Anyone who has any connection with the SEO world and copywriting knows what linkbuilding is. This has become a very popular practice and over the years, it turned out to be quite efficient. Everybody is back linking nowadays. Besides the numerous companies that write optimized content for Google and other search engines, there are also firms that offer unique and effective link building plans. However, the SEO tactics change and improve on a regular basis and so do the procedures to rank. In fact, the rankings are influenced, not changed. This happens mainly when the work is not actually true.

For example, a specialist talks about a recent experience he was involved in. Someone called him in order to get his advice on a certain company that was supposed to create content for him. These articles were meant to build up the page and linkage count. The specialist asked him if he has any experience in the business. The man answered that he is in the business for almost a year. Thus, the pro assumed that he is an expert on what he’s doing. Unfortunately, the man said that he wasn’t really an expert. Furthermore, the specialist wanted to know if the man asking for help can write anything about his products and business. Surprisingly, the business owner replied that he can’t say much about them. In the end, SEO professionals told him that hiring a company to write content for his business might be beneficial, but it’s not a long term solution.

The story doesn’t end here though. The man insisted and said that the company he wants to hire promised to create high quality articles and assured him that they’re specialists in search engines. They customize each article having in mind the search engines requirements. The professional started laughing and replied that nowadays the purpose isn’t to write articles for search engines, but for back linking. You will get no link popularity from search engines simply because they don’t offer links. The whole purpose of SEO is to create high quality articles in order to make other individuals link to them. For this, people must love what they’re doing and what they’re writing about. Without passion, it’s quite difficult to obtain back links. Without back links, the content will just enter in your page index add up.

Given that this phenomenon is more and more popular, there are numerous SEO specialists who write various threads and post about it. Most of them offer recommendations for attracting links and some are quite useful and interesting. By reading these posts you can find the answer to many of your problems. Moreover, you’ll find out that there are some questions you should ask yourself before creating your content. If the answer is “yes” to the majority of the questions, then you can obtain numerous backlinks. Just remember that all you have to do is write about products and services you like and care about. This will transpire into your content.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

In order to grow your blog, you have to get as many authority links as you can. The link is even better when it comes from reputable and reliable sites. For this reason, you should develop link – building campaigns that attract the so called authority links. Here is how you can do that.

First of all, you must write attractive content. This type of content can be spicy, personal, but not private or informative. It takes a lot of time to create valuable content for your site or blog. Thus, you might not get an authority link right away. But, when you have plenty of helpful and precious articles you can easily approach an authority site. Tell and show them that you’ve written about something of great interest for them or even about them.

Second of all, discover where you can find your target audience and go there. The face-to-face connections are as important as the online connections, but many people seem to forget this. The real connections can help us build relationships with authority site publishers and thus obtain valuable links. The conferences on online marketing or SEO campaigns are perfect for these types of connections. Talk with the authorities you’re interested in and try to convince them to back link. Don’t be too pressing, though because you might end up with nothing.

Another way of attracting authority links is writing a guest post or a column. This is actually one of the simplest methods to obtain back links. Guest posting can also help you get exposure and traffic. It’s not that difficult to get to write a guest post. Hunt for sites like Huffington Post or Open Forum. They’re always looking for more content. To be approved, you must show some of your older posts so as to prove that you’re an experienced writer.

The best authority links are those hosted by education or government sites. Most of the times, .gov or .edu is enough to show respect and reliability. Look for links from colleges such a Stanford of Harvard or even from the White House. As you might have guessed, it’s quite hard to get these types of links. A first step could be registering account on these sites. This way, you can leave comments to interesting posts. Inserting a link to one of your relevant posts in this comment is also helpful. So, these sites could offer you back links if you create interesting, researched and meaningful stories for them. For example, you might create reviews about their programs, become a case study, sponsor an event, support charitable causes or organize governmental events.

One last rule would be to get in touch with the big media. This is also difficult, especially if you’re aiming for sites such as The Economist or CNN. It’s very important to know the times when they publish the articles. For this reason, it’s easy to work with sites that publish the links as soon as the story happens. In order to get an authority link form a media site, you must contact the staff the moment they’re planning the top news of the day. Make sure you have a breakthrough story for that.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

Nowadays, everybody is talking about PPC campaigns. They’re the new trend in the SEO industry. Developing a good PPC campaign is not easy at all, so hiring a professional to do it might be a beneficial solution. Still, if you want to do it on your own, stick to the following tips. They will help have a one of a kind campaign.

