Some small firms did not pay attention to the use of the Internet as a marketing tool.

Is there a website to increase the exports for business? Is it a waste of time and financial resources to build and maintain a website? What is the nature of a well-designed website and attract more visitors? Is small and medium companies selling products and services on the Internet, or if this is just the "territory" of the big companies? The percentage of visitors is how much is enough
for sale?
Thousands of small companies continue to pose questions on the Internet is creating a marketing vehicle that will someday become as common as advertising through newspapers, at the trade fair or through trade newsletter. The Internet can be seen as a new marketing tool, is growing in popularity,
no trial and can cause inconvenience, annoyance and create hope for millions of small companies trying to penetrate foreign markets through the use of the Internet as a springboard derived .
There have been so many articles written about the explosion of Internet use. However, there is little research on the state of real consumers use the Internet to buy products and services, e-marketing techniques, the number of visitors and sales enough to prevent for e-commerce. However, companies in developing countries should still take advantage of the research results have to apply to the development of e-commerce.
In a study carried out from 1996 to 1999 by the Small Business Development Center
Michigan State University Wayne State University in Detroit (USA) who have been selected to conduct the 15 small businesses based in Michigan to study their experience in selling products and services through the Internet. The purpose of the study is to determine the advantages and disadvantages of the marketing, sales via the Internet, sharing research results as they now begin marketing and selling through the Internet to help small and medium businesses small in deciding whether the Internet can be a place to invest or not. Through the investigation to find the answer to the question: The Internet is mandatory or merely unhelpful to small businesses?

A number of lessons learned, challenges and solutions for e-commerce in developing countries is what.

Application of the Internet is still growing rapidly, but firms in developing countries
development should not wait to apply the tools of this revolution. Instead, businesses need
seize advantage of the lessons learned from the company's use of the Internet.
A few lessons:
- Coordinate the use of the Internet with the business goals of the company. Managers leading
E-commerce businesses need to run instead of delivered to the technical staff of information technology (TT).
- Ensure that the company has sufficient resources to maintain marketing and business, not only to design and install put your website. Some experts suggest that one third of human resources should be reserved for start-up costs, third for for promotion and third last to update and maintain.
- There are a number of products suitable for sale and delivery forms through the Internet than some products other. Music, books, software, travel services, financial services ranked top in the field of trade ecommerce. Other products such as computers, cars, household items now also offered through Internet.
- The Internet can be used to reduce communications costs, create closer ties between
organizations in many different places, store and use information and communication business, streamline processes sales management and supply.
The challenge:
- Distance of the telecommunications infrastructure.
- Growing demand for websites with content and information services locally to meet requirements
consumers in different regions.

These things should be avoided when developing e-commerce strategy.

No consultation of experts:
Some companies do not know much about e-commerce or are looking to expand into the market
foreign markets often fail due to not receiving the advice of experts before
when developing their e-commerce plans.
Inconsistency management:
Make sure that the leadership of the company are committed to implementing the plan. All departments functions such as management, administration, finance, marketing, production and training .. should participate in the development of design although plans have a designated person responsible for most of the plan. With responsibility highest such person appointed will have advantages in getting the approval and financial support of investors to implement the plan.
No market research conducted certainty.
Market research online today make it easier than before to study
examined the economic, social, and political conditions of the population of any country school. Through the network can easily easy to find business opportunities, import and export in each industry, product and country; identified the foreign importers of specialized items, find out the source of market information e-commerce and marketing. However, while still using the traditional sources of information the company had notbselling products to overseas markets need to. The company can focus research groups customers to explain the characteristics of the product and get the attention of customers to the purchase products via the Internet. Where the company has not exported, can send the samples to the potential market for customer evaluation. The company may also have to study the characteristics characteristics of different customer groups.
No analysis of the results of market research Conduct e-commerce strategy should be based on research and analysis of a detailed market.

Ecommerce strategy of a business is the important factor.

An e-commerce strategy is built should carefully evaluate the potential for online sales
of each product, with demand expected to build investment and business development for such products;
to plan and evaluate the operating results of the business, with criteria which assess the effectiveness of
investment. Ecommerce strategy should also facilitate to get funds.
One of the core elements of e-commerce strategy include:
Excutive Sumomary: Need to write this important part after the rest of the plan was completed
each. Investors mostly read this when first exposed to business. This is the presentation
Brief, clear and well-grounded of the plan. If this summary is to create attractive for investors
investment, there will be plenty of opportunities to express ideas for making proposals. Need to ask are what will make the company
success, then take advantage of the company compared to the other competitors were present on the network
Internet.
- Objectives: Specify objectives and long-term e-commerce will help determine how the companies to achieve the
This targets.
- Orientation: Specify companies to use the Internet how
- Current Status: Indicates the product can sell well on the Internet and give reasons.
- Set the evaluation criteria in network operations. The criteria should include the number of visits to the site
web in a month, the site is considered, the number of people who only visit once, the number of contacts to
fact, the number of transactions performed, the number of orders.
- Promotion: Describe the expansion of the company's website
- Market analysis: Description of market opportunities in electronic commerce company.
- The current level of competition: Presentation of evidence for analyzing the current and competitive in the

Services based on Internet can do something for the small and medium enterprises (SME) ecommerce.

