What Are SEO Contests And How To Rank Higher In SEO Contests

The keyword is totally unique in the eyes of the search engines, and there are strong rules guiding these contests.

Below are some of the general important rules of seo contests;

1. No black hat search engine optimization is allowed

2. No one from the official announcement website can participate in this contest.

3. No Spamming of keywords and website is allowed

4. No cloaking or keyword stuffing is allowed

These contests generally are started with a time frame given to show the results in search engine results pages.

These are some of the general tips to rank better for the contest.

1. Try to get a older domain name rather than a new one, this is because there is a myth that search engines rank old domains better. They love old domains, try them out and see the result.

2. Never try to add the contest keyword more than 10 times to your contest webpage because this will result in keyword stuffing.

3. Add meta tags to your contest page which may include title, keywords, description and robots tag.

4. Add H1 , H2, and H3 tags correctly with the keyword in the first H1 tag.

5. Always add unique content to your webpage, which is totally fresh and rich, as search engines like fresh content.

6. After the on page seo is completed , start doing link building by exchanging links with relevant websites.

7. Add a sitemap to your website and continue with the link building.

If these seo page ranking steps are done correctly, you can make sure that your webpage tops the search engine result pages in no time.

Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/30121/what-are-seo-contests-and-how-to-rank-better-in-seo-contests/

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How To Get The Most Seo And Web Traffic Benefits From Blogging

The best way to get people and search engines (which means more people) to your website is by getting relevant inbound links. If you have some spiffy new gimmick on your website this may be easy as everyone will be linking to you.

However, with a basic, solid web page the process maybe much more difficult and slower. How do you get people to link to you?

The best way is to empty your wallet! Ok, just kidding, but first we will learn how easy that is.

For example there is a pay for blogging service that will cost you at least $5 per blog post (ie: per link) and maybe $25 or more. Now that will eat up your budget, and fast. These paid blog links don’t come with any guarantee. You might get lots of visitors and you might not get any at all.

Pay per click is another great option for spending all your money. This will bring you visitors for sure and you’ll know how much each one costs. That’s it. There is no long term benefit. The ads show for only as long as you pay for them. When your money isn’t on the table, you don’t exist!

You can buy links all over the place and again this may end up costing you a pretty penny, you may or may not get suitable results but when you stop paying the results (good or bad) stop. You gain nothing for the future.

Now blogs are a great way to get visitors and develop a long term return. Blog posts tend to stick around for a long time. The trick here is to get people to blog about your website without forking over a bundle of your hard earned cash.

A great idea is to become a guest blogger. This would be where you write blog posts for other people’s blogs. Read: your links on someone else’s website for free!

This puts you in the drivers seat for a couple of reasons. First you have control over exactly what is said. Secondly, if you do a good job you may have the opportunity to make regular blog posts. That will build an audience on the blogs for your writing and turn into more and higher quality traffic for your website.

The key to being a great guest blogger is to write short (3 to 6 or so paragraph) posts that are interesting, informative, humorous and relevant to the topic of the blog (and your website). Of course they should have a link to your website. Don’t over do the linking. Don’t make it sound like an advertisement or something you just cut and pasted from your website.

A few minutes to compose a couple of well thought out paragraphs could do wonders for your web traffic. Keep looking for guest blogging opportunities and never use the same post for more than one blog. One post could bring a lifetime of traffic.

This may well be your most effective way to developing quality web traffic and enhancing your SEO for your website(s).

Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/30136/how-to-get-the-most-seo-and-web-traffic-benefits-from-blogging/

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5 Tips You Should Be Leveraging for Event-Based Content Creation

Creating event-based content can be tricky. The room is full of extremely smart people. And they’re all talking. Loudly. You find a chair in front between two people you don’t know, but who smile and offer a handshake and a name. Looking around, everyone is working on a laptop. Or a smartphone. Or both.