The first and most important thing is to know your product. This might seem obvious; still there are numerous business owners who cannot say a thing about their merchandise. Knowing the name of the product is not enough. You must know everything about it. Learn its benefits and, by using the proper words, sell it. Establish which are the unique and compelling selling points and go for them. It’s the same for the services. You and your product need to stand out of the crowd. Remember that the entire marketing industry is based on unique selling points.

Next, you should really know your market. If you’re selling gifts for men, then your market is represented by women because usually the ladies (wives, girlfriends, mothers etc.) are buying presents for men. You must always think about all the aspects when targeting your campaign. Also, keep in mind that normally, the buying power is held by women.

Don’t be afraid to be discerning. You don’t have to target the entire population. A small and powerful sector is enough for promoting your products and services. No ad is good enough for everyone. If you say that a service or product is cheap, there might be persons who will immediately purchase it. On the other hand, there will be individuals who will associate cheap with low – quality. Thus, knowing your customers, their behaviors and their psychology is really important. The great thing about PPC is that only the targeted people will be able to see your ads and if they click, you pay.

Try to be timely. Most of the commercials only talk about how good and beneficial a service or product is. This doesn’t mean that they’re bad, but they would be more successful if they would be time – sensitive. No matter what you’re promoting, a giveaway, a new formula, a competition or a discount, you must impose a time limit. Thus, the viewers will think that buying the product right now is the best thing to do. Remember to be subtle.

Tweet as often as you can. This will help you with your PPC campaign. When you tweet you must use a limited number of words to say something important. It’s the same with the PPC ads. They must sell the product by using very few words. The last things you should know for kick – starting your PPC campaign is to reinvest, revise and review. After all, PPC is all about the profit and the return on investment. Therefore, you have to create the best campaign ever. See what your best – performing offers and ads are and use them again if necessary. If some ads weren’t good enough, then you can simply revise and change them. If nothing else works, then reinvesting to increase PPC presence might be a smart move.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

A few days ago an interesting joint article was posted on Google Webmaster Blog. The post came from the Search Quality Team and was talking about having a valuable free hosting service.

Last year, there was an unfortunate incident when free hosting services banned their sites from the Google search index. In fact, this happened more than once. This took place because these services allowed almost anything. Thus, Google believed that the majority of those sites using the free hosting services weren’t observing the Google terms of service. Thus, the solution was to remove those sites and their services from the Google index.

Google actually declared that if it’s necessary, they won’t back off from banning hosts. So they did with co.cc. Now this free hosting service is back. Therefore, the above mentioned blog post was written for the free hosting companies so as to prevent them from banning and penalty. Some of the tips from this article are:

-          Users must be aware of your abuse policy. That’s why it has to be very clear. For instance, the sign – up procedure might present the abuse policy. This way, everyone will know what spammy activity means.

-          The free hosting service must be monitored for spam signals such as JavaScript code, redirections, spammy keywords or various ad blocks. A cost effective and simple solution is offered by Google Alerts or the site operator.

-          Some verification tools like CAPTCHAs are necessary for the sign – up form. This way, you’ll have only human submissions. Moreover, the automated scripts won’t be able to generate sites on your service. These methods are not 100% secure, but they will help you get rid of a few bad actors.

-          The signups must be kept under control. Also, the typical spam patterns must be discovered. The most common are the user – agents and user names used during signup, the numerous requests coming from an identical IP address or the form completion time. Even though these solutions are not conclusive, they can help.

-          Some sanity checks are required. For instance, you might discover hundreds of legitimate Japanese sites on a free hosting service in Polish. These sites will be especially created for your service. There are numerous useful language detection tools. Among them we can include Google Translate API v2 and the language detection libraries.

-          You must control the free hosting service and keep it clear from malware – infected pages and phishing. A tool like Google Safe Browsing API can test your URLs. It can even send you alerts when a link looks suspicious.

-          The log files must also be monitored so as to observe sudden traffic spikes. Whenever a new site has such traffic, you can see why it’s using more processing power and bandwidth.

-          If you’re having a free hosting service, you must also pay close attention to sudden activity spikes. Usually, these sorts of spikes relate to a spam attack that’s already taking place.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

Search Engine Optimization is a popular and widely used tool. For those who don’t know yet, this service implies the usage of highly searched and profitable terms and phrases into various page elements like copy and headlines. The most important thing that individuals must understand is that the terms are not inserted, but included in the content.