Some programs and services on the Internet has been developed to help SMEs sell products and services
Their domestic and abroad, such as:
- Web Site Design: Access acounting company launched a software package called Accessweb,
Aspect Com Ltd. is the company also offers the International Software Exporters Web Starter Pack.
- Data management and automation of export transactions: The software company's new International
Marketing Software named WT3 can help users manage data, automating the process of offering
goods, orders and invoices directly through a website.
- Acquisition of air freight quotation: Webfreight.net is the first website that specializes in freight
not for export. Users receive a quote based on the weight of goods, local
destination and other necessary documents.
- Service exchange rate: Thomas Cook virtual trading desk can provide network services on the foreign exchange
and information on the currency market.
- Multilingual Software provides software INTERSHOP multilingual translation using word-based.
- Links to products on the auction website: Lycos Company provides services at
http://www.lycos.com
- Join the small business community: Hypermart's website homepage about 360,000 sales
Small, helping companies can conduct e-commerce without building site safety
or all of their electronic shopping carts.
- Participate in the catalog and inventory of products online. The site is named for Myshop Now.com
enables individuals to create their own small shops that do not have to worry about storage or transport.

The industry has changed a lot thanks to e-commerce.

There are 6 sectors has changed the most through e-commerce. That is, computing and electronics, telecommunications,
financial services, retail, energy and services.
Computing and electronics: Three large companies, Dell Computers, Cisco Systems and Intel has more than 100 sales
million per day over the Internet. But for manufacturers personal computers, the Internet
continue to put them in a dilemma situation, or to give the online retailer for companies
direct sales such as Dell and Gateway or risk turning back to the retailer to sell themselves on the
network and thus will "burst" of the distribution system itself.
Telecommunication: thanks to the increasing use of data forms via e-mail, the server
Website on the Internet and millions of revenue from the provision of telecommunications services is increasing, especially
for leading companies such as AT & T, and even companies operating on the basis of the Internet
such as Qwest Communications International has put pressure on prices of this type of service.
Financial Services: Financial services are being digitized and made online transactions are carried out with more
low cost. Banks in the U.S. have only lost $ 0.01 to process a transaction on the Internet compared to the cost
$ 1.07 of a bank branch or a $ 0.27 transaction costs through the ATM system. Although
rapid growth of financial services over the Internet, concerns about complex systems and rules
Safety of transactions are hindering competition and the development of its kind.
Retail: Thousands of websites have been traditional retailers created online in the U.S. in 1999. The
some companies producing consumer goods such as television, electronic products has started direct sales to
consumers.
Energy: Leading by natural gas commodity, followed by other energy commodities such as electricity, coal and
Fuel is also offered online through the ability to respond immediately to changes in demand
to use. It is anticipated that most transactions in the energy sector will be transferred from the environment
exchange to the current network, as in the case of companies Altra Energy and Houston Street.com
are gradually removed national borders and increase competition and reduce prices of energy.
Tourism: Consumers are gradually ignore its travel agent to buy tickets, reservations and jobs
Other related through networks with greatly reduced cost. For example, just 1 USD to be able to handle a ticket

Enterprises using the Internet in the past.

• In 1998, KPMG provides consulting services, conducted a survey
to know the extent of Internet use for business and assess the level of Internet use for business
ecommerce and identify the benefits and concerns of the organization when they participate in the Internet.
One of the main results of this survey are as follows:
• More than two thirds of respondents indicated that they use the Internet primarily to share information through a
external websites.
• Half of the respondents said they use the Internet to share information internally with its employees.
• Only 23% use the Internet for commercial transactions.
• Only 5% of electronic payment acceptance and less than 30% want to be able to accept electronic payment
for electronic goods and services.
• The main reason for opening a website in order to build the sub-channel marketing, product sales and reduced
reduce costs.
• Nearly 90% of respondents said that a lack of security is the major barrier to e-commerce. about
80% for that matter the cost, the lack of rules and business models.
• Nearly 59% have policies to deal with security risks on the Internet.
• Approximately 31% use encryption technology, 17% intend to apply this technique.
• Approximately 23% did not take measures to protect their systems.

Internet is changing the way of doing business look like.

The leading Internet research firm Forrester Research said in 1998 the company has made
a value of $ 43 billion in ecommerce transactions BB. By 2003, the figure is expected to reach 1.3 trillion
U.S. dollars, accounting for 9.4% of all sales transactions BB. In general, while sales in BC
network is very small compared to the sales of traditional BC, the Internet is changing daily
quick ways of doing business.
• Buyers can now easily, at a reduced cost than before, compare the prices and services of the
different suppliers around the world.
• The Internet enables businesses can maintain direct relationships with each customer
individually in a large number of its customers. Information on each individual client is given
the company's relationships with customers which includes data such as sales, accounts, access
thi.v.v. High level of service provided to customers has become the market standard for
users on the network.
• Research the price, quality, delivery plan, structure or details of the product can
on the Internet.
• Customers can easily specify individual requirements on the network, allowing to follow orders
own line of products such as cars, jewelry, plates CD.vv
• Due to lower search costs than before, the new client to participate in this market are more likely
is to provide full information on prices and supply situation as providers often
through the market.

