Have you ever thought about submitting your blog to Alltop? If you're doing SEO right, you have a blog, and more exposure for said blog can only ever be a good thing. Alltop is an "online magazine rack" that brings together blogs from all different fields. It aggregates all of these different blogs into categories and delivers them on one easy to navigate page. Even better, it puts the most popular posts at the top for increased exposure. Alltop is a great place to find news, but it's also a great place to share your own writing, and it's easier than you may think.

See below for the simple step by step instructions:

Step 1. Go to Alltop.com and look around at the different categories. Find the one that best fits your blog's main topic. For instance, Wikimotive's blog is filed under SEO.

Step 2. Go to the Alltop submission page found here

At this point, you should be looking at this:

Step 4. Fill out all of the fields, using the topic you found in step 1 in the Alltop Topic Field.

Step 5. Be sure to give your Site/Blog the appropriate name. This shouldn't be just your URL, it should be something that will entice Alltop browsers to click through.

Step  6. Submit and sit tight, it can take days or even more than a week to hear back from Alltop. In some cases, you may not hear back, so check out the Topic Page you selected and see if you've been included. You will be at the bottom of the page.

So that's all there is to it. If you're rejected, try double-checking what Topic you selected and make sure that your RSS feed is working properly.

If you gave your blog a catchy title and keep the individual posts with catchy titles as well, you'll likely start to see a small influx of traffic from Alltop. If you do it right, you'll occasionally be one of the most popular stories and you'll get a spike in traffic!

Original post on Wikimotive's blog.

Mobile is huge, we’ve talked about that a lot recently, but optimizing your site for mobile can be a correspondingly huge amount of work. You have to tweak all of your existing elements to make sure they display properly, and you have to check it across a variety of devices. The workaround for this has been to get a responsive design, but is this style of design good for your SEO? We have the answer from Matt Cutts, and (for once) it’s actually pretty interesting.

To start, I’d like to clarify what a responsive design actually is. Essentially, a responsive site is designed from the ground up to handle displaying on a wide range of devices. This is accomplished by breaking down the layout into what is essentially a grid, and then resizing elements on that grid by percentages, rather than a hard unit like pixels. With some additional media queries to keep everything sound, the result is a site that displays fairly well on mobile. They generally aren’t as good as sites explicitly designed for mobile, but they’re a simple solution to a clunky problem.

But how do they affect your SEO?

It turns out, they are actually the best option for easy and effective SEO. The alternative to responsive design is generally redirects and m-dot sites. With these, you are splitting your homepage into two URLs (the regular and the m. version) and thus splitting your SEO focus. The benefit of responsive design is that, by their very nature, there is only one URL. This way, any links you accrue are all pointed at the same domain. Of course, the m-dot sites can be designed to be a better user experience, but they require a lot more time and effort to get right.

I’d say that for most cases, a responsive design will work just fine. Just make sure you check your own site in mobile every so often and ensure that everything is working well, because there have been plenty of cases where designs are billed as responsive but don’t really deliver the goods.

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Andrew Martin. 

When it comes to paid search, you expect the results to behave much like organic: the top ranking gets the most clicks. It turns out though, that it doesn’t always work out the way you would expect it to. We have some interesting new data from the marketing agency Accuracast that shows the fruits of a year long study into the labyrinth that is search engine marketing.

Let’s take a look at what they found.

After reviewing data for 12 months and roughly 2 MILLION clicks, it turns out that the top position in paid search results is not always the winner. According to the data, the number 1 paid position gets about 7  percent of all clicks, the most of the top paid positions for normal Google results, but when they spread the study to include all of the Google advertising channels, they found a dramatic shift. For Non-Google search engines, the best results were usually in position 5. For search result banners, the winner was in position 3.

“The data is surprising,” said Farhad Divecha, Accuracast managing director. “When we first noticed the unusual spikes in CTR at position 5 on search partner data and position 3 for the content network, our first reaction was to check the integrity of the data – could it be an outlier, a handful of clicks or a particularly successful campaign that was skewing the numbers? – however, we found that this wasn’t an outlier, it was seen over tens of thousands of clicks and across multiple campaigns and accounts in various industries.”

What’s the reason for the discrepancy? It turns out, people still prefer non-paid ads, it’s just that non-Google search engines aren’t always so clear. On AOL and Ask.com for instance, result 5 looks like an organic result, even though it’s often paid. This means people are trying to skip the ads and failing.

For Google though, position 1 is still the best. And seeing as how Google has the majority of the market share, we encourage you to keep trying to be numero uno. Of course, what we really recommend is using SEO instead of SEM, but we’ll concede that SEM does have it’s place.

Original Post by Tim Martel on Wikimotive's Blog.