Many specialists say that we should write for search engines, not for people. Those who reached this conclusion have written for both search engines and people, and they’re experienced. This statement might be shocking for some individuals, but it highlights some of the best practices in SEO: the content must be fragmented; your posts have to be understandable for both the machine and the other individuals; find the proper way to write for people.

In order to properly and effectively write for search engines and Internet users there are some things one must understand. The most important aspect that you should keep in mind is that the search engines will always rank a page according to a given topic. This relevancy is fed by the user’s psyche. The experts often compare Web copywriting with telemarketing. The results are that the “so what” expression and its speedy delivery are more successful when it comes to Web copy.

Not everyone agrees with the above mentioned statement. In fact, some people find it blasphemous and don’t understand how they must write for search engines and not for people, when the humans are the ones controlling these machines. Moreover, the opponents state that it is widely known that the content written for users will be automatically high ranked thanks to the proper keywords. Normally, the search engines use the osmosis process to “read” and rank a post.

On the other hand, there are individuals who find this arguable declaration quite refreshing. Writing for users is valuable and sensible. Still, writing for users and understanding, at the same time, how the search engines rank the posts is even better. That’s why the copywriters should try and comprehend how their content is consumed online.

The experts go even further and say that the various “machines” that automatically create content for the search engines must use these basic copywriting practices. This way, their content won’t be that dull and will become more helpful, efficient and user – friendly. That might be a little bit scary given that the job of a copywriter could be so easily taken over by machines. However, we must not think that far away. After all, no matter how good a machine is, it cannot replace the flair and charm of a talented copywriter.

Thus, the conclusion is that regardless of what kind of optimization people perform, including optimizing digital assets, they must address to all kinds of audiences from humans to machines. This type of copywriting and writing optimized content asks for a lot of effort, talent and serious thinking. Moreover, individuals must make a few compromises to carry out this upper hand task.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

It’s really difficult to be a beginner in the pay per click industry. To learn all the ins and outs will probably take some time and effort. Still, nowadays there are a lot of guides that can teach everything you need to know about paid search.

First of all, beginners need to understand that paid search advertising provides visibility on Yahoo, Bing, Google and other search engines by clicking on various ads promoting a service or a product. These PPC (pay-per-click) advertisements can be seen beneath, next to or above the search results. In order to start such a campaign, you need to know if you really need a sale besides the visibility. In case you establish that it’s the right moment to increase your sales, then you can start creating various ad groups with different keywords. Normally, one needs more than one campaign in order to be successful. Below you can see a number of aspects you must take into consideration when starting a paid search campaign.

The most important factors are the keywords. Thinking about the best keywords and testing them is crucial. After all, these are the elements that are going to bring you traffic and sales. Use Google Insights and Google AdWords so as to get some related searches and suggestions. Also, for more accuracy, you must review web analytics and query reports. Moreover, try not to make the keywords too general. They must be specific and talk about your business.

The budget is another vital factor. Your profit will be dependent upon your bid control costs and your budgets. Remember that the bids relate to the keywords and the ad groups and the budgets are created for the entire campaign. You’ll discover various sorts of bidding options and budgets: conversion optimizer, for display or search (CPC), automatic bidding, CPM (thousand / cost per display) and adjusting the maximum budget (enhanced CPC).

The next thing you must think about is the ads. Be very careful about them and the way you create them, because people must be persuaded to click on them. Try to make them as compelling as you can. If you already have an offline campaign, then you should include the same message in the online campaign. Also, remember to incorporate the keywords into the ads. A successful ad should have call – to – actions, unique characteristics, offers and benefits.

Last but not least, you should think about how you’re going to target your campaign. Think about the geographic area you want to draw and upon that determine the language of the ads. The analytics will tell you who your visitors are, so use them as often as possible. One more recommendation is to be very careful where you place your ads. This depends on your budget and your visitors. You can place them on search engines, on You Tube or on mobile networks.

Thus, no matter how big your paid search campaign is, keep in mind to optimize it daily and always track your results. These should be enough for a successful campaign.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

You can compare blogging to fishing. Some individuals catch everything, while others catch nothing. This is not a matter of luck, but a matter of success. A blog post must kill it, not get killed. In order to avoid failure, you must check out this list of things that might kill your blog post.