Businesses often have something wrong in the e-commerce.

Some common mistakes that businesses suffer when applying e-commerce as a tool
marketing and sales is:
• Believe that all business activities are better resolved on the Intemet
• Believe that a website will lead to a sale immediately.
• Believe that the use of the Internet is an easy way to make business and product
known world. There are countless more sites (one third of a trillion) can be read
on the World Wide Web, and this number is increasing quickly, be present on the Web is not
meant to be seen.
• No reasonable cost to introduce this website, as notified by e-mail, subscribe to all the
major search engines, sending messages, updating the title cards and letters, the tools used in
publications, television and other traditional methods to advertise your website.
• Do not invest time to design the content and form of the website and create favorable conditions for
finding. It's easy to lose a potential customer if the extraction site to meet difficult
towel.
• Web Design is not good for customers having difficulty identifying the advantages of the product should
descriptions. In the event website for online transactions so that the client had difficulty
purchase of the business.

Why is important for Internet commerce?

The use of Internet is growing very fast compared to other technologies used in history. In the
From 1993 - 1997, the number of computers connected to the network of Internet increased from 1 million to 20 million. According to the
ITU, the end of 2001 to 500 million units, end of 2002 was 655 million.
The level of Internet use reflect the level of economic development.
U.S., Canada and the Nordic countries have adopted Internet technology most quickly. League
European Union (EU), New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong (China) also has a catch
the first adopters of the Internet.
Individuals, organizations and companies in Southeast Asia, China, India, Argentina., Brazil has begun to visit
Internet since 1996. It is possible that the Internet will have a slower impact on the least developed countries in Asia
and Africa, in countries prohibit the use of the Internet.
The Internet is a useful tool for commerce
Using the Internet to reduce communication costs, reduce the time needed to bring goods and services to
market, to help the exchange of information in the form of goods, reducing transportation costs and distribution, allowing inter-
closely and wider between the business community.
The Internet promotes the development of global trade.
As Internet technology advances more and solve problems related to the reliability and speed, it
will be used more in almost most of the information media, trade in goods and services.
Many large companies now have the technology associated with online systems available its EDI. The company
This is building a new system based on the internet for supply chain management and inventory
themselves. In addition to using the Internet to sell products and services, companies are using the Internet to
customer surveys, provide information and images, the paper declared legal, management and transfer of funds.
The actual impact of the Internet has not seen before.
The Internet has had an impact on business practices, trade partners, learning and relationships
mutual political and social. The industry, the company is increasingly affected by the application
of the internet and more and more people use it to purchase goods and exchange information.

E-commerce will account for a larger share of the retail market

The Economist magazine recently conducted a survey on e-commerce method B to B and
B to C in the United States. Although online shopping form (electronic shopping) is increasingly being used in many
America than any other country in the world, but it only accounts for 1% of retail sales in the festive period 1999-2000
categories of online sales is also very limited.
The initiative forms online sales today can compare with the initiation form
through catalog sales in the last century. However, while the method through catalog sales from the start
has developed very strong because of its novelty factor, but then plummeted because no novelty
Also, today there are sufficient grounds to support the view that e-commerce will continue to expand the proportion of
its retail market. This view is based on a unique capability of Internet and network-based
on the technical platform and benefit both users and businesses.
Users benefit when shopping through the immediate comparison of price and product (assigned by the
sales agent or product reviews site), the different pricing mechanisms (fixed price, auction, auction
vice). In addition to simplifying commercial transactions between buyers and sellers, the more publicity

What is eCommerce?

So far there is no accepted definition of unified e-commerce (electronic
commerce or e. commerce). However, e-commerce phrase often used to refer to "the distribution
distribution, marketing, sale or delivery of goods and services by electronic means. "
Electronic commerce has existed in various forms of Internet Network before being put into use, and the
This form exists in which the exchange of electronic data - EDI (electronic data-interchange)
commonly applied in the computer network protocol TCP / IP. EDI is a person considered to be of
important form of business-to-business business (B to B) than the network of Internet
(This may be a point of debate, especially if the other industries follow a company as large as
General Motors Corporation, Ford Motor Company and Daimler Chrysler have recently built a system
providing appropriate for B to B auto industry through a global portal of Internet).
Increasing concern for e-commerce can be derived from the impact of Internet on
business practices between enterprises and customers (B to C), the conversion method
ecommerce. There have been no basis for denying care to electronic commerce B to C in
That rapid growth in the number of users connected to the development of Internet network corresponding

Amazon Affiliate How to Register

If you are looking to make money online  in a simple and efficient, the Amazon Affiliate is the best choice for you.

