Timothy Carter

In the world of digital marketing, they say that content is king. With carefully crafted content marketing, you can easily influence your target audience and convert them into paying customers more effectively. And with quality content you can keep your audience in the know. On the other hand, link building is a crucial component of online marketing that no campaign should do without. By building links, you will help the search engine’s determine the importance and value of your brand or website. So . . . which should you place more value on? Content marketing and link building Efforts are two of the most important pieces of a successful Internet marketing campaign. However, evidence suggests that content marketing has the edge over services that just build links. That’s not to say you should abandon one in favor of the other, but the following are compelling reasons to regard content marketing as having more to offer than link building. Content Marketing is More Measurable Than Link Building Just what is the value that links give to a site? Experts agree it’s a bit difficult to quantify, although links certainly contribute toward improvements in a site’s ranking and traffic. On the other hand, with content you can measure your success by determining how many site visits and links are generated by each piece of content. Content also allows us to see how many social votes it gets and how many visits it garners from search engines and social media. We can also determine which keywords have been used by browsers to locate a piece of content. Can you determine how much revenue a new piece of content has generated for your business? Certainly. You can quantify how much revenue has been generated by each unit of quality content per day, per week, per month, or per year. Content Marketing is More Natural Than Link Building By generating high-value content, you will naturally gain and craete links. Great content is a natural link bait; it inspires people to share, blog about, and link to it, if they find it interesting. As for linking, in most cases you will find that when you analyze submission-based link-building activities, people link to your content not because they like you, but because you requested a link back to your own site or you paid for those links. Link Building is More Expensive & Time Consuming Than Content Marketing While there are some affordable SEO, a lot are offering their services at expensive rates. Finding great copywriters isn’t very hard, though. There are plenty of great writers out there who have strong copywriting skills and are not only creative, but also provide their services at reasonable prices. Link building efforts is a time consuming process that requires building massive Excel spreadsheets and keeping track of which links are actually generating traffic and which ones are hurting the website’s ranking position. Link building is a long and tedious process that requires patience. The cost of link building can also be restrictive. Writing content, on the other hand, requires a few hours and ingenuity, but that’s it. After it’s finished, it may need polishing, but it doesn’t require massive amounts of time looking at daunting spreadsheets that may require a detail-oriented person to navigate it. Content marketing costs less to produce than link building. Hiring a content marketer is more cost effective than a link builder because the work is less intense in most instances. Content marketing is effective for less money than most people think. Hiring a content marketing professional through a crowd sourcing firm will cost less than people think. The Value of Content Marketing is More Measurable Than Link Building The value of content versus the value of link building is surprising. In part, because the value of a link is difficult to quantify. It’s much easier to measure how many links content has created or how much traffic has visited the site based upon the last post than it is to measure the value of link building. It’s always easier to measure social votes and referral visits than to try and measure how much traffic was gained from adding a single link. It’s easier to determine how much revenue content generates if the purchase is made directly after reading the content. Most content generators can quantify that content will generate a certain amount of dollars over a period of time, but link building services focus on increasing rankings. From increased rankings, you can get more traffic, but this does not always equate. Content Marketing is More Scalable via GIPHY You can either outsource your link building and other SEO needs or you can build your own team. However, you should be warned: Setting up a competitive SEO team isn’t a stroll in the park. There are many things you need to consider to succeed. You need to find the people with significant experience in SEO, pay substantially for their talents and skills, and hope they turn out to be as good as they claim. If you hire the wrong people or people whose experience is limited, you run the risk of having to devote many hours to training them, testing them, and supervising them to make sure they do the proper job for your clients. If you are an SEO agency looking for resources to help you scale, please take a look at our white label link building solutions. On the other hand, setting up a team of copywriters is much easier. They are cheaper and not difficult to find. One look at their samples (you can test them if you must), and you should have a grasp of the quality of output you can expect from them. And if they decide to leave, you won’t be set back far because there are plenty of other great writers on the market to go around. Content marketing is scalable, but link building is less scalable. When you are scaling a content marketing team, it’s easier than

