WordPress Spam.

There isn’t a corner of the internet that isn’t affected by spam, and blog comments are certainly no exception. For spammers, automation is profit. Comment spam is not usually known for having a high rate of success, but if a spammer can make millions of attempts to get through, even a very small percentage of successful comments can be a huge return on their investment. Most blogs automatically allow public comments on all posts and pages, since this is the default comment setting for WordPress. That default acceptance of comments, coupled with the many ways to automatically detect whether a website is a WordPress blog, and the sheer number of WordPress targets available make them a prime target for spammers designing automated tools to post on websites. These tools are also very attractive to SEO spammers, since WordPress blogs cover every topic imaginable.

Spam on your website isn’t just an annoyance: it can have major implications on your SEO campaign, on your site’s overall ability to rank well, or even show up in the SERPs at all in some cases. Letting too much spam through in the comments can clutter your pages, making it harder for search engines to identify what your page is about in the first place. Not to mention how degrading comment spam is to your sites link power and search engine trustworthiness.

Google Webmaster Central says:

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

That warning is targeted at would-be spammers, thinking about throwing their links all over the internet, but the penalties from Google aren’t just limited to the sites that are pumping links out there. Websites that are drowning in comment spam also have penalties applied to their rankings, link “juice,” and results. These negative effects are amplified when the spammers start targeting your site with tarnished topics such as online gambling (eg. “Play Poker NOW” or “Real online casino!”) or ones with a more pharmaceutical approach (eg male enhancement, “This mom’s 1 crazy simple trick to ______”, or other equally annoying gimmicks). If your site is already fairly new or hasn’t established a good amount of trust, even a small amount of these types of spam comments can hurt your site.

How Do I Identify Spam?

What do you think of when you think of spam? Some think of a heaping pile of links, others obscure or maybe even semi-relevant anchor texts pointing to sales pages or CPA networks, some think of sandwiches (okay, not really the sandwiches anymore). Truth is WordPress spam comes in many forms, some a little bit better cloaked than others. While some is easy to detect, due to obvious keyword promoting, link stuffing, garbled messages, or obvious spammy topics, others are not so easy. For instance, someone leaves a comment on a post that looks like this?

Seems harmless. No links in the comment body, and there is no apparent profiteering going on. The name field was filled with “John” and if you hover over his name, the link points to a site such as “John’s Super Cool Personal Blog” and his email doesn’t seem to be serialized in any way. This is probably not spam. However, the comment adds nothing to the content of the site, includes keywords such as “theme” and “layout” in a WordPress environment which may throw the overall context off a bit. There is a chance this is a legitimate question, and perhaps deserves an answer (new friends are always good, right?).

Now, what if that comment looked a little different?

This comment has an obvious red flag: the comment poster is using the name field to specify an anchor text for the URL entered under “Website” in most comment posting forms. It has the same message body, but it’s obviously spam due to the name entered and the fact that clicking it probably brings you to a spammy site centered around pharmaceutical products. Spammers rely on vague comments that could apply to any post, since the posting is done automatically, so any time you see comments that are unrelated to the specifics of your post, it’s worth looking for other red flags that the comment you’re looking at is just so much spam.

Filtering out spam by hand can be an incredibly time consuming task, though, which is why we’re going to walk you through some of the many automated options to help cut down the amount of spam you need to slog through.

Over the Spam and Through the Bots…

To the WordPress Codex we go. Like I alluded to earlier, WordPress has one of the biggest coding/plugin communities known to CMS users. Virtually anything you need WordPress to do outside of it’s basic functions, you just click the Add New link under Plugins right in the WordPress Admin panel, and search away.