Amazon affiliate is currently one of the ways to make money on the most popular among webmasters. An easy way to understand, you introduce products from Amazon, and when a sale, you will receive a commission.

Method to make money online with Amazon Affiliate also very diverse. For example, you can advertise products laptop on his technology blog. Or create product review sites such cameras.

However, Amazon Affiliate has recently become more difficult with the Vietnamese community so that everyone understands why. This article will show how to register a simple Amazon Affiliate and have a high success rate for Amazon you are not accepted by regular subscribers.

First, create 1 new blog, for example, about how parenting blog in English. Back to google.com / ncr find foreign blog similar content. Copy 2 post on each blog post in my blog. Makes 10-20 full article. Note: post back to the past time believed blog I wrote a long time ago.

How to build Online Business

Everything started nan, trying to say so much to know that. Reflecting only true, but now, with the development of construction technologies, the Online Business has never been easier than now. The cost is low, the engine that broke up!

There are a number of things, "but that the" first flight in each time you want to run something new. Things will become simpler if you sit down and read through a few of my bullets:

• Understanding the Internet

Do you have experience with the Internet? You must have knowledge of technology and new trends of the internet today, now you can not use Myspace to work and communicate with friends, while 11-year-old sister you're talking about "like" or "tweeting"?

To succeed, you must first study and understanding of the internet

• Research the competition level of the field you are going to jail bar (refer to keyword research)
• Understanding how Web tools like activity (Facebook, tweeter, RSS, ...)
• You must be a part of the community, learn about Internet culture.

How to start your own internet business

There's more to it than putting up a site and waiting for the orders, says Esther Shaw

If you've ever had an idea for a product or service that you think could net you a fortune, you may well have considered setting up an internet business with the aim of sitting back and watching the money roll in.

After all, in 2006, consumers spent £30.2bn on online goods and services, according to IMRG, the industry body for global e-retailing. Over the past 10 years, the growth of the internet has resulted in the high-profile successes of many internet-related businesses. Just a few weeks ago, for example, price comparison serviceMoneysupermarket.com became the second-biggest internet float in the world since thedot.com implosion, after that industry behemoth, Google.

The internet has certainly revolutionized the way we live our lives, and offers a place where individuals can compete with global organisations. But just how easy is it to get started?

Your business plan

The starting point for any new venture is to create a business plan, says Tony Cohen, the head of entrepreneurial business at Deloitte.

"You need to know your target market, know your competition, attract funding, secure good resources, build consumer loyalty – especially blogger coverage – and forge alliances with strategic partners," he says. "Preparation and research are key."

Jeffrey Macklin from FDUK, a company that provides part-time finance directors to start-up businesses, says the objective of the business plan is to tell a simple yet compelling story that leaves the reader wanting to meet the management team and find out more about the proposition. "It should be as succinct and accessible as possible, and around 20 pages at most," he says.

Finding a market

One of the most important elements of setting up an online business is finding out if there is a market for your idea.

"It's all about finding a niche," says William Berry, a self-made internet millionaire. "Hampers, for example, are a niche of food retailing, but there are already market leaders in this area, so you either need to aim for a niche which doesn't already have a market leader, or attempt to become even more niche – by offering Christmas hampers, say. "

Disavowed: Secrets of Google's Most Mysterious Tool

Update: Check out the new findings at the end of the post.

To many webmasters, Google’s Disavow Tool seems a lifesaver. If you’ve suffered a Google penalty or been plagued by shady link building, simply upload a file of backlinks you want to disavow, and BOOM - you’re back in good graces. Traffic city!

Or nothing happens at all.

Few Google products have produced more fear, rumors and speculation. No one outside Google knows exactly how it works, and fewer understand how to succeed with it. To better understand, I used the tool myself to disavow 1000s of links, and talked with dozens of SEOs who used it in attempts to recover from Google penalties.

How Dangerous Is Disavow?

When you first log into the Disavow Tool, Google does everything in its power to dissuade you from actually using it with scary messaging.

What’s the worst that could happen?

To find out how much damage I could do, I performed an experiment: Disavowing every link pointing to my website. Over 35,000 of them.

In this case, no reconsideration request was filed. Would the disavow tool work on its own?

Disavow 35,000 Links to a Single Website

URL: http://cyrusshepard.com

Process:

1. Download all links from Google Webmaster Tools

SEO Ranking Factor #1 is Satisfaction

You know the numbers — Google uses over 200 ranking signals, updates its algorithm over 500 times a year, and employs thousands of engineers. We often get so caught up in the minutiae of the algorithm that we forget all this effort serves a single purpose:

Satisfy the user.

This isn't a touchy-feely post that says "Make great content and visitors will come" or "Delight your customers and magic will happen."

It's not magic. Satisfaction is an actual ranking factor.

Unlike other ranking factors, this one is hard to measure because it's based almost entirely on search engines' own internal data — something they don't share. We do know search engines both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google's most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results.

