long-Term Approach Create Amazing Content Recent changes to the Google algorithm have made it painfully clear that the only way to rank highly in the search engines is to create amazing content. Both the Panda and the Penguin update showed that the websites with the highest quality content typically prevailed. This means that you can't just write a quick piece of content and throw it up on your site in hopes of ranking highly. Make Link Bait When you are trying to rank highly in the search engines, you have to get a large number of inbound...

Right after the search engine (it was called Archie) appeared online, people began to realize the true power of a search engine to be used worldwide. In 1998 Google appeared on the scene and quickly began winning millions of supporters worldwide. With so many users, many webmasters began to ask themselves what are the ways to get good traffic from those search engines. So this is how it all started. At first many webmasters began to manipulate their website's code and content to take advantage of the growing popularity of Google. At the very beginning, almost everyone used Black Hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing the META tags and titles. With the constant efforts of Google and all other search engines to drive low quality results out of their SERPs, many people developed techniques, which can be used to enhance their websites and comply with the new guidelines of the search engines. That's how White hat SEO started. For many marketeers it is hard to believe that Black Hat SEO actually is really closely related with White Hat, even today. Each technique claimed as spam by the search engines, can be reorganized using quality content and quality websites, to finally...

When you first start learning about SEO and using it to optimize your website, you can feel overwhelmed by all of the different things there are to remember. The art of SEO can be very complicated and even SEO experts are continuously learning and improving their skills. In order to make starting out a little bit easier, focus on a few of the most crucial aspects of SEO first so that the learning curve doesn’t seem so steep. Asking yourself the following questions will ensure that your website has a good start towards being optimized and you will be able to build on these foundations later: If Your Website Accessible? You can have the best SEO in the world, but if search engines are having trouble seeing your content because of errors with your code then all of your hard SEO work is going to waste. They will not be able to crawl your website and your pages will not be indexed or ranked. If you are not sure how to properly code your website, you should seek the help of a professional who can ensure that everything is done correctly. Is Your Page Title Optimized? If the keyword that you...

If you just start a site, it’s really hard to make it noticeable and valuable both for the user and search engines. In this post, I’ll just give you a list of the things that you need to do, in order to make it big with your site :). Take a look at link building diversity infographic. Forums You can create profiles on the forums, which are related to the topic of your blog. You need to participate in the forums and later on you’ll be able to put a link back to your site both from your profile page and from your forum signature. Paid reviews Some bloggers accept offers on writing a review about your service, product or site. You can find such people on some SEO forums. Plus, there are even online services (like separate sites) that provide this sort of services. Free Blogging platforms You may want to create like 20 sites on such platforms (like Wordpress.com, Blogger, Tumblr and the like). Once created, you’ll be able to run separate sites there and make those sites relevant so that links from them help you main site. Article submission You basically need to write articles and submit them...

Don’t Shoot Yourself In The Foot Many businesses put a great deal of time and money into making a brand new shiny website and then sit back waiting for the sales to come flooding in. Sadly it’s not quite as easy as all that, even if your website looks great there could still be a few aspects that are stopping it from being successful within Google and other search engines. So what are these factors that are stopping your website from cementing a Google top spot and turning your business into an all-conquering force of nature? Well at least generating some sales, but I like to aim high. Onsite Advertising When you own a website it can be very tempting to sell advertising space, it’s money for doing nothing right? Well it may seem pretty attractive but your side could end up suffering because of it. Advertising within a website is widely considered to be one of the factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking a site within its search engine. If you website has lots of adverts all over the page making it hard to concentrate on your own content then  you can be pretty sure that this will...

