Black Hat SEO News

Steve McCurry, a professional photographer and author of several photography books, shares his reasons for why he blogs on WordPress.com.

MTV’s newest project, the MTV Insights Tumblr aims to teach everything you could ever want to know about Gen Y. It’s a tricky generation that uses all sorts of crazy lingo, but MTV helps to close the gap between generations by compiling a bunch of useful information in one single place.

71% of small businesses NEVER use Pinterest? Imagine the potential, as it’s likely your competition simply hasn’t caught on yet. Pinterest users spent about 2.1 billion minutes on the site in 2012, with women making up 70% of its web audience, and Pinterest buyers spend more money, more often, on more items than any of the other top 5 social media sites.

Who doesn’t want to stride confidently into 2013 armed with a mass of critical knowledge, insight and new found awesome? So I’ve put in some of my `must read’ recommendations and I got your recommendations too, because let’s face it crowdsourcing awesome is just such a smart idea right? So get inspired and put these on your Christmas list (or better yet your Amazon `wish list’ for friends and family to buy) right now.

I’d like to step way back and look at the big picture of where we are today. To use a cliché, this isn't a "30,000-foot view". Rather it's more like the view from the moon.

Marie Forleo, a marketing and lifestyle expert whose weekly newsletter and videos have over 90,000 subscribers in 188 countries, recently created a video with some great tips on how to write faster, and after the video we’ve pinpointed the most pertinent guidelines for small business owners.

By plotting these companies on the chart below, which maps their respective Awareness Quotients (a measure of status) and Engagement Quotients (a measure of participation and interaction), we see that only Barclays and Aviva occupy a leadership position. HSBC’s score seems mainly driven by status, with little social media engagement. However, RBS, Hargreaves Lansdown and Standard Chartered show higher engagement than awareness scores, suggesting a willingness to listen and participate.

Des Walsh, LinkedIn specialist, social media strategist, speaker and coach, founder of the #30dlb, co-author of _LinkedIn for Recruiting_ and _5 Simple Steps to Getting Started on LinkedIn_ tells you why your company needs one.

Every business wants to protect their online reputation and avoid social media fails. However, few have a policy in place to protect themselves from online attacks or poor employee responses. Here are 5 tips for writing an Online Reputation Defense Strategy for your business.

The author believes that in order to drive change—marketers need to focus on the program flow first, and the stock second. Those who publish in large quantities without strategic guidance risk creating pieces of content that will merely distract and potentially annoy customers, instead of helping them to solve their problems.

The redesign aims to help users find their favorite channels and “subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.” By encouraging more users to subscribe to the YouTube channels they love, YouTube will be able to share 10 times more ad revenue with its partners.

In The New York Times today, columnist and semi-professional Andy Rooney impersonator (won 3rd place in Mid-Atlantic regionals last year) Roger Cohen took a break from defending the Iraq War and Rupert Murdoch to talk about how painful it is to hear people who over share on social media.

The music industry should definitely take note. At the time of this writing, the new Myspace has 53 million songs and 14.2 million artists. I would imagine that this will in some way begin to have major marketing potential once it is open to the public.

Why not commit yourself and your company to some content marketing New Year’s resolutions? There are common bad habits practiced by content marketers. Although they all have solutions, some may take more time and effort to correct than others.

Mobile DSPs, like Adfonic's Madison platform, will help shift ad budgets from traditional media into the digital world as media buyers demand a deeper level of targeting. And what better platform to target than the one most of us are in arm's distance of throughout the day: mobile devices.

So the risk of Big Data is from Big Brands with Big Plans to fill Big Data coffers with personal information about us, so they (not us) can analyze the routing between our wallets, our activities, intentions and behaviors and the rest of the marketplace.

The trending themes in our social Save the Seaport tracker create a stark visual reminder of the countless number of lives impacted by Superstorm Sandy and how those of us who live and work in the Seaport and FiDi neighborhoods feel intrinsically connected to each other in our devastated surrounds, which include the Lower East Side, Red Hook, Coney Island, Staten Island and the Rockaways.