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), images matter. In this post, we will be discussing SEO for images. More specifically: What is image optimization or SEO? Why is image SEO so critical? What can you do to enhance your on-site SEO with images? If I add an image will it add value to the content or detract? Do my responsive images “show” vs. “tell” by enhancing the page or post dialogue? Or, are they just glorified stock images? Why Photos & Images Matter for SEO Just as video can add to the user experience, so can responsive images. Whether it is a photograph, artwork, graphic design or some sort of chart or graph, an image optimization can provide a great deal of information and greatly enhance the user experience. When a popular photograph or other image is shared on social media channels, Google, Bing and other search engines will rate the originating website or web page much more highly and boost its rankings on search engine and keyword image search results. Images are much easier to produce than video, although video has become easier to provide in recent years with webcams and handheld cameras. But images often times can be produced very easily and for very low cost when website owners and contributors can provide digital photos, proprietary artwork, graphs and other designs that illustrate information, entertain people and offer unique ways to demonstrate how something works or has an impact within a particular context. Your first goal is to optimize your image to maximize user experience. While the experience of your users is qualitative, and does not directly influence your search rankings, Google or many search engines does take user behavior into consideration. If you have better images, you’ll have lower bounce rates, and lower bounce rates means you’ll enjoy a higher authority. How to Optimize Your Images for SEO Optimizing your images with the appropriate meta data or structured data is important not only for Google Image search, but it will also ensure your blog posts themselves will be properly optimized. While Image SEO search gets less attention than search engines traditional search function, it can be a source of significant organic traffic, but your blog posts with embedded and properly optimized images can help your content to rocket to the top of the SERPs. Image Inclusion Your first step is to include images wherever you can. That doesn’t mean stuffing images into every nook and cranny of your website or web page, but it does mean having at least one significant image SEO for every major post on your blog. Without images, your site will appear bland, and people will be less willing to read your content or stick around. Image Appropriateness Next, you’ll have to make sure your Google images are appropriate for your content. It isn’t enough to pair a picture of a hamburger with an article about cat behavior simply because you “needed” an image SEO. Your images should be appropriate to the content they’re intended for, and if possible, they should be original. This will keep users on your page for longer, which can improve your authority. Image Captions As an added measure, it’s a good idea to include captions with your images. While image optimization captions won’t necessarily help your images rank higher in a search, they will help users understand why you’ve chosen specific images for your posts, which leads to an overall better user experience. Appropriate Alt Text Various Google updates have seriously cracked down on the overuse of keywords, including one or two keywords in your alt text can still help you rank for target queries. To add alt text, add alt=”example text here” to your image alt tags, where “example text here” stands in for your keyword-optimized description. Just be sure that your description is appropriate to the actual image SEO & content. Appropriate File Name In addition to an alt tag, you’ll want to make sure your image titles are appropriate. For example, if you’re using that hamburger picture from earlier, titling it “Delicious looking hamburger” is much more appropriate than “Broken ukulele.” This image title will clue Google in to the image’s content, and will help it appear in more relevant searches. Adding Images to Your XML Sitemap As a final tactic, be sure to include all your images in your XML sitemap. Google peruses your sitemap to learn how your site is laid out and to discover new content on your site, so make sure it is updated regularly. Otherwise, your images will be harder to find, which could negate the effectiveness of your other strategies. Your Images Should Load Quickly  We discuss optimizing image load speed in a separate post. Where to Find Public Images The first question most people ask about public images is “where can I find them?” The prospect of free-to-use images is certainly appealing, but that means nothing to someone who doesn’t know where to look. Finding high quality public images can be challenging, but the extra effort you put into finding perfect specimens