This is a true story told to LatPro.com, the worldwide leader in providing online employment resources for Hispanic and bilingual professionals since 1997. With 95 of the Fortune 100 companies using its service, LatPro is the largest diversity employment site in the U.S. and the most complete personal career advancement service for Latino and bilingual professionals. Visit to find careers in your field specifically tailored for Hispanic and bilingual professionals like yourself.   My job title is SEO Specialist and I work in a variety of industries as I am self-employed. The main industry I work in would be considered affiliate marketing as I operate several of my own web properties and generate revenue through affiliate marketing programs. I have worked in this field for three years now. When I describe what I do to others I explain that I get a cut of the revenue generated by sales from my websites. I have to explain what an affiliate program is first so that people can understand how I make money from my websites. Once they understand affiliate marketing, it is easy to explain to them what search engine optimization is and how that drives the revenue I create. On a...

Quality backlinks, "quality" being the operative word here, IS more important to Google than they've ever been. That's because Google's Panda update has been part of the North American Internet scene for more than eight months. Clever marketers are carefully making deals with smart webmasters offering up quality articles that include a couple of backlinks to their website. These backlinks also include cleverly crafted anchor text. I have been teaching SEO and anchor text strategies for over a decade. I have found for many students it's a difficult concept to grasp. I found that the backlinking jargon is the main culprit. If you have troubles in this area or are new to the subject I'll try to provide clarity. First, bear with me while I tell you a quick anecdote. A Quick Way to Kill Your Rankings I recently was called by someone in the SEO field asking if I could help him guide one of his clients in the right direction. His client's page had plummeted from page 3 to page 30 and the poor guy was scratching his head and trying to figure out where he had gone wrong. It quickly came out that what he was doing was...

As search engine optimization is becoming more and more popular nowadays, the number of people who would like to get in that business is growing as well. So if you are one of those people and you would like to start your own SEO company, there are some things you need to know. There are two really important aspects when finding clients. Let's say you have already set up a meeting with people who would like to learn more about your service and eventually use them. How do you reel them in? The Sales Pitch The first step of this process is of course the sales pitch. What makes your services valuable? What makes them special? Why the client needs them? In order to convince a client that SEO is worth the investment you should use various strategies. A typical one is taking the main keywords that describe the client's business best and prepare an interactive chart that shows how much traffic exactly the client will receive after reaching the first place of the search engine page results. All this traffic is related to the client's type of business which increase the chance of attracting new customers. You should have around...

A discussion on SEO never ends without a mention of creating unique quality content. While I wouldn’t dare to differ from this basic fact, I’d like to differ on popular notions of quality content.  For me quality content is content that gives me what I’m looking for. Ask any guy offering professional SEO services, and he’ll tell you that good content is one that helps him attract links. But we’re talking of content in terms of the average searcher. For instance, if I was looking for information on Hailey’s comet to help my daughter with her science project, the last thing that I want is high brow information that discusses about the subject in detail. I need something that explains in simple language about the comet. Now that’s what SEO content is all about! To give people what they want and are looking for. Easier said than done, you’d say. But the trick here is to think about words that a user is likely to type when looking for an answer for his question and then construct an article around these words. This includes including these words (keywords) and presenting it in a manner that’s easily comprehended by the targeted reader....

The Benefits of Having SEO and PPC Working Together Many businesses conduct one-sided SEO and isolated ad campaigns because they feel as though they need to devote their attention entirely to either pay per click ads or search engine optimization. What these businesses fail to realize is that SEO and PPC are not mutually exclusive. What is more, they work better when used together. Is It Always Right To Share? Some businesses are against sharing keywords between their SEO and PPC campaigns; the logic being that if a visitor clicks on a paid link that already ranks highly on the organic search, the company essentially loses money it did not need to spend. Although this is a valid concern for growing businesses who would like to minimize their budget, larger enterprises know that dominating both, organic and paid, results increases site traffic and indicates your company as an established presence. Using Your PPC To Inform Your SEO And Vice VersaBy running SEO and PPC campaigns simultaneously, you can generate data to improve and fine-tune both your projects. Pay per click data usually rolls in much quicker than organic data. Using this information, you can tailor your page content, title tags, and...