Can social media be used internally within an organization to drive increases in revenue? Can it improve employee retention? Increase productivity? This study reveals just what is possible.

Content marketing is greatly improved by including visuals.

Using online marketing promotional videos drives action and increases conversions across the entire sales funnel - from small ecommerce transactions to longer enterprise level sales processes....we are quickly becoming an audience of viewers, not readers

iAcquire has started a series called “12 Days of Linkmas”. It is an entertaining series of beautifully designed "christmas cards" that offers such great advice that you could consider each bit of advice a little gift to link builders.

Quixey App Search Integrates into Ask.com Natural Results Ask.com and Quixey, "the search engine for apps" have announced a deal which aims to bridge the gap between the app economy and the web.

Google launched Google+Communities yesterday. Here's a look at the how, why, what of this latest, greatest, social media development.

Enterprise SEO captures and builds upon opportunities not just across your site, search and social campaigns but also the interplay of data across these functions. Learn how to use this data and execute and align action throughout your organization.

For years Facebook struggled to make an impact in Japan, despite the nation's love of technology and social networking. Now it has finally turned this around, reporting huge growth in the last six months.

When you have (tens of) thousands of products, each with a different price and margin, and multiple categories, PPC life can get complicated indeed. Here are three opportunities for e-tailers. Act quick to implement these to ride the holiday wave.

eConsultancy have released their first "E-commerce Best Practice Compendium" with over 170 tips to improve conversion rates. It explains the customer experience and issues behind what some sites are doing, walking you through the pros and cons.

When you think search, no doubt you think Google. But there are other popular major search engines (e.g., Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu) that you can turn when searching for information, images, maps, videos, products, or something local.

Whether you are augmenting an existing community, starting a member/customer community or developing an interest-based online community, the life cycle is the same. Just like a butterfly, before it can fly on its own it needs careful attention each step along the way. So let's take a deeper look.

We get to know people online first and then, if we think they might be a good fit, we do the in person thing. Then they get to go through the formal interview process and take a writing test. By the time they’re hired, we already know where they’ll fit, how they’ll fit, where their strengths lie, and how others on the team will fill in for their weaknesses.

In this new “techonomy,” the increasingly sophisticated and highly-connected consumer expects more from brands; he or she wants personalization, relevance, convenience, simplicity, and proximity. To stay competitive, brands need a new approach to consumer engagement and conversion.

80% of your social media posts should involve curating others’ content – and 20% should be your own promotional posts. In order to get people to pay attention to social media content, one must first find compelling content to post. With that being said, here are ten great places to find interesting social media content.

A video blog not only makes it easier and quicker to share your content, but also delivers a stronger impact with your readers. Even if someone doesn’t have the time to read your content, they can still listen to it in the background.

As you may or may not know, there are a number of Twitter search operators that can greatly enhance the value of your Twitter search results. If you haven’t used them, or didn’t know about the full range of search operators, you may be surprised at how powerful a Twitter search can be.

The SEO services world has always been a dynamic one where the rules of the game change every year. 2012 has perhaps been more dynamic than the last one. Now...it’s a good time to look back at the changes and formulate effective SEO strategies for the rest of the year.

The Social Marketing ROI book by Olivier is a must-read for all marketers...don’t let the “social” title of the book fool you – Social Marketing ROI offers marketers of all stripes a roadmap to designing, executing and measuring social marketing initiatives.

Differentiating social business from media, Google+ keeps pulling numbers, reviewing the new Myspace, and more.

Microsoft opens Socl, Pinterest keeps pushing numbers, Instagram starts drifting away from Twitter, and more.

Instagram is no longer allowing Twitter users to view its photographs in tweets in an effort to drive more people away from the rival social media company to its own website...

Let that sink into your coffee or beverage of choice or stream of consciousness for a second: 90 percent of consumers now move “sequentially” between different screens the same day. Marketers need to realize we are living in a multi screen world.

Instagram photo contests are a great way to engage your brand audience and create a memorable experience for your fans; however, maximizing engagement and growing your audience requires some planning.