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Akismet

So you’ve just seen how to install Akismet, and conveniently it’s the first step we should take to combating (or preventing) a spam invasion. Akismet is an Anti-spam plugin that detects spam by using data collected from millions of blogs around the world. It runs dozens of checks on the comment to rule out a good chunk of all types of comment spam. Akismet is now included with most WordPress installations, however it’s not ready to go right off the bat. Users need to register on Akismet and chose a payment plan (free is an option, and allows full use of the API for most personal bloggers) in order to receive an API key, which needs to be entered on the Akismet configuration screen in your admin panel.

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AVH First Defense Against Spam

The next component in our spam defense system is called AVH First Defense Against Spam. This plugin installs the same way as Akismet, through the search function in the Add New portion of the Plugins section within the WP admin panel. Once installed, it’s time to configure. AVH F.D.A.S. will require two API keys in order to make full use of it’s anti-spam features. There are three primary components to AVH F.D.A.S. that help fight spam. The first is Project Honey Pot. Second is Stop Forum Spam, and lastly is Spamhaus (which does not require an API key). All three of these networks essentially log IPs that post a great many comments or forum replies in a short amount of time and on a large scale. Project Honey Pot requires that you be an active participant in honey-potting in order to acquire an API key. Learn more about setting up a honey pot here. Stop Forum Spam is a bit easier, and only requires that you register on their forums. Once logged in you can request an API key here.

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There are no further steps to take with AVH F.D.A.S. It runs autonomously in the background, and will alert you to any issues if you enabled the emailing options in the config screens. This plugin will continually monitor the activity of users on your site and reject those that have been flagged as spammers. Your normal visitors won’t know a thing, and no personal or identifying information is stored.

User Spam Remover

Our next item of interest is User Spam Remover. This plugin takes care of all of those spam account should your blog be open for registration. User Spam Remover does just what the name says, removes spam user accounts. Any accounts that were registered and have no valid activity will be cleaned out by this plugin. You can also tell it to disable email notifications for new user registrations. User Spam Remover will also log all of its activity, and even provides a .sql file with all deleted account should you need to restore them. You can tell the plugin to only delete accounts of a certain age or older, and tell it which accounts to never delete regardless of usage (white listing).

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Voilà! No more dusty old unused user accounts. There’s no further actions to be taken. User Spam Remover will run automatically without any need for attention.

Better WordPress reCAPTCHA

Better WordPress reCAPTCHA is another plugin for WordPress that helps defeat automated spammers/bots. It places a reCAPTCHA image (similar to the one displayed on the right) in every comment form to stop bots from being able to comment. Captchas are computer generated images of warped text that only humans can accurately read. When prompted, a user must enter the characters accurately in order to proceed with posting a comment. This is a preventative measure that all bloggers should implement.

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Contact Form 7 with BWP reCAPTCHA Extension

Every site has a use for custom forms. Mostly, custom forms are used to create contact forms that guests can use to send messages to the blog owner. These custom forms can also be used for free reports, informational requests, or other call-to-actions. Usually getting a notification from one of these forms is a good thing, and I hate it when the joy is spoiled when I discover the form was filled out by another useless spam bot. Contact Form 7 is a great tool, and is very versitile, but it works best when the BWP reCAPTCHA extension is added on to provide a spam free way for contact form to be used on your blog.

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Now you have an excellent way for your customers/readers to communicate with you, and a little spam deterrence to go with it. Captchas are a fairly quick thing for humans to solve, and prevent a great deal of automated submissions.

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Email Address Encoder

There’s one other area of spam that we can target in WordPress. Aside from spammers looking to get cheap backlinks, many are also looking to collect contact information. Email harvesting is the act of using automated software to crawl sites relevant to the spammer’s interests, saving any and all email addresses it finds. The spammer likely uses these emails to attempt solicitations, and that can get really annoying if you’re posting email addresses for your users to use, but 99% of your emails end up being from spammers. Well that’s where Email Address Encoder comes in. This lightweight plugin will convert any email addresses contained within forms, pages, blog posts, and other areas into decimal and hexadecimal based entities. The email addresses remain readable to the user, but to automated crawlers the email address is obfuscated, thus severely reducing spam received when posting your email address on a public page.