Is newer always better? It’s a question that has been debated since the first new thing was released over the first old thing, but we’ve never really come to a consensus. Personally, I think that older is often times better (like in the picture above) but if there’s one instance where newer is the way to go, it’s SEO techniques. With SEO, it’s not just a question of taste or style, it’s a question of effectiveness, and there’s just no denying that the new ways are the right ways. Let’s take a look at how things used to be compared to how they are now.

SEO used to be all about the technical side of things. That’s about as simply as I could put it. You needed to build links and you needed to build a lot of them and you needed them build yesterday. That was the whole shtick.

Today, as we so often say, that kind of crap gets you banned. New SEO is about content and creating websites that rank the highest because they offer the best possible experience to the searcher. Sure, there’s still stuff to tinker with on the backend of it all, but content is the engine that drives your jalopy forward, one mile at a time.

To see the change from old SEO to new SEO laid out for you, take a look at the infographic below. It’s a pretty accurate representation of the SEO paradigm shift we’ve been going through these past few years.

Original post titled Old vs New SEO on Wikimotive's blog.

They say that everyone has a book somewhere inside them, and no, they aren't talking about crazy nights at the library with your frat. A better way to put it is that everyone has something to share with the world. In some cases, it's a detective crime thriller or a post-apocalyptic science fiction story. Those are great, but they aren't what I want to talk about today. I think that even if you aren't creative, you still have a story to tell. Maybe instead of a novel, it's a how-to book or a book of insights into your business success. Sure, the word "novel" by its dictionary definition is a fictitious piece of work, but what November really is is national book writing month, and there's plenty of room for professionals of every field to hop on board the word train.

Choo choo, friends.

Really? A book?

I know, I know. Writing a book seems like an awful lot of work and your a busy professional. That's undoubtedly true, but that's the beauty of national novel writing month, you aren't going to waste a lot of time on it. You're going to take a couple hours a day for the next thirty days, and you're going to put words down on the page. It may not turn out exactly like you hoped, it may outright suck, but if you spend the time, you'll at the very least learn a lot about yourself and how you really feel about the industry your in and the way that it operates.

Okay, so where do I start?

There are a lot of answers to this question, and all I can really give you is the one that seems to work for me. To get started, you have to outline, outline, and then outline some more. I know we're coming into this a little late, but you're going to spend tonight's writing time outlining how you want your book to go. Break it into sections like introduction, industry history, personal history, and so on. From there, break down those sections into further sections, and from there, drill down even deeper. Before you know it, you'll have a great expanding tree of sections, chapters, experiences and anecdotes you want to share.

Do you have to keep to this early outline exactly? No, of course not, but it will be your roadmap for when you start to veer off course. With this outline, you can always add more later if you want to expand, what the outline really does is gives you the bottom. You HAVE to write AT LEAST as much as you originally map. If you get stuck on one section and you just really don't know where to go, look at your outline and bounce to a section that you're excited to tackle. If you're outline right, there will be plenty of those.

How about the rest of the month?

The rest of the month should be relatively easy. Well, not easy, it will be a challenge, a grueling one at times, but all you have to do is focus on the word count. Sit down every day and write 2,000 words. That may seem like a lot, but you'd be amazed how easy they start to flow once you get into the zone. If you want to take a day off, write 3,000 for the two-days prior, thus staying on track and EARNING that day off. If you start to get overwhelmed, remember that it's only 30 days and embrace the challenge. Also, be sure to sign up at nanowrimo to take advantage of all the daily advice and encouragement they offer.

What's the point of it all?

I understand, personal benefit and introspection only goes so far in the business world. You want to know that the ROI of taking the time to write about your outlook on business may be. Well, believe it or not, the ROI is there, and here are just a few examples of where you can find it:

Social Proof: Writing a book (and for this point, it doesn't really matter if it's published traditionally or digitally as long as it looks professional) is amazing social proof when you're talking to new or prospective clients. It proves that you aren't some fly-by-night or phone, you have invested the time and effort into your profession. You have then sat down and shared all of your experience, and people have found it valuable enough to read (hopefully). It shows that you care, and that will always be important.

Learning: No matter how much you know, you can always no more. It's a fool indeed who thinks he knows everything. In writing a book, you'll be forced to research and delve into the nooks and crannies of your industry that you had previously ignored. In trying to share and teach, you will be made to learn, and that kind of learning usually lasts you a good long time.

Content: If you're involved in the marketing of your business (and if you're reading this, you must be) then you know how much of modern digital marketing revolves around producing quality content. Having a book chock full of unique content will be good fuel for your content engine for months to come. You can write blogs about it, share snippets, release chapters as blog posts, and more. Of course, if you want to try to get it traditionally published, you need to wait until you hear back before you start releasing it to the world for free.