is typically worthwhile. One of my personal favorite sources for free public images is Photo Pin, a search resource that scours Creative Commons photos from Flickr and similar image hosting sites. If you’re looking for something specific—like a penguin for your post about Google’s Penguin update—one search can give you dozens of options. However, when you find the image you need, make sure to check its licensing. Some images cannot be used commercially. Some other sources for free public images include: Wikimedia Commons Compfight(which also offers paid unique stock photos) Pixabay FreeImages.com Pexels.com No matter where you find your public images, you’ll also have to give proper attribution to the original owner. Different sources have different requirements for the type of language you need to include, but in general, you’ll need to say something along the lines of “Image courtesy of ____,” calling out the name of the photographer or creator and including

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is an important feature for any link-building campaign. UTM parameters can be added to your links in order to track which sources are driving traffic and conversions to your website. With this information, you’ll know what marketing tactics are working best and how they affect conversion rates. In today’s article, we’re going to discuss the basics of UTM tracking as well as some of the most common uses for it. What is UTM? UTM parameters are codes that you add to your links in order to track which sources are driving traffic and conversions. Adding UTM’s will allow you to see where a visitor is coming from, what they clicked on the link (landing page), and how much time they spent there before converting or leaving. These parameters can be added using either the URL of an individual landing page by adding them after the ‘&’ or “?” symbol at the end of the URL. Why is UTMs Important? UTM parameters are an important part of link-building campaigns because they allow you to track the sources, landing pages, and conversion rates for each. This way, you can see which marketing tactics work best for your website. When you use UTMs, you can gauge the success of your link-building campaign. This way you can save both time and money when performing these high-priority campaigns. How to Track Links Using UTMs If you want to track where your links are coming from, there is an easy way. Just add UTM parameters at the end of a URL in order to see what page was clicked on. UTM’s can be added using either a landing page or simply by adding them after the ‘&’ symbol following the link’s web address (URL). If you’re just tracking one specific link with multiple attributes, it will look like this-‘link text & utm_medium=social’. There are two ways that these fields can be formatted for more than one attribute; start each field with an ampersand and separate all values with semicolons. Should You Use UTMs by Yourself? UTMs are a great way to track sources and landing pages, but they aren’t effective if you don’t have the time or resources for managing campaigns. If this sounds like your situation, it’s best not to use UTMs on your own. Instead partner with an agency that can help. This way, you can focus on running your business, while a reputable link building agency does the rest. How We Can Help Link-building isn’t easy. Hiring an agency is the best route for getting the job done effectively. If you’re looking for an agency to help with your campaign, contact our team. Our link-building team will work with you to add UTM parameters to your targeted URLs to maximize the performance of your campaign. Contact Us Today! UTM parameters have long been used as a technical way of tracking the performance of links. Allow us to help your campaign reach its full potential. To learn more about link building, please take a look at our beginner’s guide to link building. Otherwise, let us help you with your digital marketing needs. Contact us today to speak to a member of our team.

Here is another golden SEO tip for beginners: Without a quality backlinks, your website is dead in the water; but with the wrong kind of linking strategy, you will put your site in an even worse state. Linking strategies are among the most innovative aspects of search engine optimization. Links determine your website’s popularity and they keep the traffic flowing to you. But not all backlink strategies are created equal. Free backlinks are usually free because they’re not worth as much. Far from it. There is one linking strategy that is clearly superior to all the rest. According to SEO experts, one-way link building rules them all. What is one-way link building, and how is it better than any other link-building campaign? Consider the two link-building strategies that are used the most often: reciprocal linking and one-way linking. Let’s discuss how both of them work, examine their advantages and disadvantages, and see how one outperforms the other. Tactic No. 1: Reciprocal linking As its name suggests, reciprocal linking is a strategy in which you ask another webmaster to link to your site, and in return you link back to his or hers. One of the biggest advantages to using this strategy is that it provides your website with free exposure. And if the site you effect a reciprocal link with has a high pagerank or is a good authority site that enjoys a healthy amount of traffic, you can be sure that