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Whew! That’s a lot to take in!

We’ve taken a look at identifying spam, reducing comment spam by IP monitoring, blocking comments based on certain spammy characteristics, reducing spam with the help of Google’s reCAPTCHA service. We’ve also taken a look at Contact Form 7′s reCAPTCHA extension and an email address encoder. With these seven plugins, you should see a dramatic reduction in all types of spam associated with your WordPress site. It’s important to remember that spammers are constantly evolving their tactics, so as time goes on some of them will develop workarounds for these spam-blocking techniques. We’ll be sure to keep you posted when we see it’s time to adopt some new tools to block WordPress spam.

The post Keeping Your WordPress Spam Free (Mostly) appeared first on Local SEO Company.

Any errors on your website can cause serious problems both for visitors and your SEO.  If the first experience a visitor has with your website is a 404 page, they are very likely to bounce off to another website for the information or services they need, instead of looking for the page on your site.   I know when I follow a link from Google and hit a 404 error, I immediately hit the back button and check the next result on the page.  Visitors who are already on your site and follow one of your internal links to a 404 are more likely to have a negative opinion of your site, just like you would feel less secure about shopping in a store with a broken staircase.

In addition to discouraging visitors, 404s hurt your site’s SEO.  Search engines penalize websites that give them 404 errors, or pages that look like they’re otherwise “under construction.”  Google (appropriately) believes that searchers are looking for reliable websites that have relevant information, not placeholders or sites that are not being maintained and kept up to date, so any site with lots of broken links sends a signal that your site should be lower in the results.  Getting rid of as many of those errors as possible will help reduce your ranking penalties, and significantly improve the visitor experience.

What is a 404?

Lets start off with an explanation of 404 errors. When your website shows someone a 404 page its because they have attempted to visit a page or file on your site that doesn’t exist.  Sometimes its a problem with your website, such as a link on your site that is taking them to this page and causing the 404.  A lot of the time it is actually not anything you did, and instead its caused by a link from another website or an automated system scanning websites.  One thing is constant, no matter how the user got to the 404 page, you need to figure it out and deal with it.  Here’s what the default 404 page from an Apache server looks like:

Most good content management software like WordPress comes with support for custom 404 pages. Replacing the default Apache 404 page is important for many reasons.  The default page is unformatted, and gives the user the impression that a terrible problem has occurred.  It’s important to remember that many of your visitors are not particularly familiar with the different errors that a website can produce, and may not be able to tell the difference between a trivial 404 error caused by a typo and a more serious error like a 503 gateway error or 500 server error.

Making a friendly 404 page that matches the look and feel of the rest of your website immediately communicates the fact that the website itself is still functioning, and casual language can help put your visitors at ease.  You can also take the opportunity to suggest working pages that they may have been looking for based on the url, which reduces your 404 bounce rate.  You can get an example of that by viewing our 404 page here at Local SEO Company: www.localseocompany.net/non_existant_page.  You will notice that the URL for non_existant_page isnt a link, I dont want to create another 404 for Google to see.  You will have to copy and paste it into your browser.

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I won’t go too deeply into how you actually create a custom 404 page in WordPress.  Most good themes have this functionality built in with easy methods to customize the page.  If your theme doesn’t already have a 404 page for you to edit then you can read up on the WordPress Codex at their Creating an Error 404 Page entry.  I’m linking to the Codex for this because it will remain up to date with new versions of wordpress, so it’s the best resource for creating your own 404 pages.

How To Monitor 404s In WordPress

Thanks to Weberz Hosting we have the 404 Redirected plugin (which we use to handle 404 redirection on this site).  404 redirection works by identifying a url that resulted in a 404 error, figuring out what existing page the user was most likely attempting to reach, and creating a permanent redirect from the non-functional url to the correct page.  In my opinion, 404 Redirected is the best plugin available for WordPress to tackle this problem, as the interface is very intuitive and the plugin automatically attempts to identify appropriate redirections.