Conclusion

It's one month...31 days. Set aside two hours a night (you can always watch less television or give up an hour of sleep) and just start writing. Don't worry about the quality, you can always go back and edit that later. The goal for this month is to produce as much long-form content as you can over the next 30 days. At worst, you have a bunch of content that you can parcel out and include in your blogs and newsletters. At best, you'll get it traditionally published and be awash in wanna-be clients banging down your door. Either way, it works out pretty well for you.

Original post by Dan Hinds on Wikimotive's blog.

If you read this blog, than you know the name Matt Cutts. In fact, if you’re involved with SEO in any capacity, you should know the name Matt Cutts. Here at Wikimotive, there used to be this one guy who didn’t know Matt Cutts.

He doesn’t work here anymore.

The fact is that he’s one of (if not THE) most influential figure in all of SEO. He is Google’s mouth and even though the information is often timed filtered through layers and layers of PR, it’s still the best info from the source that we have. This week he spoke at PubCon 2013, and we wanted to share the speech with you. First though, a little bit about PubCon for the uninitiated.

PubCon is one of the biggest new media and optimization conferences around. It started way back in 2000 as a more informal gathering though. In fact, it was so informal, it was just a handful of developers and webmasters and optimizers gathered at a pub, hence the name PubCon was born.

Over the years it has grown more and more official, and now it is pretty much the biggest and best conference for optimization, social media, and digital marketing in general. The Las Vegas meeting that was held this past weekend is where all the most notable speakers, including the aforementioned Matt Cutts.

Below, you’ll find Matt Cutts’ speech in its entirety. We’ll do a more in-depth breakdown next week, but for now, through it on during your lunch hour and absorb all of the semi-wisdom and half-revealed truths you can handle.

In this age of harsh Google penalties on fluff content, people are looking for increasingly exciting ways to generate real, quality content. For a lot of companies, the solution has been to start hosting more events. The benefit of events is that you get some press (along with those juicy press releases), and a good SEO company can stretch one event into a ton of valuable content. I know, I know, you don't think you can afford to be spending money hosting charity softball tournaments and the like all over town, but you're thinking too big. Events can be small, and they can even be entirely digital.

It's easy to imagine what offline events look like, so I want to tell you a little more about online events. The current most popular choice is to host a webinar, so I'll use that as an example. When you host a webinar, you don't just get the benefit of the webinar itself. Using a complete digital marketing strategy, you can use your webinar to fuel your email campaigns, social media, blog, and other channels for a week before and after the event itself. First, you promote the webinar and gather participants, then after it's over, you follow up and recap.

To illustrate (literally) this point, I want to share a great infographic with you. It shows some of the different events you can hold, and gives you examples on how to squeeze them for every last drop of marketing juice. As always, it's not a comprehensive guide, but it's great for inspiration as you build up your own ideas. Check it out and let me know what you think. Also, if you have any great events that have worked for you in the past, please, share those too!

successful SEO is largely based around collecting and collating data. Sure, there’s the content creation aspects of the field, but none of that would work without first having a strong understand of the data to base your content around. The trouble is that a lot of people view SEO as a pay to win field, but that’s just not the truth. You don’t have to pay hundreds and thousands of dollars a month to beat the competition. Does it help? Of course, throwing money at a problem will almost always fix it, but the smart SEO practitioner knows that a little bit of sweat is worth a disproportionate amount of money.

To that end, today we want to share a great list of free SEO tools with you.

We’d love to take credit, but the list was put together by Chuck Price and published over at Search Engine Watch. You can find the list here.

The list includes tips on everything from research to content to technical tools, all of them powerful in their own way, and all of them free.

For what it’s worth, I’d like to make an additional recommendation here: the new and improved Raventools. It’s not free, but most businesses can get away with just using the version that’s a mere $99 a month. Maybe your digital marketing budget is slim, but if you can find some way to squeeze out an extra Benjamin to get Raventools, I promise you won’t be disappointed. It’s had its issues in the past and there are a couple minor annoyances they’re still working on fixing after the overhaul, but for the money, it’s one of the best values on the market.

In case anyone is suspicious by the way, no, I’m not being paid by Raventools.

Raventools, if you’re reading this and would like to pay me, you got my number baby.

Remember when Facebook was on the cutting edge of social media, drawing in all of the kids and generally just being the cool place to be? You should, because it was only a few short years ago, but these days, the social network is entering its dotage. As we wrote about last week, Facebook is on the decline with teens. Luckily for Facebook, they have had the wonderful idea of replacing innovation with fat stacks of cash, buying newer, hipper properties as they emerge successful. It worked for them with Instagram, and now they are trying to do the same thing with Snapchat. Will they get it? What will it mean for your social media marketing? We take a look.