your site will enjoy a surge in traffic as well as an increase in ranking. However, search engines have recently stopped placing as high a value on this type of linking strategy. This is not to say that Internet marketers should give up on reciprocal linking altogether; rather, you should stop focusing your primary energy on creating reciprocal links. The main and perhaps only disadvantage to using reciprocal linking lies in the fact that your traffic is shared. This strategy may encourage your visitors to wander off to all the other sites you are linking to. And if you’re running an e-commerce site, while you may be getting traffic from other sites, you could also be losing some opportunities in sales as your regulars visit those other sites. In the worst case, the imbalance in traffic could all lean in the other sites’ favor. Tactic No. 2: One-way linking strategy With one-way link building,  your site gets inbound links from other Internet locales without your having to link back to them. News sites, entertainment sites, and mega-prolific and ultra-authoritative bloggers enjoy a great amount of inbound or one-way links on a consistent basis. What’s great about this approach is that you don’t have to worry about possibly linking back to bad sites. Most importantly, one-way links are judged by search engines to be the most valuable linking strategy, because inbound links signify a vote of confidence on the part of other sites in favor of yours. This means other site owners have found your website to be highly valuable and they are recommending your content to their visitors. Keep in mind that one-way links are most beneficial if the sites that link to yours have a greater domain authority than yours, or have achieved roughly the same level, at least. When you can attract links from such sites, search engines will ultimately award even greater value to your site. Face-off: Reciprocal vs. One-way Of the two, one-way link building strategy definitely takes the blue ribbon. As mentioned earlier, search engines no longer place as much importance on reciprocal links as they did several years ago. Plus, when you go for reciprocal links, you run the risk of linking to a site in a bad neighborhood, where a mass of links from scam and worthless websites converge. And there’s a chance that the search engine police could penalize you for that. One-way links, on the other hand, are more natural and provide your site with highly targeted traffic and, even more desirable, that all-important Google juice. It doesn’t matter which sites are linking to yours, as long as those sites link to you in a way that does not raise red flags. Creating one-way links If your business’s website has only recently gotten launched, remember that you want links to come from authority sites and those that have greater pagerank than yours. Some of the things you can do to generate high-quality one-way links to your sites include: Linking from social media sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, and LinkedIn Submitting original content with links to your site on EzineArticles.com Guest posting Submitting to directories like Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ In the case of submitting content to article directories, be sure to post them in the appropriate categories to help the search engines properly identify what your site is all about. You also want to keep your website’s content fresh, interesting, highly valuable, and engaging so your other visitors and websites you’re not aware of will have new reasons to visit and link to you. Conclusion Most importantly, create one-way links to your site on a constant basis. Make it an integral part of your online marketing strategy. Before you know it, your site will enjoy an accelerated increase in pagerank and authority. Want more information on link building? Head over to our comprehensive guide on link building here: SEO Link Building: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide If you’re an SEO agency owner, we encourage you to engage us for private label link building. Dozens of agencies use as as their back-office for building quality backlinks at scale. Or, use our backlink checker to check your website’s existing backlink profile.

99%+ of website shouldn’t even take stock in the idea that keyword stuffing will ever affect them. Why? Because we have tested thousands of sites and found that even sites with a keyword density of up to 12% can still rank VERY well in SERPs. Do you know what a keyword density of 12% looks like? It atrocious. But, it still works. The keyword stuffing that doesn’t work is when you shove your keywords in an invisible <div> tag. That’s when you get in trouble. Ask any professional SEO what they think of keyword stuffing as a strategy and they’ll tell you it’s obsolete, useless, or actively harmful for your brand. But just how harmful is it? What are the risks involved with keyword stuffing? Will search engines really punish you? Will your search rankings drop? What Qualifies as Keyword Stuffing According to Google’s own definition, keyword stuffing is …the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Google goes on to explain that these instances often appear in a list or group, in a context that makes no sense for them, or repeated an inappropriate number of times. There is no hard parameter the number of times you use a keyword on a given page to qualify it as keyword