First of all, you must stay away from bad or confusing headlines. Keep in mind that the headline will appear in subject lines, feed readers and search engine results. A headline has to be attractive in order to draw the readers. Confusing, clever or cute headlines won’t help you with that. Use urgent, useful, ultra – specific and unique headlines.

It’s important to link to other bloggers. First of all, you become an authority and the search rankings will be greatly impacted. Second of all, if necessary, you give credit to the person you’re referring to in the post. Thirdly, you open conversations and exchange ideas. This implies creating relationships, which are very important.

It’s also vital to link to old posts. There are numerous benefits to that. Google spiders will be directed to your site and those old posts will have more traffic. Furthermore, the keywords included in those links will help you rank high.

Don’t you ever plagiarize other bloggers! A consistent and unique content is the key to successful blogging. Traffic is boosted if you post more articles. This can be quite difficult sometimes. For this reason, some bloggers run out of creativity from time to time. Luckily, there are numerous articles talking about creativity. Everything a writer requires is a large amount of ideas. When these ideas are missing, some bloggers are tempted to copy other posts. This is actually the worst thing one can do.

Another big “no” is publishing once a month. Nowadays, people are very busy and don’t have time to write blog posts. Still, if you want traffic, you must write. You’d better give up blogging, if you’re thinking about writing a post once a month. Traffic and success are related to posting, so make sure you write regularly. Another thing that kills your post is not fragmenting it into paragraphs or writing big blocks of text. This is tiring for the reader and dull. A basic rule is to write short paragraphs with short sentences and simple words. Your blog post will have a lot to suffer from large blocks of text.

Last but not least, you should be present on all social media platforms. This is going to be very helpful for your blog and business. Nowadays, it’s not enough to blog. You must also publicize your posts on social media sites like Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, you must know how to use these sites and you have to develop a strategy for promoting your articles. The social media presence you have on these websites can really boost your posts.

So, taking into consideration these tips will help you a lot in your blogging career. You just have to make sure you apply them properly.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

Many clients come to us on the back of a bad link-building job with another company or individual.  Sometimes, the client them-self has engaged in dodgy linking practices. No matter whose responsibility it is, you must know that it’s not easy to fix the problem. However, there are a few methods that can help you get back on Google searches.

Before you perform any of these methods, you must be sure that you’re in trouble because of bad links. Other reasons for your problems might be a Panda penalty, some technical issues or devaluation. Thus, it’s important to separate them. Therefore, after you’ve established that you’re experiencing link problems you can start the clean up.

Sometimes, a helpful thing to do is wait until the problem is solved by webmasters. The moment you’re surrounded by thousands of spammy links, webmasters will remove them and the problem will be reported to Google. If you’re not the one who attracted all those links, Google will take care of the problem. However, even if it’s your fault, as time passes, the links will devalue and you won’t be able to rank again in Google search.

Another thing you can do is cut the links. Oftentimes, waiting is not the most sensible solution. Thus, you can simply eliminate bad links. At this point, there are 2 questions arising. The first is what do you do if you can’t cut the links? This is a common issue. Most of the times, you won’t be able to control these types of sites. Contacting the webmasters is a viable solution only if we’re talking about a small number of links. The second question arising is which are in fact the bad links? This is a real issue. Are all the bad links harmful? Some of them might even help you. Thus, it’s difficult to establish which link is bad and which is good. However, the first problem is the most common.

Cutting the page might be another solution. You could remove the articles if they’re on low – value or deep pages. Most of the times, the best solution is to remove the entire page and add a 404. This way, the links will be neutered. A very effective method is to build good links. Build as many beneficial links as necessary so as to return the balance in your favor. A good link must be relevant. It’s also beneficial if the link comes from an authority site. In these cases, quality is more important than quantity. It takes time to build these links, but it’s well worth it.

If you really can’t get rid of the bad links, you can appeal to Google. This is one of the last strings you can pull. The Google Webmaster Tool can help you if you are detailed, specific and honest and if you prove that you’ve tried all your best to remove the links by yourself. Last but not least, you can move to another home. The best solution in this case is to buy a new domain and perform a 301 – redirect.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

Right now, many SEO specialists make use of Google authorship. Google has seen this opportunity and it’s using this tool in the search results. But, first things first! So, anyone who has a personal brand wants to strengthen and build valuable relationships. Recommendations and relationships are the first step to success. Moreover, people usually trust recommendations and suggestions from friends, relatives or acquaintances. In fact, it turns out that very few individuals trust the results coming from search engines. For this reason, Google became much more social. Their solution to this problem is Google authorship. This means that they’re personalizing searches so as to include your social circle.