According to the Wall Street Journals’ Evelyn Rusli and Douglas MacMillan, Zuckerberg and Facebook are willing and eager to buy Snapchat (owned by Mr. Spiegel). They’re even (allegedly) willing to pay more than the bundle they paid for Instagram. It seems like throwing a cool billion at a problem would solve it, but Zuckerberg and the gang are being stymied by Spiegel’s unwillingness to sell his creation.

The reality is that Spiegel doesn’t need Facebook money. He already has millions in his pocket from investments, and even if Instagram failed tomorrow, he would still walk away a rich man.

“According to people briefed on the matter, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to approach the start-up to discuss an acquisition above $1 billion,” Rusli and MacMillan write. “However, Facebook was rebuffed by Spiegel, who was not interested in selling his service to the social network, according to those people.” Facebook and Snapchat did not return their requests for comment.

Before you call Spiegel an idiot for not taking up Zuckerberg on a billion dollar offer, be aware that experts have valued Snapchat at between 3 and 4 billion dollars. Then again, MySpace was worth a lot of money too back in the day.

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Zach Billings. 

Once upon a time, writers were a rare breed, seldom seen by the world at large. They sat in their basements, scribbling mad words by candlelight and muttering to themselves about deadlines. They’d turn their advances into golden Irish spirits and use that strange fuel to power through the endings of their crazed manifestos. Unfortunately, that kind of behavior is a thing of the past. The Internet and digital marketing especially has made a writer out of many people who never would have claimed the title in years past.

Why?

It’s actually a pretty straightforward answer. It used to be that copywriting was a thing that copywriters did and that was that. Now though, copywriting is the engine that powers digital marketing, especially when it comes to SEO. Google wants fresh content, the people want fresh content, and the volume of content required to really succeed is costly. The good news is you get to decide how you pay, time or money. The bad news is that you HAVE to pay one way or the other to succeed. If you can afford to pay money, then you’re in great shape, but a lot of companies aren’t able to. So, instead, they are spending time and writing their own content.

The trouble with businesses writing their own content is that they don’t know where to turn for advice. They end up reading and learning a lot from other marketers, which is fine, but to really take your writing to the next level, you should take some advice from the masters. To that end, I’ve compiled a list of quotes about writing from some of the best modern writers to ever put ink on a page.

GETTING STARTED

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” —Lawrence Block

I think this is the best writing advice there is. All of the grammar and style tips in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t just start writing. Block was writing novels but it works the same way for business or for a creative endeavor of any kind. Just start writing and don’t worry about where you’re going or how good it is as you’re getting it down. Success comes later, to start, you just need to start.

Actually, Hemingway put all of that a little more eloquently:

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
—Ernest Hemingway

Now, another great piece of advice when you’re starting to write and publish to the world:

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
—Harper Lee

The reality of the internet is that people are mean. Even people who are perfectly friendly in real life won’t hesitate to give you a hard time for every word you write on the internet. It’s easy to get offended, but you have to work around it. If every writer quit the first time someone criticized them online, there wouldn’t be a single writer left anywhere in the world. If you want to write (or if you just NEED to write) then you better toughen up buttercup.

“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.”
-Jack London

This is the other part of it all. Staring at the computer, word processor open, won’t give you anything but a headache. You need to research and read and live and be inspired. Keep a notebook on you as you go about your day and write down little nuances in your field that you think would be interesting to read about. Have coworkers do the same. If you’re really stuck, read what others in your field have written and see if you don’t have you own take on it.

ROAD TO HELL

I had to include this section after I saw two of my favorite writers both had ideas about what the road to Hell (is it sacrilege to capitalize Hell?) is paved with.

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King

I don’t hate adverbs as much as King does (and for someone who hates them, he sure uses them a lot) but I agree they don’t have a place in most writing. This is especially true for business writing, so I think you’re best to just avoid them.

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth

I like King more, but I think Roth has the right of this one. Like I wrote earlier, all of the advice in the world means nothing if you don’t finish. Even if you don’t love what you’ve written, chalk it up to experience and move on to the next one. It’s like playing a sport, you get a little better every day, almost imperceptibly so, but you DO get better.

 HAVE A VOICE

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg

This is great advice, and it definitely applies to business writing, whether you believe it or not. The fact is that people can read about industry news anywhere. There are a million blogs on every topic under the sun. If you want to stand out, you need to do something to make yourself stand out. You need to dare to have a voice, to make a joke, to say what you really think about a topic. Well behaved women rarely make history, and well behaved writers are doomed to be read by no one, a fate worse than death and taxes.

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac

Another great quote from another great beat writer. The point is the same though. You need to be brave with your writing. If you’re conservative, you’ll be boring, and that’s one thing that no one on the internet will stand for.

IN CONCLUSION

“Beware of advice—even this.”
—Carl Sandburg

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Daniel Hinds.