stuffing. Because Google’s ranking algorithm works at least partially based on the context of various pages, it’s almost impossible to empirically tell. Instead, you’ll have to use your best judgment. If you read a keyword-containing phrase and it sounds “weird” or “off” to you, that’s a good indication that you’ve “stuffed” it into a place it doesn’t belong. In order to make sure you’re are not keyword stuffing, we suggest you check out our guide to keyword density in SEO. Keyword Stuff Has Been Dead for a Long Time To understand why keyword stuffing is harmful in the first place, you have to understand the world of semantic search, which boils down to two important Google updates. The depth of keyword research, length of material, subject of material, detail, wording, and accuracy are all taken into consideration (among other factors). Sites with “fluff” content or content that isn’t relevant or useful are penalized, while sites with more valuable, well-written content are rewarded. Keyword-stuffed content naturally reads as unnatural and non-useful, making it rank lower than its contemporaries. How Keyword Stuffing Hurts You Now that you know what keyword stuffing is and why it can hurt you, we can take a look at exactly how keyword stuffing can hurt you. I’ve already mentioned that it can lower the rank for the page or site in question, but how much? Direct penalties. You won’t be blacklisted for stuffing a few keywords onto a page, but your content quality will be graded against how naturally written and useful it is. The more you keyword stuff, the lower quality content you’ll be deemed to have, and the lower your ranks will sink—eventually to the bottom. User experience factors. Keyword stuffing isn’t just bad for Google’s crawlers. If a user reads content on your site stuffed with keywords, they’ll end up with a bad impression of your brand. That’s potentially lost business even if you manage to attract traffic. Lost potential. Inbound links are a necessity for building rank, but people only link to valuable content. If yours is keyword-stuffed, you won’t be able to build the backlinks, and your progress will stagnate. When combined, these effects of keyword stuffing have a cumulatively devastating effect on the ranking of your website. You won’t end up on Google’s blacklist, and a few simple content edits should be enough to reverse your momentum, but keyword stuffing will still stifle your progress almost completely for as long as you continue to abuse it. Why Keywords Are Still Valuable With all that said, “keywords” as a concept are still valuable—they’ve just evolved as a form of understanding your users. Rather than selecting a handful of specifically phrased keywords to hammer into your content at every turn, in the modern world, you’ll want to find subjects that your average user might like to read about or search for, and build content topics around those subjects. If you’re sufficiently detailed, and you focus on answering user questions completely, you’ll naturally use the type of language Google wants to see in its evaluative processes, and you’ll naturally rank for those queries. It’s also important to use keyword identifiers for your brand and company in the page titles of your site, so Google understands who you are—the trick is to avoid too much repetition or any situation that might make a user grimace. Again, if it sounds like something a person would say naturally in a conversation, you’re probably in the clear. Doesn’t SEO manipulate rankings? While it’s not advised to manipulate search rankings, that’s a fine line to walk with SEO because the purpose of optimizing your website and content is literally to get your web pages ranking higher in the search engine results pages. To increase your page’s ranking, you’ll need to do things that look like they’re designed to manipulate rankings. However, when you use keywords appropriately with informative content, it’s not technically manipulation. What you need to do is focus on providing value to your visitors and you’ll find the sweet spot for keyword optimization. When you create rich content that uses keywords properly, even when you stuff keywords into your content, you’re not creating a negative user experience. Informative content that utilizes specific phrases doesn’t count as keyword stuffing. Genuine keyword stuffing, on the other hand, does create a negative user experience. Filling pages with keywords just to get on the first page of the SERPs will annoy your visitors and reputable sites don’t use this practice. In the early days, this was the norm, but search engines wised up to this practice and while keywords are still important, you can’t rank a