It's easy to tweak a keyword. It's much harder to stop visitors from clicking the back button on your website when they don't find what they were looking for. Satisfaction is very difficult to game; perhaps that's why search engines place so much emphasis on it.

How Google measures and predicts satisfaction

User behavior in search results

Stephen Levy’s excellent book In the Plex describes how Google engineers figured out how to improve search results by mining their user behavior data (bold added):

"… Google could see how satisfied users were. … The best sign of their happiness was the "long click" – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query. But unhappy users were unhappy in their own ways, most telling were the “short clicks” where a user followed a link and immediately returned to try again. "If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy," says Patel. "If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy."

Often called pogosticking, this refers to the behavior of users that click on a result, then "pogostick" back and forth between the search results and different websites, searching for satisfaction.

Decoding Google's Referral String (or, how I surviVED Secure Search)

Last week, I held a Mozinar outlining a method to extract SERP vertical -- called Universal Search by Google --- from Google referral strings. Since the Mozinar concluded, the number of people who have reached out with their own theories and ideas has been impressive. I want to post everything that I know here and then leave it up to you folks in the SEOmoz community to start hacking and sharing your insight.

For those of you who did not see the Mozinar, you can access it here (voiceover included). You can also download or view the slides without VO on Slideshare here.

---

Before getting into the step-by-step process and providing examples of how to use the Google referral string to interpret where in Universal Search your traffic came from, I want to lay out a problem we were having at AudienceWise. In 2011, Matthew Brown and I started an agency to help news publishers with technical SEO and audience development. In our other jobs, specifically Matthew at the New York Times, we struggled with reconciling for the lack of data around Universal Search referrals. As far as our web analytics platforms were concerned, a visit from web search, a News OneBox link, and an image result were all treated exactly the same: as organic search traffic.

Then came Google Secure Search, and referral data got even more opaque. In addition to not knowing which Universal vertical the referral came from, now in about 10% of cases we didn’t even know the keyword that referred the traffic. The question that kept going through our collective ginger minds was: how can we help our clients with content strategy if we know nothing about WHY they are receiving said search traffic? Unfortunately, Secure Search has vastly expanded and now accounts for a large percentage of all Google referral traffic.

2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors

Yesterday at MozCon, I presented the results from Moz's Ranking Factors 2013 study. In this post I will highlight the key takeaways, and we will follow it up with a full report and data set sometime later this summer.

Overview

Every two years, Moz runs a Ranking Factors study to determine which attributes of pages and sites have thestrongest association with ranking highly in Google. The study consists of two parts: a survey of professional SEOs and a large correlation study.

We'll dive into the data in a minute, but some of the key findings include:

1. Page Authority correlates higher than any other metric we measured.
2. Social signals, especially Google +1s and Facebook shares are highly correlated.
3. Despite Penguin, anchor text correlations remain as strong as ever.
4. New correlations were measured for schema.org and structured data usage.
5. More data was collected on external links, keywords, and exact match domains.

Survey

Cyrus Shepard and Matt Brown organized this year's survey of 120 SEOs.

An Open Letter to New SEOs

First off, let me congratulate you. Whether by luck or good planning, you’ve entered the field at a time when business is booming and just about every decent company I know of is looking for talent. So, you may be wondering – why aren’t they hiring you? Maybe being a dad has gone to my head (I’m sure of it, actually), but I’m here to give you some tough love…

Do First, Then Talk

You’re doing it in the wrong order – you need to read this (hat tip to @chriswinfield). I’ll paraphrase – before you shoot your mouth off about how great you are, prove it. Yes, there are cocky people in SEO, and yes some of them make a lot of money, but you’re not them (at least not yet). Your attitude may get you 500 screaming fan-boys and girls on Twitter who all shout “Hell, yeah!” whenever you strike a key, but unless you’re taking your act to the big screen, fan-boys don’t pay the bills.

It’s not just about arrogance, though. I can’t count how many times I walked into a networking event to drum up business and couldn’t connect to anyone, because I had nothing to talk about. People don’t want to hear about what you could do, given enough time, money, and magic beans. They want to hear about what you have done (or, at least, what you are doing). If you want to get people interested in what you do, then do something interesting.

Build Something (Anything)

In this world, “do something interesting” means create something. It could be a mega blog post like David Mihm’s annual Local Search Ranking Factors, or it could be a tool, like Darren Shaw’s Local Citation Finder. Those are just two examples of dozens that catapulted a relative newcomer to SEO stardom.

How Many SEO Consultants Actually Know What They're Talking About?

As an industry, SEO has struggled with setting standards of quality from day one. Even with countless professional SEOs doing best-in-class work, the industry as a whole is constantly battling the bad rap of being tactless, unethical, and sometimes even "dead."

Black-hat or black cat?