A hush falls over the crowd. A speaker stands up at the microphone, offers an introduction, and launches into a mind-blowing presentation full of statistics, facts, tips and tools. There are dozens of keys being typed, tweets being sent, and people whispering.

And you have to make sure you catch it all.

Event-based content creation isn’t always the easiest thing to tackle, but it’s worth learning. Liveblogging is a great way to interact with people who are participating in the same event, communicate information to coworkers, share wisdom with your subscribers, and learn things that can take your digital marketing efforts to another level. (Not to mention the increased visibility, social shares, and traffic this type of content can bring your brand).

There are certain things you can do to prepare for creating compelling, shareable content during an event (when we learn how to get speakers to speak slower, or how to get all attendees to put their phones on silent, we’ll share those, too). Here are 5 liveblogging tactics you can use at your next event:

1) Choose the Interesting, the Useful, and the Relevant
Can you imagine trying to liveblog, a webinar or presentation from the teacher in Ferris Bueller (Bueller

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3 Tools to Help You Find Influencers in Social

Influencers are influential. They have a significant following on their social channels and are so knowledgeable about a topic that people not only like to consume their content, but share it. Engaging an influencer and being promoted by them is a great way for your brand to increase visibility, grow a following, and rank in search. Sounds simple right? It’s actually something many brands struggle with.

There are over 500 million registered Twitter accounts, 300 million active monthly Google

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What Do You Get With A Social Media Audit?

In Optimize, I include guidelines for doing a number of different audits to establish a basis for determining the gap between a company’s current situation and where they need to be in order to succeed.

One of those audits is a type that has gained a tremendous amount of popularity given the dramatic increase in attention and budget towards the area. Of course I’m talking about a Social Media Audit.

Why do an audit? If you don’t know where you’re starting from, a lot of time and resources can be wasted improving things that don’t need it and neglecting things that really need your attention.

Who should do an audit? Companies that are new to social media marketing, companies that have been unorganized and uncoordinated in their social media marketing, companies that have used an outside agency and are pulling social media inside (or vice versa), or companies that have matured in their social media marketing and need to jump ahead a few steps.

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Seo Guidelines Search Engine Marketing

SEO guidelines also known as Search Engine Optimization set the rules used by major search engines like GOOGLE, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. to judge whether or not to include a website in their search engine results. Believe it or not , having your website included in Google results is not part of the Bill of Rights under the constitution. There are Search Engine Marketing guidelines that govern which websites are included and those excluded from their results.

SEO Guidelines – Thou Shall…

Write your pages for people, not for search engines. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? We have all gone to web pages with garbage content written to deceive search engines for top rankings. When discovered (and they will be discovered), these websites are banned. Other SEO guidelines prohibit offering different content to search engines than your visitors. Called “”cloaking”, it’s unethical and another trick to avoid for high search engine rankings. Instead, focus on providing useful content your visitors are seeking and update your site frequently with fresh content.

SEO guidelines – Thou Shall Not…

Here are some important search engine optimization methods to avoid when using SEO methods on your website. These are unethical techniques that may lead to having your websites removed from the Google index. OUCH!!! That hurts! Once banned, your site will not appear in GOOGLE results or partner sites.

SEO guidelines clearly ban link farms that create multiple links to your site to raise your page rank by unethical means. Sooner or later your site will be caught and penalized for breaking SEO guidelines. In particular, avoid links to web spammers and software that auto submits your pages to search engines.

SEO guidelines – Search Engine Optimization

Create web pages free of hidden texts and links seen only by the search engines. Instead, use search engine marketing strategies without redirects to other sites. Instead of garbage content, search engine optimization promotes useful reader content. Do you like to read the same thing again… read the same thing again… read the same thing again… neither does the search engine. After all, search engines are people too!