Here is what you can do to take advantage of this tool. First of all, you must build a strong personal brand. Nowadays, social media indicates whether or not a site is successful or qualitative. Additionally, most of the social media sites promote personal brands. In this case, authorship seems like a great solution. Besides determining how influent a brand profile is, Google also analyzes its followers / fans, writers and employees. The sites that can help you build a great profile are LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, a personal blog would be of much help. Blogging can be very beneficial for any type of brand.

Another tip to boost your rankings with Google authorship is using Google+, as well as other social media sites, daily. Some people don’t like being online all the time. But, when your brand depends on your online presence, then you should make an effort. Spend your time sharing and commenting your content and the content of your connections. This way, you’ll build strong relationships.

If you have more than one site you’re writing on, you should use Google Authorship on all of them. Thus, every time you post an article and it appears in the search results, your profile will be displayed next to it. So, people will get to know you through your Google+ profile. Moreover, your social circle will find out about your posts and will increase your rankings.

Some people are not talented at writing. Still, they must post articles on a regular basis in order to boost their business and their traffic. In this case, it’s wise to hire some writers. Make sure they’re great at what they’re doing and that they have strong social profiles. Take your time to find the right people. This will help you with the Google authorship, because the writers with positive social profiles are going to bring their own audience to your profile.

The internet is full of tools that help you boost traffic. Make use of them. Some of the best are FindPeopleOnPlus, Topsy and FollowerWonk. These tools will also help you find the influencers in your sector. Contact them and get their attention, but don’t be too obtrusive. One last piece of advice is to try to meet the writers and bloggers in person. Face – to – face connections have always been the best, so start going to various conferences and make friends.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.

Nowadays, the market is full of search engine optimizers. Thus, it’s really difficult to find the best SEO specialist. First of all, you need to see how skilled that search engine optimizer is. Does he have only marketing skills, or does he posses other talents and features too? Do you want a specialized SEO or a person who can do everything you require? Currently, SEO professionals have realized that they have to specialize in more than one domain, thus learning various integrated tactics.

If you think about hiring an SEO, you must take into consideration the five most important SEO skills. First of all, you must be looking for a technical SEO. A SEO doesn’t only search for keywords in order to place them on the page. SEO means a lot more than that. It implies making a site better by working on the server and page level. For this, an SEO must have a strategy and a structured plan. This will help them enter the top search engine results. The ultimate goals for a search engine optimizer are conversion and traffic. It’s important for him to be aware of on – page optimization, including copy optimization, H1, alt tags, title tags etc. At the same time, he must know the technical stuff, for example coding. Technical SEO can help you conquer the IT world. If you want to do this by your own, you should learn all you can about rewrites, server – side settings, server response codes, sitemaps etc.

Nowadays everybody is talking about link building. This is how you know that this element is significant. The social media platforms have become more and more important and so has the link building. Thanks to these sites, it’s quite easy to build links these days. On one side we have the traditional and permanent links obtained through PR sites, association sites and directories. On the other side we have the internal link optimization. This is performed on your site and on Facebook and other social media websites and can get you a lot of traffic. Therefore, a SEO must be skilled in internal link optimization and external link building.

A good SEO must also know everything about social media marketing. This doesn’t imply only maintaining YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts. A search engine optimizer must drive traffic from these sites. Some of the strategies for this accomplishing this goal are optimizing You Tube videos and attracting Twitter followers.

Content marketing is another important skill. Articles and posts are the ones that really attract the visitors. Thus, a SEO should know everything about this domain. He must think about content distribution and content creation. These two are related and must be part of the same unique and innovative creation strategy. Last, but not least, SEOs must know a little something about information architecture and usability. Thus, they must learn how to place various objects on the page. They should also establish if the information on the website is valuable and useful or not. If not, then they must come with different information architecture. Overall, these are the skills you should search for when hiring an SEO for your site.

Zeno is a market leader in the search marketing field. With offices in London, Cheltenham, Copenhagen, Berlin and New Delhi – our finger is truly on the pulse of search marketing. Contact us today to see how we could help you achieve more from the Internet.