At SEOmoz, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised day after day by the array of high-quality SEOs that make our industry such a wonderful place to be. Unfortunately, the time finally came where we had to ask ourselves the nagging questions looming over our industry: where was all this negative noise coming from? Had we been missing a widely accepted fact in the SEO world? And, most importantly, was the current state of SEO really as awful as some were making it seem?

There was only one way to find out.

Inspired by a post highlighting the "sad state" of today's SEO consultants, we decided to conduct a survey of our own to determine the true, calculated quality of SEOs in 2012. Similar to the Webmaster World member whose less-than-awesome exchange with various SEO consultants sparked this hot debate, we chose to reach out to real, third-party SEO companies for advice on how to improve rankings to collect our data. But we wanted to do it bigger.

6 Ways to Learn SEO

Thus, let's start with a chart of relative knowledge/experience levels (similar to this old/outdated post on levels of knowledge):

Now that we have some context, let's dive in to the ways I recommend learning SEO. For each, I've provided a description of the process, the ideal starting level(s) (and where you can expect to reach via that methodology) and a list of resources with my notes.

#1 - Free Online Guides

The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program [Infographic]

As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear: 

“My name is Earl. My conversion rate sucks, and I can't stop sending expensive PPC traffic to my homepage.” 

Feel better? You should.

You just passed the “unofficial” first test of landing page rehab, and now you’re ready to take 12 little steps that’ll lift you from that river in Egypt (denial?!?) to a higher place on the conversion charts. This is the intervention your landing pages have been crying out for, so take a deep breath... and let’s get started.

Study the 12-step infographic to see where each step in the program should be applied to the conversion funnel.

Search and Social Media FAILs by California Gubernatorial Candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown

PEOPLE LOVE MEG 2X MORE ON FACEBOOK AND JERRY 4X MORE ON TWITTER

While Meg Whitman has a little more than double the number of Facebook Likes than Jerry Brown (201K to 96K respectively), Brown's Twitter following is enormous, more than 4x more than Whitman's.

But why? Looking at the Twitter streams from both candidates, both tweet a lot about the event they're at or going to and both congratulate the Giants on their first World Series game wins (Go Giants!).  Both have under 1,000 tweets.

But one thing I did notice is that they both humanize differently.  Meg Whitman talks about the pumpkin patch she visited or about stopping at Andersen's for their famous pea soup.  Brown sends out personal thank you's in droves.  The big difference in the humanization of these tweet styles is that talking about what you did (visiting pumpkin patches & restaurants) is talking about yourself, while sending personal thank you's is more along the lines of talking about your audience.  People like that.  But could that be what makes the difference between a quarter million and over a million followers? Is there more to learn from the content that Jerry Brown tweets that gets him more followers?  Is his audience just more Twitter friendly (but not really on Facebook)?  And/or are these thank you's really doing the trick?

Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing

The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. This won't just help with SEO, but on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site.

#1 - Install Visitor Analytics

Nothing can be improved that is not tracked. Keeping these immortal words of wisdom in mind, get your pages firing analytics code before your first visitor. Google Analytics is the obvious choice, and customization options abound (for most sites more advanced than a basic blog, I'd highly recommend at least using first-touch attribution).

Google analytics, or any other package (see some alternatives here), needs to be placed on every page of your site and verified. Do yourself a favor and install in a template file you can be sure is on every page (e.g. footer.php). GA's instructions will indicate that placing the code at the top of the page is key, but I'm generally in favor of leaving it at the bottom to help page load time for visitors (though the new asynchronous GA code is pretty fast).

SEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Will

This is a post that has been gnawing at the edges of my brain for years, and I think the time has finally come to write it. Our recent Moz re-brand launched the inevitable 4,789th wave (and that’s just this year) of "SEO Is Dead" posts. This isn't a post about our reasons for broadening our brand (Rand has talked extensively about that) – it’s a post about why I think every declaration of SEO's demise misses something fundamental about our future. This is going to get philosophical, so if you’d rather go make a sandwich, I won’t stop you.

The Essence of Search

Let’s start with a deceptively simple question – How big is the internet? I’ll attempt to answer that by creating a graph that borders on being silly:

The internet is so big that even Google got tired of counting, and it's growing exponentially. Five years have passed since they announced the trillion mark, and the article suggests that URL variations now make the potential indexed page count theoretically infinite.

How to Build Links to Your Blog - A Case Study

I recently took some time out to do a bit of travelling across East Asia (which was incredible!) and decided that I would, along with a group of friends, set up a travel blog. Knowing that I would be embarking on some amazing adventures, I thought it'd be a waste not to blog about them. Plus, the idea of bringing in a little extra cash to go into my travel fund helped in my decision.

