Monthly Archives: January 2013

SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of January 2013

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The first month of what promises to be a year of change in the SEO industry is drawing to a close. As usual, we have for you the content that we have found most interesting, informative, and entertaining during January.

The debate over the value of content marketing seems to be shifting away from straightforward cheerleading or naysaying towards a more nuanced dialogue. We expect that continue as the year progresses, and of course, we’ll continue to share with you the high-points in the inbound marketing landscape.

SEO

 

Why Executives Should Care About SEO, and How You Can Help Them

Why Executives Should Care About SEO, and How You Can Help Them

When I began my career in search marketing, organic search was often times a last minute consideration. It was more of the rule than the exception to have SEO brought in after content had been created and/or after a website had already been developed. And many times, once the cost of reverse engineering the damage was identified, stakeholders in … Continue reading →

Java Is A Security Risk: Here’s How To Deactivate It

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(image:flickr/StudioRedChile)

The Problem

For those who aren’t aware, Java is a programming language that requires a piece of software called the Java Runtime Environment to be installed on machines that run Java code. Many people use Java to create applications that run in browsers, and to do so browsers need to have a plugin installed.

Unfortunately, over recent months there have been numerous security problems discovered in Java, some of which will allow malicious third parties to infect machines running Java with malware via the browser.

Java’s owners, Oracle, have been slow to issue patches that will fix the security vulnerabilities, and new zero-day exploits are being discovered with alarming frequency. Continue reading →

SEO Is Not A One Shot Process

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(image:flickr/weegeebored)

There exists a misconception among many business owners that SEO is a process that once done is done forever. This can lead businesses to fail to extract the maximum benefit from their online presence. If, in fact, search engine optimization should properly be thought of as a continuing process of refinement and adjustment, businesses may be missing out to competitors who have a more aggressive and nuanced approach.

We’re going to take a look at three major reasons why business owners should consider SEO as an ongoing part of their marketing and promotion.

First we should define our terms. In this article we are conceiving of SEO as not just optimizing for keywords and traditional link building. Since the Panda and Penguin updates, high-quality content has become the bedrock of effective SEO strategy. SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. Continue reading →

What Can Google Wallet For Web Content Do For Bloggers

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Image:Flickr/dyobmit

Monetizing can be a bit of a puzzler for bloggers. For those who blog for its own sake rather than for SEO or content marketing purposes, turning posts into money generally relies on an advertising model.

Advertising is how most commercially viable blogs fund themselves. Using AdSense, or some other third party advertising provider, they display advertising and hope to get a sufficient amount of clicks to generate a decent revenue.

Unfortunately click-through rates are pretty low, often as few as 1 in a 1000 visitors click, which means that even a very popular blog with visitors in the hundreds of thousands can fail to make a livable income from their work. Continue reading →

Backing Up Your WordPress Site To Amazon

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(Image: Adrian Limani)

There’s nothing more heartbreaking for a website owner than having put dozens or hundreds of hours of work into perfecting their WordPress site, only to have it trashed by hackers, hardware failure, or a simple administrative mistake.

WordPress is enormously popular, with good reason, but as with any complex software it’s susceptible to malicious individuals and user errors. Your WordPress database and other assets should always be backed up so that, in the event of a catastrophe, you can simply reinstall, import your data, and be back where you were before disaster struck.

Most decent hosting companies will keep a backup for you, but as the saying goes, if your data doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist at all. Having a backup available that you fully control can be very useful.

There are many services and extensions that will help you with backing-up, but we’re going to take a look at how to back up to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Continue reading →

SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media: The Best Of December 2012

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As 2012 rolled to a close, the SEO and content marketing world was inundated with predictions and prognostications of what is to come in 2013. This month’s content curation round-up is going to include a lot of crystal ball gazing. It’ll be interesting to come back here in a year’s time and see who was right, who was wrong, and who was so wrong we can point and laugh at them.

SEO and Content Marketing

Essential Tools for SEO

During this session we’ve had some rather technical articles about SEO, so it’s time for a short breather. We’ll do this by taking a look at some of the tools that are useful for search engine optimization.

7 Ways to Resuscitate a Boring Links Post


I can’t tell you how many links posts I’ve seen that are more boring than watching paint dry. More often than not they seem like they’re just a lazy blogger’s solution for getting a post out there quickly so they can take the day off. They put 10 or so links on a page and call it a day. But a links post can actually be quite valuable when done properly because they’re bookmarkable content.

5 Trends Shaping SEO & Content Marketing in 2013

The Mayan calendar ended this month. Contrary to the “predictions,” it wasn’t the end of the world, just the end of Mayan content. To avoid having your company come up short on content, let’s take a quick look at the history of web content and trends for 2013.

Why Buying Backlinks Is Bad for SEO

In this special feature of ‘Ask Entrepreneur,’ Facebook fan Cake Apps asks: What about buying high PR backlinks, will it hurt the SEO? How will Google know that I am paying? This is an easy question to answer: Don’t buy links. Continue reading →