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Configuring 404 Redirected is very easy.  The options screen has 22 settings, and that might seem like a lot to some people, but the defaults are actually pretty good.  Here is a screenshot of the optimal settings.

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With these settings in place your WordPress will first check the incoming page to see if its a close match for any other page on your site, and if it is an automatic redirect will be done.  For example, lets say a user visits your site and you have a page with this URL:  http://www.domain.com/something.  A visitor comes to your site but the URL they enter on is http://www.domain.com/somethin.  Normally that missing g at the end will force your site to show the user an error page.  404 Redirected will catch this and automatically redirect that visitor to http://www.domain.com/something.  After successfully identifying an appropriate redirect, the plugin will permanently redirect all traffic from that incorrect url to the right one.  This feature catches most common misspellings, which is great if you have people manually typing in urls in their browser, or links to your website through twitter or other social media.

Manually Redirecting 404 Errors

Now lets say the user visits http://www.domain.com/lskdghf.  Assuming you dont have a very strange page named lskdghf, that user is going to get sent to a 404 page (hopefully your nice new custom one).  Since 404 Redirected can’t make any reasonable guesses as to what that user was looking for, it will log the error in its WordPress admin page and you can view the log of errors and deal with them manually.

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The screenshot above shows the admin page I visit most often in my WordPress install.  This Captured 404 URLs page makes it easy to redirect any incoming visitors to the page you think they wanted, or just the page you want them to visit.  Hopefully when you see this screen, it says “No Records To Display”, but usually after a few days of waiting you will see at least a couple.  If you’ve just moved or redesigned your site you might be unlucky enough to see pages and pages of 404 results here.  If, like most of us, you see something in this log then it needs to be dealt with.  Capturing those users and the general SEO benefits are just to valuable to ignore.

Placing your mouse over the entry you want to redirect gives you four options: Edit, Trash, View Logs and Ignore 404 Error.  Edit allows you to redirect the error to anywhere on your blog, or to an external url.  Trash just deletes the error, which will allow it to re-appear in the list if it happens again.  View Logs shows you the full log for this error, which includes the IP address and time of every error.  The last option, Ignore 404 Error, puts the error into an ignore list which makes it stop showing up in the list.

Edit

Clicking on the edit link takes you to a page that allows you to redirect the bad URL to a good one.  You have a few choices here.  You can redirect the visitors to an external page, or an internal page.  If your sending them to an external URL then it just has to be a valid working URL, this could be http, mailto, or any other type of link.  You can also chose between 301 or 302 for the redirect.  These http codes have specific meanings.  A 301 redirect is permanent.  By selecting this you are telling the visitors web browser, or the search engine bot, that this page has moved and it is a permanent change to your site.  A 302 redirect is temporary.  These might be used if your site is under maintenance and you are re-arranging things, but plan on putting those links back, or aren’t sure that this is going to be the final destination for that traffic.

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When this page came up the URL field was already filled in.  So all we have to do is select where we want to redirect it to and hit the Update Redirect button. Nine times out of ten your going to be selecting an existing post, page, category, or tag from your site.  I moved my site from a static html site with a blog in the /blog/ directory, to a site completely based on WordPress about 2 weeks ago. This left a lot of incoming traffic causing 404 errors.  The example here is one of the most common ones, its a tag page that needs to be redirected to the new tag page.  This is going to go from http://www.localseocompany.net/blog/tag/rss-feed/ to http://www.localseocompany.net/tag/rss-feed/.  In the screenshot below you will see what the dropdown menu looks like, it shows you posts, pages, categories and tags (in that order.)