After a month or so of development the site was finally ready and I wanted to start thinking about how to get some traffic going on the website. Whilst paid advertising and social media were a huge part of the strategy, I knew that appearing in the search engines for a wide selection of long-tail phrases was going to be instrumental to the blog's success. This is when I began developing my link building strategy and, after trialing out some very successful approaches, I've decided to now share my link building tactics with you all - you can thank me later :)

Identifying My Link Targets

As a brand new blog it can be really tough to gain links from high authority sites. Unless you have something particularly unique or special (and even then you might struggle), it's an uphill battle to get your content in front of anyone. With this in mind I decided to start off small. However, the general rule of thumb that I kept for any links that I was looking to build was this:

SEO from a Newb's Perspective

Author’s note: I’m new to the SEOmoz community and super excited to be contributing – but frankly, I’m a little intimidated by all the expertise on this blog. Gulp. Read and critique with love and understanding for my beginner status, please. Here we go!

For all of you search engine optimization gurus out there, I hope my perspective is a fresh one for you. Sometimes it’s fun to temporarily place yourself back in the mindset of an ignorant beginner. You probably can’t remember the day before you understood SEO backwards and forwards, can you?

Well, I’m still there. (Yes, thank you for the supportive smiles and knowing looks.) I still don’t understand it all – BUT I’m on my way, and I’m making progress.

Stereotypes about SEO

In college, my understanding of “search engine optimization” was that it was for “techie” people, a hybrid hobby of computer science and math. Where I gained this impression, I don’t remember, but I truly thought SEO could only be done by the guys who knew JavaScript and wrote code. That person wasn’t me. As an English creative writing major, I spent my time writing sonnets, short stories, and articles for the school newspaper.

7 Reasons to Remove "Link Building" from Our Vocabulary

Double disclaimer: This really is my own opinion, and may not be the official position of either Moz or Distilled.

"We’ve only built high-quality links."

I see variations on this theme often; sadly, I see it most commonly in laments composed by those affected by Google’s Penguin update. After years of consulting, dozens of penalty-related questions in Moz’s Q&A, and careful consideration, I am convinced that the idea of "building links" has been heartbreakingly detrimental to our industry and many site owners. I will argue that everyone — marketers and SEOs included — would be better off if we stopped talking about building links altogether.

It may seem insane to many in the industry to speak of discarding "link building" as an action, goal, or job description. I certainly understand the objections, but I only ask that you consider the whole of my argument before coming to a conclusion.

1. Link building isn't a process or goal

Our goal is almost always direct or indirect profitability. Where organic search marketing is concerned, profitability comes from qualified traffic, and qualified traffic comes largely from favorable search engine positions. Favorable search results are achieved to a significant extent by acquiring links from diverse high-authority domains.

How To Use Twitter Data for Really Targeted Outreach

Howdy Moz fans! It's been a while since I've been up on the Moz Blog (and boy have I missed it), but as a huge thanks to the Moz team for such a fantastic MozCon, I thought I'd get a write-up of my session submitted just as soon as I arrived home.

MozCon 2013 was the biggest, best, and most exciting yet. It's really nice to meet so many good people, and I'm always left with heaps of ideas to implement when I get back to the office.

Outreach is getting harder

Over the years, it's become harder and harder to find websites and link prospects using classic outreach and guest post queries in Google. I think maybe webmasters as a whole are pretty blind to unsolicited "we'd love to write for you" style outreach, and I also think that the sites that tend to rank in Google for those queries may be of a lower quality (certainly not always, but there are plenty of bad sites out there inviting guest posts. You've seen them, I've seen them, and I don't really want a link from them!).

My session at MozCon was called "Really Targeted Outreach," and I looked at an alternative method to find sites that our target audiences may be sharing on Twitter. With that data, you can build content strategy, understand your market a little better, and construct an alternative outreach plan based on what real people are sharing and engaging with, rather than starting with sites that just rank for guest post queries.

The SEO's Guide to Building a Great Mobile Site

If you're a regular reader of the Moz blog, chances are you've heard about the importance of investing in mobile. You've already formed an opinion on whether or not you'd like your employers/clients to build a responsive site or keep a separate mobile site, and you've started hinting that great mobile sites are worth the investment. The problem is, how can you make that happen?

In my experience as an SEO consultant, in order to effect change, you have to:

• Convince key players that change is important
• Know enough about the problem, the site, and the available solutions to recommend the best strategy
• Be an active player in the implementation, making sure that the solution is implemented properly, and that the change doesn't create any new SEO problems

Using that framework, in order to get a mobile site built, you have to explain the necessity of creating a solid mobile site, investigate the options of responsive versus separate mobile sites (or a combination of the two), and guide the build and implementation of the mobile site. This is your guide to making that happen.

5 Data Insights into the Headlines Readers Click

 A Conductor study finds that the more explicit a headline is as to the reader takeaway, the more the headline resonates.

The new digital economy has created a wealth of new opportunity for modern marketers across search, social networks, and digital channels. Digital marketing has brought with it the opportunity to create leads, drive engagement, and drive sales at costs far less than traditional offline channels.

In some ways, though, online marketing has been victimized by its own success. Viral media site Upworthy's co-founder Peter Koechley describes it this way:

"When we look at the media landscape, we see there being more of a demand problem than a supply problem — how do you get people to care about important stuff amidst the avalanche of content we all face each day?"