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How to Promote Your Business Online

   by Aaron Smithin Search Engines / SE Optimization    (submitted 2013-12-19)
There was a time when advertising stopped at the television. The only way to spread the word was either to physically spread the word, run an ad in the Sunday Times and next month's edition of Elle, or resort to television ads, which could be hit or miss. Those days are a blurred part of the past; today, the internet is the centre and focus of promotion and marketing. With a computer becoming as common as a microwave, people of every age have access to the internet and (more or less) know how to use it. That automatically drove the web up the list to become the primary method of marketing and promotion, and naturally, businesses based on marketing and promotion experienced a shift in focus from print ads to online ones. This opened up new chapters of marketing to optimize and maximize its efficiency.
The first sites to become more popular were search engines - especially Google. The nature of searching on Google and other search engines was and continues to be based on the same model - enter the search and see relevant results. Marketing agencies capitalized on this and used what is now called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The earlier, or higher up, in the results page that a specific website is shown, the more likely it is to be clicked on, and the more traffic that site will generate. More traffic directly translates to more revenue! By considering how search engines work, the actual search terms, and other specifics, SEO can drastically improve a business' online presence.
Similarly, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is also search engine related. In essence, advertisers pay a site to publish their ads and pay the publisher when the ad is clicked. Advertisers bid on keywords and phrases relevant to their target market, or hosting sites charge a fixed price per click. The price paid to display these ads when related search terms are entered is generally drastically offset by the amount of traffic that these ads are capable of generating.
One assumes that the results from these marketing methods would be difficult to track. To the contrary, the most common and effective method of doing so is by generating a conversion rate report, or a statistics report that shows the number of visitors that are converted to customers - hence the name conversion rate report.
The bottom line is that promotion has changed over the years. In order to promote your business online, it is necessary to go beneath the surface and make use of methods such as SEO and PPC. That's something that most businesses can't handle on their own, without spreading their time very thin. This is where Executive Web Club comes in.
About the Author

Hope this article sheds some light on promoting businesses online. To know more about online marketing and search engine optimization techniques click on the link below. http://www.executivewebclub.com

Use and distribution of this article is subject to our Publisher Guidelines
whereby the original author's information and copyright must be included.
Aaron Smith

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Why A Transition From Optimizing for Search Engines to Optimizing for Customers is Essential

Judging by the daily new business inquiries we get every day, there’s a groundswell of companies that have become frustrated at the lack of cause and effect data from their SEO programs.

Sure, there are workarounds for things like “not provided” keywords, but the lack of information and uncertainty about what Google will take away next is causing many marketers to diversify into other owned, earned and organic areas: social media, content marketing, online public relations, and certainly into online advertising.

At the same time, as SEO practitioners have matured as marketers, the shift from keywords as the driver for content optimization and creation have been displaced by a focus on answering customer questions along the sales cycle.

Ironically, this emphasis on solving for the customer and architecting content according to satisfying customer information is in alignment with Google’s Hummingbird update – i.e. the move away from “keyword SEO” to creating useful, customer-centric content that answers their questions is actually good for SEO.

But so many marketers have relied upon and benefitted from traditional SEO tactics and reporting, that they have a hard time letting go. Their internal marketing performance reporting is often keyword driven and a ridiculous number of companies cannot answer the question: “What is the profile of the target customer you are optimizing for?”. What does the sales cycle look like? What topics are important during the customer journey?

Think about that.

There are numerous companies that have top tier writers creating keyword optimized content with no clear identification of who the content is for, or what the specific intended outcome is. Or where one content object fits with other content and how they are connected to the customer experience.

What legacy SEO focused marketers often care about is rankings, organic referred traffic, and page views with trend lines that go up and to the right. There’s not a lot of focus on customer experience, customer journey or differentiation amongst segments.

Even if marketers were convinced that keyword lists and ranking reports are no longer the primary way (yet still useful in some ways) to manage a website marketing program, they aren’t set up to move to something else other than various online advertising options.

I’m sure more than a few brand marketers reading this can relate to situations where management wants tactics to affect certain big picture measurables like “rankings and traffic” that are not necessarily tied to other important metrics like increased orders, sales, revenue, customers added, sales cycle duration, and cost of marketing/sale. It’s the old KPIs vs. business outcomes thing.