Writing and publishing blog posts, white papers, case studies and ebooks creates demand for a brand’s products and/or services, right? Doing social media marketing does, too, right? Those are common presumptions in marketing today. In actuality, they provide something much more... powerful

icking a digital agency can be an overwhelming task for a marketing manager starting a new digital project. Here are five things you should do to make sure you pick the right agency for your new website, mobile application or social media campaign.

"I have assembled my top predictions for 2013 below, based on daily observations, anecdotal input from others, conferences I have attended, trade publications, analyst reports, and Scotch-fueled late night conversations with others in the field."

"The way I see it, with all the noise being channeled in popular directions, it’s the little buggers swimming opposite the current that tend to pick up solid mileage (the contradiction). Think about it yourself, when there are a billion accounts on facebook, you are only relevant to your friends/immediate circles. The same way, when brands brag about themselves, its friends of the brand that care – the one’s you already have onboard."

Google’s updates are frequent and the rules of the game do shift, but the major elements of onsite SEO and backlinks have been the fuel for better rankings for years. Follow these tips to earn better rankings and build a community around your brand.

Google has introduced new ad formats, AdWords settings and a few high profile tests. This year saw a lot more aggressive monetization by Google, with several high profile changes that increased the real estate for ads at the expense of organic.

Social media internships have the advantage of being roomy enough in terms of position requirements and the ability to try everything out at least once, but eventually some progress needs to be made to show that all of those hours of hanging out on Tumblr and Facebook are helping move you into a buzzworthy direction online.

Malcom Gladwell repeatedly mentions in his book The Outliers the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of about 10,000 hours. So how are you and your organization moving toward that 10,000 hours to become experts in social media?

Don't abandon an SEO strategy and just begin blindly writing content. There is no doubt that a solid blog could boost your search engine rankings. Here are some contributing reasons why producing excellent content will beneficial for your online marketing purists for SEO and beyond!

Almost everyone who is on the web today has the ability to help push, spread, and migrate URLs to the far corners of the web. The key to finding link gold today: learn what's important, know what doesn't work, and develop and master your skills.

It is the time of year when you can almost count on making up for any sales shortfalls that you’ve accumulated throughout the year. Of course, before you can do that, you need to let people know that you’re there. This is where social media comes in really handy.

Conductor, released an infographic that illustrated SEO role salary ranges across the USA. Right now, it is a pretty nice lifestyle to be a search marketer. And "the good life", rather than riches, seems to be a priority to many.

In order to engage in meaningful discussions and get ROI, brands must have well-crafted strategy in mind. Companies should be prepared to provide value and they need to design positive and fun experience via the social web that encompasses the overall story.

A better understanding of advanced search commands, will make you more resourceful when doing site auditing, link prospecting, and competitor analysis. Let's explore the most awesome advanced search operators for Google and Bing and how to use them.

What might happen to the internet, and our world, if Wikipedia bit the dust? I look at some very different opinions in this article.

Join our webinar on climate change and social media on 12/10, 1:00 PM EST/10:00 AM PDT as we discuss how can social media be leveraged to increase its usefulness in times of crises, what impact is social media having on how we learn and engage with these natural disasters, and more.

As the holidays approach, people will almost certainly make several purchases. Thanks to remarketing, you know they’ve been to your site and have some interest in what you’re offering. Drive some serious profits using these smart remarketing tips.

It’s December, and the countdown to holiday events and the New Year has begun. With fewer than 30 days left until 2013, here are 22 easy-to-implement social media tactics to use this December.

Your website is, ideally, the place where you build the deepest, most meaningful, and potentially most profitable relationships. It’s where potential clients and customers should really get a transparent, informative and up-to-date picture of you and your business.

The world of online marketing is very complex, diverse and challenging, but here's why it's a great time to be an Internet Marketer.

With this platform having its own "community" - it is very easy to learn new methods and strategies to implement for your business' website. Sharing ideas and plugin tweaks are a norm on WordPress.org, plus the support your receive from developers is astounding.