With the growth of online marketing, both the channels and volumes of content competing for our readers' attention has exploded, making it increasingly challenging to stand out. Consider the following statistics:

• Explosion in content competing for readers' attention: A Day in the Internet shows that 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails, and 864 thousand hours of video are created daily. Each day also brings 400 million tweets.
• 80% of readers never make it past the headline: According to some sources, on average, eight out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only two out of 10 will read the rest.
• Traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on the headline: According to Koechley, tests show that traffic to content at Upworthy can vary by as much as 500% simply because of the headline. "The headline is our one chance to reach people who have a million other things that they're thinking about, and who didn't wake up in the morning wanting to care about feminism or climate change, or the policy details of the election," he said.

Measuring which headlines resonate with readers

Given how significant a headline can be to click-through rate in both search and social online channels, here at Conductor we decided to test different headline types to determine those that resonate most with readers. Although it would be interesting to measure this by analyzing actual click traffic (and we know that there can be a difference between how respondents say they will click and how they actually do), it can be difficult to precisely test by getting multiple headlines for the same article in front of readers. Taking the survey approach also gave us the ability to gather demographic data about respondents to determine if headline preferences differed across specific groups.

To start, we analyzed a large sample set of headlines across multiple online publications and social networks to determine if there are general ways in which headlines are written. We determined there to be five high-level headline types:

9 Experts and a Summary: What Makes an Ideal SEO Employee?

In 2012, the SEO industry in the UK was worth over £500 million annually, growing 18% from 2011 figures. The US SEO industry is even bigger, topping $16 billion in 2010. In a time of general malaise about the economy, this industry is growing rapidly, and the good times look set to continue.

This is great news for any SEO business looking to expand along with companies' search marketing budgets, as there is plenty of work to be done. There is so much, in fact, that most SEO departments, consultancies and agencies are looking to hire new employees to keep up with the demand. This does raise the question, however, of what to look for when hiring new SEOs.

So what do the best and brightest SEOs in the US and the UK look for when they are hiring? Read on to find out. Take note: Their answers may surprise you.

Eric Ward – EricWard.com

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Not joking. A bit OCD, a bit ADD, and experience in marketing, public relations, and library science. When presented with a long page of source code, do they faint or confidently explain the good, bad, and ugly in it without having to see the page in a browser? Do they spend time online when they are not working? Do they have their own individual presence established online? If they saw Matt Cutts at a conference, would they hide?

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay.com

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Someone that has not learned bad habits, and that will be a leader on their projects. They must be a great written and spoken communicator, they need to know what they do not know and endeavor to fix that, and they have to be excited about problem solving. They need to stick to the methodology while seeing opportunities to surpass the competition. Our ideal candidate is fantastic at time management and organization, is service focused, and lives for internet marketing. Their technical background should be (entry-level) basic, and they need to be a quick and accurate student. At a senior level they need a solid foundation across many markets and technologies, without the baggage of learned spam techniques. They should be able to teach, lead, and communicate as the expert on a complex project. Historically we have found great success in training our employees from an intern to expert level (10 years with our firm). And, yes, we have many technical staff that have been with us that long.

Heart to Heart About Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

With best practices for link building continuously changing, it can be difficult to keep track of which work well and which should be removed from our repertoire. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Michael King (a.k.a. @iPullRank) makes a case for dropping some tactics in favor of others.

For reference, here is a still image of this week's whiteboard:

Video Transcription

Greetings and salutations, SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King, a.k.a. iPullRank. I'm the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire. It's been a minute, but I'm back.

So today I really want to have a heart to heart about link

Content Isn't King. Trust Is King.

As you likely already know, the goal of content marketing is to build up familiarity and trust with your prospective customers. In this case, the content isn't designed to sell a specific product or service, but rather to sell you, and to interested potential customers.

People buy from people that they know, like, and trust. And if you haven't heard it yet, let me be the first to tell you that "familiarity" breeds trust.

Content marketing certainly isn't new, but it's been getting a lot of new attention online lately (and for good reason). Small business owners across the globe are re-discovering these tried and true marketing practices, and using them to get a big leg up on the competition.

One of the really big advantages small business owners have over the titans of industry is that you can get much more personal with your target audience than they can. You have a face and a voice. You can be human with your audience. And, as it turns out, one of the best ways to do that is by talking to your customers. One of the best ways to get a feel for some of the best-practices around the industry is to follow and watch how others are succeeding. As such, I've cherry-picked some of my favorite content marketing tips from experts around the web.

1. Don't build on rented land

Publish your best content on web properties that you personally own (i.e., your own self-hosted website). Social media has hit the business world like a freight train, and there is great value in spreading your message far and wide via these cheap media channels. The point of all that chatter, though, is to get all those eyeballs back to your own site. Once they're there, it's time to convert them, either into customers or, at the very least, into email list subscribers. Social media is for mingling and chatting (and, obviously, marketing). Your own site is where the magic should happen. That's where you answer your potential clients' questions in depth. That's where you create loyalty.