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For most of these it will be pretty easy to tell what you should do.  In the list above it shows four entries.  We just fixed the first one.  The next one is just our example, so it can be sent to the Trash.  The third one is also easy, its obviously a broken link somewhere. But you can tell that it is meant for the SEO Service Pricing page, so just redirect it there.  The last one is a mailto link.  This one cant be done with the dropdown menu on this page, you have to put the URL to redirect to in the External URL field on this page, then hit the Update Redirect button.

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Anything that doesnt seem to have a logical place, or that doesnt make much sense I just redirect to the Home page.  Whatever page on your site you have set to show up at the root, for me I always name it Home.

Trash

The trash feature doesnt really need much of an explanation.  When you click on this link it removes the entry from the list and puts it in the trash.  You can see in the list above that there is a line on the screen that says Captured URL’s (4) | Ignored 404′s (489) | Trash (17).  If you click on the Trash link here you will be shown everything in the trash currently and you can clear it all with the Empty Trash button.

View Logs

The View Logs link takes you to the Log page with it filtered to just show entries from this 404 error.  It shows you the URL, IP Address, Referrer, Action Taken, and Date.  The URL is the same one you saw on the list of 404s.  The IP Address can be used to do some research and see if you can figure out who or what caused this.  I only find this useful to figure out if it was a bot such as google or bing, or if it was a normal visitor.  I dont actually use this screen to much, it only comes into play when there are a lot of 404s to the same URL and I really need to figure out where its coming from.

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Ignore 404 Error

Generally, you don’t want to ignore most 404 errors, since the whole idea is to capture that traffic and redirect it elsewhere on your site. Sometimes, though, 404 errors are the result of bots scanning your website for vulnerabilities — not legitimate traffic.  When you learn how to identify these kinds of 404 errors (and make sure the holes they are attempting to exploit are covered) you can safely ignore them. Most of my ignore list right now is attempted exploits of the Timthumb vulnerability (you can read more about it at Mark Maunder’s blog).  After running the Timthumb vulnerability scanner I didn’t need to be notified every time a bot tries and fails to break into my blog, so it’s easier for me to just ignore them.  Here’s a little bit of my current ignore list (there’s about 30 pages of similar looking urls):

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Conclusion

Keeping track of incoming 404 errors, creating a useful 404 page, and actively managing 404 redirection takes some time to set up, but the result is a website with better search engine appeal, better functionality, and a lower bounce rate.  Over time, you’ll find that you have to spend much less time with 404 errors, as common errors are slowly added to the automatic redirection list and you learn to identify the errors left by failed attacks instead of visitors.

The post Managing 404 Errors in WordPress appeared first on Local SEO Company.

Today I’ve gathered a few articles from other blogs that highlight a few of the different options available for promoting your website besides building backlinks.  While I tried to cover a lot of bases, this is by no means an exhaustive list.  The key to remember in all this is that any time you find yourself feeling like there’s nothing to do but throw links at your site until it reaches the top, take a step back and see if there isn’t a better way to use your time and budget.

First we look at a very unique plan to get more content on your site and more visitors to your pages.  This post actually comes to us from the CEO of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin.  In this article he talks about the cost of direct link buying versus purchasing the whole site.  In his example he talks about buying a link on a blog, or just buying the whole blog and migrating it to your business site.  The example is well laid out and makes a lot of sense.  Anyone looking into a big paid links campaign might want to rethink it after reading this post.

Link: Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that’s a Strategy.

Next up we have a post from Miranda Miller, a staff writer at Search Engine Watch.  This one is all about Pinterest.  If you run an e-commerce site and dont have Pinterest integrated, you are already behind the curve.  One of the most interesting things you learn here is that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google +1 right now.  For an e-commerce site, or a brick-and-mortar store, Pinterest can drive massive amounts of traffic.  For some people its bringing in more than search engines and PPC.  This post walks you through a great case study and then some simple tips to get started.  If you’re looking to get more traffic and better conversions then Pinterest is a good place to be looking.

