Bots Are Filling Up the Internet

This research was brought to you by the blogger Igal Zeifman from Incapsula.

Social Media Is Growing - And You Should Be Growing With It!

Social media plays a big part in internet marketing today. Whether you own a blog, an ecommerce site, affiliate site etc., social media plays a big role in your business. Or at least it should. 3 years ago social media was just another way of saying ‘facebook’, but since then the social media scene has exploded with options and possibilities for websites to reach out to its target groups. The most significant social media today platforms are Google+ and Facebook with Twitter a close third, but also Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr now have a big audience. What social media platform a website should focus on of course depends on what business it runs, but there is no doubt that a general focus needs to be put on social media.

The confusing part in all the social media hype is where it is most beneficial and hence where the biggest emphasis should be put when engaging in social media. Is it for SEO purposes mainly, or is it to create traffic and relationships for your website? The answer is that there is no right answer. It first and foremost depends on what kind of marketing strategy you run with your website. However, it is not yet entirely clear to the business how much social media affects the SERP. Lots of testing is showing that Google+ engagement and in particular ‘+1’s have the biggest effect from a SEO perspective, but most experts agree that to post and create social media content entirely for the purpose of SEO would be a big mistake.

The reason that it would be a mistake is not the uncertainty of the extent to how much social media engagement affects SEO. Everyone agrees that it certainly doesn’t hurt doing it unless black hat tactics are being used. No, the real reason that it would be a mistake is that by focusing solely on SEO, the website miss out on all the networking potential there is in social media. This is where people are, and by being where others in the same niche as you are, you can get the traffic to your website more easily than through the SERP.

In the long run it is all connected. The more followers/like/retweets you get, the more authority your website will get, and the bigger is the likelihood that your ranking will be better. The SEO part of social media might take a while, but building relationships will benefit your website almost immediately driving traffic to your website.

Why CRO Beats Everything!

It is almost impossible these days to speak about ‘internet marketing’ without also in some way mentioning SEO. Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a. SEO) has become one of the most vital tools in internet marketing, used to bring more traffic to a website as a result of a higher ranking on search engines, in particular Google. Despite having written a great deal about the importance of good SEO’ing, this blog has also several times pointed out that SEO alone doesn’t create success in internet marketing, but that content plays an important role too. A term, however, which is not spoken about as much as it deserves to be, trumps both SEO and content.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is, simply put, the practice of increasing the amount of online sales and leads on a website, without increasing the amount of web visitors. That is, taking the traffic you get to your website and turning it into something which converts. That could be sign ups, purchases made, downloads etc. So why is this more important than SEO?

Taking an example from the “real” world can help to explain. A company buys a bunch of highway billboard ads, but the letters on the billboard are too small to read. While the billboard gets lots of traffic (literally), it doesn’t convert as the people driving by can’t even read what the text says! The SEO in this case is fine, but when the user experience doesn’t match the efforts of the SEO, the users will just drive by, and the company, or in the internet marketing world the website, won’t profit from the high amount of traffic.

So before you hire an expert in SEO to get the most visitors as possible to your website, make sure that the website is ready for all that traffic by optimizing elements such as color, text size, graphics placement, page layout, price, order process, etc. Luckily there is also ways to combine CRO and SEO which are presented well in this blog by Chris Goward: (http://www.widerfunnel.com/conversion-rate-optimization/how-to-combine-conversion-optimization-with-seo), so you will not be overwhelmed by the many different terms to keep track of.


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Getting the edge by Retargeting

In a competitive market as Internet Marketing has developed into over the years, it has become exceedingly important to have an edge over one's competitors. One of the ways to gain that edge is by retargeting. First of all, to those unfamiliar with the concept, retargeting is to target users that previously have been visiting your site, whether that being a specific part of your site or just the site in general, by having adverts pop up on other websites they visit. This way, you only target consumers who are more likely to be interested in the product you are selling.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it is assuming that it is done properly. Research has shown that more than 50% of consumers notice retargeting ads, and this is likely to affect their decision of whether or not to purchase the product. This statistic shows us how important these ads are, and when executed well they can be the most valuable tool for success. Retargeting itself isn’t a guarantee for success though. It demands unique banner ads, custom landing pages and ongoing optimization in order to have the optimal effect on the potential costumers.

The banners themselves shouldn’t be too official, but instead have a personal touch over them, preferably with some humor added to them. Making them unique makes the ad have a bigger chance of catching the person’s eye thereby causing to have a memory of them visiting your site in the first place. Another way of catching the eye of the consumer is by offering them a promotion or some kind of bonus. Remember, we are talking about people who have already visited your website, so the vast majority of them have an interest in your product, and an added benefit could be the exact thing to turn an interested customer into a buying customer.

While retargeting can be a successful tool, it is important to remember the saying ‘everything in moderation’. You don’t want to have your ad being in the face of your potential customers every time they visit a website. Being too pushy can scare people away. It’s all about finding the right balance, which is why in order for retargeting to succeed you need patience and lots of trial and error.

That being said, when you do find the right balance, retargeting can be the factor which brings you in front of your competitors and win over a lot of customers which would have been lost otherwise.

Internet Marketing Conundrums - Which is better; unique visitors or page views?