So how can you move from that all-SEO program and mindset to a customer focused online marketing program?  How can you put SEO in it’s place within the marketing mix without discrediting yourself and past advice? What’s the go forward and how can you continue to provide value with roots in SEO but with an emphasis on customer targeting across the sales cycle?

Fundamentally, it comes down to cracking the nut that is your target customer and how solving information problems for them in a way that leads to achieving business goals – leads, revenue, profitability, referrals, lower marketing costs, retention and advocacy. Optimize covers this in depth. That’s not a book pitch, it’s the truth.

Every week I know that companies are contacting their SEOs and saying, “Hey, we love the work you’re doing, but we’re shifting our focus. What else can you do for us?” When that happens, you’re up to bat, what are you going to do?

Are you going to start rambling on about algorithm changes? Or maybe say that social media is the new SEO? Better yet, talk about how content marketing is the new SEO!

Content Marketing is NOT the “new SEO”

My challenge to companies still focused on keyword vs. customer driven online marketing is to take a step back and maintain perspective on where SEO fits in the marketing mix. Content is the reason search engines were created, so broaden your perspective and think about answering the why, for who and what outcomes are expected with content. Understand who the target audience is and why they buy. See the relevant topics and stories you could tell in your content and let that drive creation, optimization, amplification and engagement.

Some marketers will say, “We don’t have people who know how to do that.”. 

The good news is that agencies like ours that integrate multiple marketing disciplines have been helping companies with these discussions and transitions for years. You may not know this, but our company roots are an integration of public relations, direct marketing and SEO – since 2001. That long standing “SEO plus” approach has helped keep SEO in perspective.  After all, SEO is just marketing.

The last thing you need, is to pay a SEO consultant for advice only to later find out the effect of that advice (quantity, not quality content, overly aggressive links) is now working against you. Next you’ll be asked to pay to undo what you paid to have implemented in the first place. Whether that comes as a result of SEO hucksterism or brand greed, it’s expensive and potentially deadly. And it’s completely avoidable.

Not all SEO consultants put their clients at risk like this. Not by a long shot.

The reason to transition from keywords to customer optimization isn’t just to avoid risky SEO tactics. The drive to make the transition should be a clear picture of how your company can better serve your customers.

Start speaking customer and focus on content that helps your brand become  the best answer for customers, where ever they may be: search, social, email, publications, mobile.

More important than getting into the weeds of how to make the transition is acknowledging that the change needs to be made. Then having the confidence that what you evolve to is something that actually works – for customers, for your business and especially for you in your role as an agency or a brand marketer.

Has your company made a transition from old school SEO tactics to a more customer focused, integrated marketing approach? Do you ever feel stuck with SEO focused reporting and want something more strategic?

View the Original article

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Mobile Content Marketing With Apps: Pros, Cons, Examples and Best Practices

Early adopters of mobile technology in their digital marketing mix have been experiencing great results by providing convenient methods for customers and prospects to find, consume and act on brand information. Mobile commerce success is here too: According to IBM, 25.8% of total online sales for Thanksgiving, and 21.8% for Black Friday were via mobile.

As companies discover innovative uses of mobile technology for marketing and communications, they can help differentiate their services, reinforce corporate culture, and build long-term customer loyalty.

With growing demand as a content delivery and customer experience channel, mobile applications represent a substantial digital and content marketing opportunity for brands. Mobile is now 28% of all web traffic and the smart money is on those companies and organizations that can attract, engage and convert through the creative content opportunities mobile apps provide.

If there were ever a time to double down on mobile apps as a content marketing tactic, it would be now.

Adopting Mobile Apps as Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

As the Black Friday stats above prove, online spending is expected to rise for the fourth straight holiday season. Retail trends and the latest research leads eMarketer to believe that 72 million people in the U.S. will make a purchase through a mobile device in 2013, a figure that will increase nearly 65%, to 119 million, in 2016.

Market research firm NPD predicts

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