Link: Pinterest Marketing Tips & Tricks to Drive Targeted Traffic

For our third entry we look at a post on community building by Thomas Høgenhaven, creative director at Chrisper Economy. Here we get actual statistics about the use of community building to drive traffic and interaction on a website.  The best way to describe this entry is with a direct quote:

“In this post I focus primarily on community building. At SearchLove last year, Rand had a slide stating a 34% growth in 4 months, primarily from Q+A, YouMoz, the blog and user profiles. Add to this that community members are some of the best link builders you’ll ever find. Getting community right is a huge win.”

Link: What Community Builders Can Learn From Research

The final thing we should all be looking at after reading and possibly implementing any of the methods above is Analytics.  Avinash Kaushik, co-founder of Market Motive, has put together a great set of tips for getting the most out of your Google Analytics data.  This article is a must read for anyone who uses Google Analytics on a regular basis.

Link: Google Analytics Tutorial: 8 Valuable Tips To Hustle With Data!

Thats it for this week.  Next week I will be starting a weekly series on daily SEO tasks for small business owners.  This will focus on simple things you can do throughout the day that wont take up too much of your time, but will deliver great value.

The post ROI Is More Important Than A #1 Ranking appeared first on Local SEO Company.

Reading the blogs, following the forums, and generally paying attention might get you to believe that even thinking about some of the tools that so-called black hat SEOs use will cause your sites rank to plummet. While the usage of these tools can definitely get you penalized if used to the full extent of their capabilities, the white hat SEO professional can benefit hugely from responsible use of many of these tools.

Today I am going to cover one of the most hated tools in the blogging world: the one tool that has increased the amount of blog spam created on a daily basis by an order of magnitude since it was released. I am speaking of ScrapeBox. This tool, if you choose to use it for this purpose, can send out hundreds of thousands of blog comments a day. How many stick is anyones guess, but the sheer volume of outgoing spam makes it seem like a worthwhile investment for black hat SEO practicioners. That isn’t what I use the tool for, and in my opinion it isn’t what you should be using it for either.

One of the first things you will notice when using this tool is its speed. ScrapeBox can process more posts and more search requests than any other tool I have in the same amount time. It is fast. When you first run the tool you will also notice the plethora of features. Not all of the features will be helpful to everyone, and you won’t need to understand how every feature works to use the program. Its nothing to be overwhelmed by, most of what I use it for is pretty simple to accomplish.

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The main use this tool serves for someone looking to save some time is finding relevant blog posts on good domains. Load up your keyword list for a client, hit the harvest button and wait for posts to come in. There is a simple process I follow then: Remove Duplicates, Scan for PageRank, Remove 0 and N/A PageRank posts, Scan for Outbound Links, Remove any posts with >80 outbound links, check the remaining posts to see if they are alive. At the end of this I usually have a decent list of blogs and blog posts that have good rank, are relevant to my clients business, and are still alive. This can take me about 10-15 minutes, and most of that is waiting on progress bars. Right here is where the bad line can be crossed. This list could be fed into the auto-poster and you could have it post all the comments in one big flood. That is the line that most white hats dont want to cross, and rightfully so. Not only will it lead to complaints at your web host, but it can also lead to penalties from search engines, your ip and domain being blocked by anti-spam services, and many site owners/bloggers being angry at you for spamming. ScrapeBox won’t stop you from crossing that line, but common sense should.

So now we have a list of blogs and posts that might be useful. I use this list in a few different ways. First up you can give the list of posts to your client and ask them to post relevant posts on those pages to help their SEO, and to get them into the conversation on blogs related to their industry. This can have the added benefit of starting to build your client up as an expert in his or her field. If your client is paying you a bit more, for you to do that manual work then by all means go and do it yourself or have one of your employees do the work. The second way to use this list is to cut it down to just the root domain, clean it up for only unique sites, and then go through and find ones that might be worth trying to guest post on for your client.