The question to many - if not all - internet marketers is to ask themselves is which number is more important; Unique visitors or Page views? To try answering this questions we first have to fully understand the two terms.

A unique visitor is an individual user who has been to your website. No matter how many times the same user visits your site from his device or the same browser, the person will only be counted once. If the user chooses to visit your site from a different device or/and a different browser it will be counted as a new visitor.

Page views on the other hand, is the total amount of time your page has been visited. If the same user visits your site 100 times in one day, the page view count will increase by 100.

I will set up two scenarios to demonstrate what to look for when viewing the unique visitors number and the page number.

Let’s say that a website has a low unique visitors number but a relatively high page view number (the page view number can never be lower than the unique visitor number), meaning the difference between the two numbers is big. The difference shows us that the site has a small new audience, but of from that group of users many of them return. This indicates that while the site does not reach a big new audience, the users visiting the site are pleased with the content and come back for more. A benefit of this is that Google Algorithms read this website as a valuable source of information

On the other spectrum we have a scenario where a site has a high amount of unique visitor and an equally high amount of page views, meaning the difference between the two numbers is small. The small difference together with the high amount of page views shows that the site has a big audience, but most of the users visiting the website do not return, indicating that the site might have a good SEO strategy, but the users visiting the site do not particularly like the content. This is good statistic for internet marketers who's strategy is to market with landing pages or review websites.

Which of these two scenarios is preferable depends on what kind of website we talk about. For a blog having dedicated readers is very valuable, while an affiliate getting money on a CPM basis from advertising will prefer having a lot of visitors even if it means they won’t return.

For a good search engine rankings both unique visitors and page views are taken into consideration. Additionally, length of visit also plays a role in determining the ranking. So even if unique visitors are not important on it’s own merit, everyone wants a high SERP ranking, so focusing solely on SEO is just not enough. There needs to be some good content to back it up.

With all this being said, unique visitors and page views are of secondary importance compared to conversions and sales. That’s what matter in the end of the day! Unique visitors and page views however are unarguably a good hint on how a website can improve, and using the numbers for exactly that purpose will undoubtedly improve both conversion rates and sales while moving up in the rankings.

Alexa ranking - What it is and why it matters

Most people in the internet marketing business and in particularly with websites writing blogs know about the concept of Alexa ranking, but what exactly is this magical number that seems to be so important to websites and just how important is a good Alexa rank really?

Alexa ranking ranks very differently than search engine rankings like Google. The main difference is the fact that Alexa only calculates the traffic of visitors who have installed the Alexa toolbar when calculating their ranking, so if your site has a niche where most visitors do not have the Alexa toolbar installed it can be tricky to get your Alexa ranking improved. This partly undermines the importance of Alexa ranking as it is mostly other websites and businesses who have the toolbar installed, while most ordinary people who do not own a website or deal with internet marketing don’t have an Alexa toolbar installed on the browser. Nevertheless, Alexa ranking is an important tool to determine how much traffic a website is getting, and especially important when comparing the rank to the ranking of other websites working on the same niche.

A good Alexa ranking is considered to be if a website is in the top 100,000, but a ranking in the top 200,000 isn’t considered bad either since this means that your website is in the top 1% of the websites in the world. Being in that range generally means that the website will attract more advertisers and prominent websites wanting to work with you.

The big challenge websites are faced with is how to improve this Alexa ranking. One of the ways is the same way that a website improves its search engine ranking; by doing good SEO. This gets your website higher up on google which sends more traffic to the website. A more direct way to improve your Alexa ranking however is by constantly updating it and making it a lively non-static site, like this blog is doing for VIPaffiliates. Alexa recognizes this and rewards active sites with better rankings. Lastly, promote yourself on social media. Write, blog, advertise on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ so people will be aware of your website and create lots of traffic.

Follow these 3 advises and your Alexa rank will improve in no time hopefully attracting lots of advertisers and even more users.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing!

One of the main focuses of all internet marketers these days is to find a way to avoid getting banned or penalized in the ranks by Google. That, and of course improving their google ranking by doing white-hat SEO.

A tactic which used to be practised a lot more before google did it’s penguin and panda algorithm updates is keyword stuffing.

Basically keyword stuffing is when a website overuses one or many specific keywords in different places on their website to improve search engine rankings. There are many ways of doing this. Some of the ways to do keyword stuffing can be in a sentence where the keyword(s) are repeated unnaturally; either in the anchor text, adding the keyword where it isn’t relevant or bolding keywords. All these tactics used to have a great affect on the websites’ ranking. It still does actually, but not for long thanks to the much improved (objectively speaking) Google algorithms.

Internet marketers reading this have a reason to be nervous if they are guilty in keyword stuffing. But at what stage is using keywords defined as keyword stuffing. A good estimate to when it is called keyword stuffing is, according to many, when a keyword is used more than 1% on the website. This is an estimate though. The main advice for people worrying about being penalized for keyword stuffing is to keep the content of one's site natural and relevant. Write for the sake of the users and not for the sake of a better ranking. Obviously, ranking matters to every internet marketer, but there are other, more white-hat, tactics which are more safe and effective.

So as long as you don’t think about keyword stuffing, chances are that google won’t penalize you and as an added bonus your content will be a pleasant read for your users.