If you’ve tried your hand at search engine optimization (SEO) for your clients but you haven’t quite gotten the results you wanted, or if you find your agency strapped for resources, you might consider outsourcing your client’s SEO. Outsourcing SEO can help you and your clients in many ways. Successful search engine optimization requires implementing a specific strategy, and if your in house team doesn’t have much experience, an SEO outsourcing company can get you the results your clients want. Every SEO firm is unique in terms of service, experience, and price, so if you want the best possible results for your budget, it’s important to understand why outsourcing SEO is beneficial, and what types of firms tend to see the most success. Throughout this guide, we’ll help you understand the main motivations for outsourcing your client’s SEO, the considering factors for choosing an SEO company, and best practices for working with a firm moving forward. The Basics of SEO Outsourcing Source: Omnicore The premise of SEO service outsourcing is simple. You’ll work with a third party to get access to SEO services on your client’s behalf. This agency will use search engine optimization best practices to optimize your client’s site, write new content, and build links to help your clients earn higher search engine rankings and get more organic search traffic. Depending on the agency or individual you’re working with, different services may be available. Often, SEO outsourcing services can provide you with more than your in house SEO team. In most cases, these services will be white labelled meaning your agency can take credit for the work and present all information to your clients with your own branding. Most of the time, agencies outsource SEO with one of two main options: Independent contractors/freelancers. Hiring independent contractors for search engine optimization can have its advantages. You can assemble your own team of specialists with varying levels of SEO expertise. Outsourcing SEO work to contractors can save money in most cases. You can also provide more overarching direction. But at the same time, independent contractors with SEO expertise can be hard to find, and they tend to be less reliable. Additionally, you won’t have much help with the high-level strategic direction of your campaigns. SEO companies/agencies. A better option is to work with an SEO company or agency. These organizations exist purely to provide outsource SEO services, and they tend to have access to a robust number of resources, including specialists in many areas related to SEO. These companies are true SEO experts. You’ll pay a bit more to work with an SEO agency, but it’s well worth the money to get access to their expertise, reliability, and resources. Especially if you have multiple clients who need SEO. The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Client’s SEO Now, the obvious question: what’s the benefit of outsourcing SEO? There are actually many different benefits to outsourcing SEO, assuming you’re working with a quality SEO provider. Save time. First, when you outsource SEO services you’ll save time. This is a great benefit when you’re working with multiple clients. You won’t have to follow tedious steps like spending hours on keyword research, nor will you need to invest as much time in strategic planning to execute a complex SEO process. When you outsource SEO, you can focus on customer service and providing services in other areas. Save money. Outsourcing SEO will cost you money, but don’t forget about the money you’re saving—by hiring an SEO agency, you can avoid hiring a full-time in house team, and spend fewer man-hours on each client campaign. Ultimately, many providers end up saving money by outsourcing SEO work. Get better results. Outsourcing SEO gets better results. Your outsourcing partner is an expert in SEO, so it’s likely that outsourcing will get you better results. Your client will climb rankings faster, get more organic traffic, and earn greater brand visibility. This is one of the best benefits of outsourcing SEO because it validates your status as an SEO specialist. Offer more services. If your organization is limited in the range or volume of services it can offer, outsourcing SEO is the best way to expand your offerings. You can offer your existing clients more support and make a better pitch to new clients in the future. Also, SEO outsourcing companies often have access to more SEO tools that can help with conversion optimization and other SEO efforts. In other words, you’ll be providing comprehensive SEO services to your clients. Skip training and education. Succeeding in SEO requires you to constantly train and educate yourself. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with the latest Google updates and the latest white hat SEO trends and keep improving your technical skills. While it’s still a good idea to do this to some extent, outsourcing SEO allows you to push this burden onto a third-party SEO expert. Free up internal resources. If an SEO outsourcing agency is handling the bulk of your SEO campaign, you can free up your internal resources to focus on other responsibilities. That could mean managing an internal digital marketing campaign or working on other important matters. This is why outsourcing SEO can be an excellent part of scaling your business. Get access to better reporting. Many SEO providers struggle to provide adequate reporting to their clients, but reporting is a critical component in the SEO process. They aren’t sure what metrics to report, or find it difficult to put together consistent report documentation. When you outsource the work, your SEO expert partner will be responsible for generating and distributing these reports. Outsourcing SEO doesn’t mean you’re not responsible to your clients for results, but you won’t have to do the work. See faster progress. Though not a guarantee, in many cases, you’ll see much faster progress when working with a white hat SEO outsourcing agency. When outsourcing SEO, you’ll have access to more resources and more expertise, so there are fewer errors and less troubleshooting to deal with. Collaborate