In the end the tool speeds up the process of finding more places to get your clients name, links, and information, and you don’t have to use the spammy functionality to do this. This can save you time, effort and money. Tools like this shouldn’t be overlooked just because they can be abused. If they offer real value and help your process without forcing you to cross that dreaded line into the black hat, or even grey hat world, then you should keep your options open.

The post Drawing A Line In The Sand appeared first on Local SEO Company.

I have been making my living doing SEO, specifically Local SEO, for about two years now.  I have learned a lot over that time, and I hope to add to the ongoing discussion in this field.  I plan on adding new posts to this blog at least once a week, hopefully more often. There is a lot to do around here so stick with us as we add a lot of content to the site and the blog.

First thing I want to ask everyone is: What do you think of the new site?  Is anything missing?  Is anything broken?

The post Relaunching the site! appeared first on Local SEO Company.

Research, Research, and Research

Starting up a new blog always starts with an idea. What topic will the blog be about? What perspective will you take on the topic? What sort of content should be produced? If you plan to make money from the blog, usually from contextual advertisements and affiliate programs, then you must have a clear idea of all of this and more before you begin. Anyone familiar with SEO will tell you that you need to begin with a topic, and try and narrow it down as much as possible. The next step should be to find keywords in close relation to your primary topic that all have a good volume of search traffic while having a low or weak competition at the same time. You can read more about keyword research in our SEO learning guide.

Don’t Expect Overnight Results

Many people start out blogging with high hopes of taking the blogosphere by storm. Chances are you will not become an overnight blogging sensation. In fact, the chances that anyone but your few close friends and your mom will be reading your blog within the first few months are rather very slim. These things take time and persistence. Too many people start out strong and only last a few weeks to a couple months before they feel like they’re hopeless and proceed to give up.

Getting regular traffic takes time and constant attention to many details, but most of all it takes patience. It’s a common belief in the SEO community that things like this usually take about 6 months before you start seeing anything worth while. If after this time frame you still have no traffic to your site, you’re probably doing something wrong. Don’t give up, just do your research!

Other Tips

Unique content is king. Nothing makes the search engines happier than a big block of fresh keyword rich content that’s highly relevant overall to the keywords they’re indexing you for. Don’t settle for copying big blocks of text from other sites or bloggers and just making small comments, or perhaps none at all. Content scraping does not make as much money as a genuine unique source such as yourself.

Regular posting is important, especially keeping up on news topics relating to your niche. If your blog makes regular updates, Google and other search engines would be more inclined to visit your site more often to slurp up more information. This effect is amplified when you’re posting about popular news topics. If the search engines detect that you stay current on the times and update regularly and often, you will gain authority and perhaps tap into the massive traffic generators known as news aggregators.

If you’re only in it for the money, take up SEO and hire a writer, you will be much more profitable and much less miserable. Let’s face it, if you’re not enthusiastic about the topic or the writing, the product will not be quite as good as it could be. If you have a paid writer dedicated to writing high quality content for good profitable keywords, there’s a good chance you’ll profit off of any investments into SEO and content.

The post A Blogger’s Beginning Woes appeared first on Local SEO Company.

So what exactly is SMO?

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a rather new term in the industry but is quickly becoming an essential component in any complete SEO campaign. Commonly referred to as Social SEO, SMO involves using a company’s social media properties to boost traffic and brand awareness. Mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ have become an essential way for businesses to communicate with their customer base. While SEO drives traffic from search engines to your site, SMO deals with directly interfacing with your customers on their social feeds.

How does one implement SMO?

There are two primary ways to incorporate SMO practices into your SEO campaign.

- One is via promoting your business or brand via the social media platforms. If your business does not currently have active accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even other social media sites, then you’re not doing all you can do to make your company as visible as possible. Customers love to communicate via social media, and there are many opportunities to catch their attention with your services and products. Not to mention it’s a great way for new customers to find your business.

- The other is by adding social media functionality to your site’s content. A great example is right to the right of this very text. You can add social media functionality to any of your content simply by displaying similar buttons to the ones on the right. The Facebook Like button, Google’s +1 button, and others allow for readers to easily share and distribute information you want them to.

Yes, SMO takes time and effort, but the bounties it can provide are well worth the time and sweat put into it.

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Both search engine optimization (SEO) and search marketing (SEM) require a specialized set of skills. SEO requires knowledge of search engine and how to effectively optimize a website or web page. SEM requires knowledge and understanding of online marketing, online advertising, and keyword marketing. Although it can be intimidating diving into either of these fields, the key is simply identifying where you will be best served.

Search engine optimization is a broad term for all of the various tricks and techniques used to promote a website within search engine results. Sites with good SEO (whether intentionally applied or a result of natural growth) will appear higher in the results pages than those with poor SEO. Since so few search engine users bother to even go on to the second page of results — let alone third, fourth, and fifth — you need to have good SEO if you want to see any traffic from search engines.

SEO can take time to enact, and results cannot be guaranteed. For some a more direct approach to appearing on search engine results is advisable, which is why search engine marketing is a growing field in advertising. SEM puts ads for your site in prominent positions on search engine results for the terms you specify. Unlike traditional marketing, you only pay when someone clicks through the ads, making it an excellent source of cheap, targeted traffic.

So what does your website need? You’ll have to consider a few factors before making your decision. SEM works quickly and easily, without any changes to your website or new content being generated, so it’s a good choice if you need results now. Most savvy internet users pick out search engine ads easily, though, and tend to be wary of clicking on non-organic results. SEO is a good long term investment, as having good results will generate more traffic than ads alone. Good SEO will also get you results in keywords you may not have targeted directly, helping you target more of your market than just with SEM.

A common tactic is to use SEM to get your link on search engine pages while waiting for your improved SEO to take hold and generate solid results. That’s why Local SEO Company offers both tactics for our clients. We can even help you determine which services fit your unique needs better.

The post The Differences Between SEO and SEM appeared first on Local SEO Company.

Article Marketing is as simple as writing a few hundred words about a topic related to your business and posting it on a blog or submitting it to a website that will publish it online. Many websites have a minimum word count of 500 to 600 words, although others will allow any length. It’s important to make sure that any articles you publish are well thought out, complete, and free of errors such as typos. Quality writing is important in these articles, as it could be the first way a customer hears about your company. Your content should be clean, unique, and useful. Duplicate content will not only hurt your credibility with readers, it will also hurt your search results.

Another important thing to consider when writing your articles is the title choice. Using a title that includes the keywords you want to target (the words that people will be typing into search engines) will help connect your company to those terms. You should also use keywords as the text for links back to your website within the article if you are able to. Some sites do not allow links inside the article, but do allow them in an author information area or resource box, where you can use the keywords as anchor text too.

Getting started as an article writer isn’t always easy, which is why Local SEO Company offers article marketing services for your company as part of our comprehensive SEO packages. We can offer anything from article submissions to hundreds of sites to creating unique, targeted content for your articles.

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Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia (formerly Wikicities) recently proposed the idea of an internet blackout, where supporters around the globe would shut down their websites to speak out against the unethical censorship power this bill proposes to give to the government. He said that, in hopes of sending a strong message, that in the event of SOPA passing, Wikipedia’s English site would shut down all around the globe, allowing no one access. A poll on Wikipedia showed that 87% of the users are in support of the proposed blackout. Many big names are on board with the internet blackout and against SOPA (and it’s congressional counterpart PIPA) including Google, Facebook PayPal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, Mozilla, AOL, eBay, Yahoo!, IAC and more.

These big name companies have formed a coalition against dangerous legislation, known as the NetCoalition. They release the following infographic explaining the differences between SOPA, PIPA, and the much more widely supported OPEN act.

The post Big Online Businesses Consider Internet Blackout; Support #OPEN over #SOPA appeared first on Local SEO Company.