Top 15 Tips to Write a Good SEO Article

1. Understanding the target audience

Know thy audience. This is the basis of writing a good SEO article. Think from the audience point of view. You will get to know what they expect from you.

2. Research

Perform a thorough research on what you are going to write. Your readers will probably know the basics of the topic you are going to write. So writing some general and vague content won’t help. Your article should give a thorough knowledge to the reader.

3. Title Selection

The title of an article is what people see first. The time you spend on selecting your topic will affect the end result of your article. Use some catchy phrase which the reader finds interesting and probing them to read further. Also from SEO point of view, remember that a keyword in the title gets more importance. But make sure that you don’t spoil the effectiveness of your title.

4. Engage real experts

If the research you performed hasn't yielded the resources you need, feel free to get the help of experts from online forums or blogs. This will cost you nothing and will improve the quality of your content to a great extent.

5. Originality

Original article always attracts readers. Be sure that the article you write is your own. Copying contents from other sites is illegal and you’ll be detected by Google and get penalized.

6. Usage of keywords

Always remember that you write article for readers and optimize it for robots. Keyword density of more than 3% makes the reader lose interest in your article. Write quality content for readers and help robots to find them. Perform keyword research and find what people are searching for.

7. Body of the article

This is where you give all your thoughts. Keep readers interested. Stay on topic and make sure you retain your readers till the end. Concentrate on the flow of information.

8. Length of the article

Your article should ideally have 400-500 words. Be sure that you keep the readers engrossed till the end. Even though your article has more than 1000 words, readers skipping your article afterthe first paragraph won’t help your cause.

9. Flow

Your article must have a good flow from its introduction to conclusion. It should tempt the readers to read till the end of your article.

10. Article description

First impression is always the best impression. Article description is what that shows up when people search for your article from a search engine. This should tempt your readers to click the link and read further.

11. Use statistical data

Using statistical values in your article improves the credibility of your article and readers tend to read credible stuff. These statistics will improve the quality of your article to a great extent.

12. Post in high quality article directories

Once you are done with writing, you've to post it in good quality article directories. These directories will have a lot of members and this in turn will provide good traffic to your website. Some examples of popular article directories are www.ezinearticles.com www.goarticles.com etc.

13. Read and follow publishing guidelines

Before publishing your articles in any directory, read and understand the publishing guidelines of the particular directory. There a few ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in every directory. Submitting your article after going through these guidelines will prevent your article from being rejected.

14. Promote your article

Just writing a good article and posting it in good directory won’t give the popularity your article deserves. Promote your article in social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

 15. Embed some widgets

Embed some widgets like Facebook comments, shares, Google+ , etc. so that readers find it easy to share your article on social media platforms.

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Negative SEO : How to Uncover an Attack Using a Backlink Audit

Ever since Google launched the Penguin update back in April 2012, the SEO community has debated the impact of negative SEO, a practice whereby competitors can point hundreds or thousands of negative backlinks at a site with the intention of causing harm to organic search rankings or even completely removing a site from Google's index. Just jump over to Fiverr and you can find many gigs offering thousands of wiki links, or directory links, or many other types of low-quality links for $5.

By creating the Disavow Links tool, Google acknowledged this very real danger and gave webmasters a tool to protect their sites. Unfortunately, most people wait until it's too late to use the Disavow tool; they look at their backlink profile and disavow links after they've been penalized by Google. In reality, the Disavow Links tool should be used before your website suffers in the SERPs.

Backlink audits have to be added to every SEO professional's repertoire. These are as integral to SEO as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. In the same way that a site owner builds links to create organic rankings, now webmasters also have to monitor their backlink profile to identify low quality links as they appear and disavow them as quickly as they are identified.

Backlink audits are simple: download your backlinks from your Google Webmaster account, or from a backlink tool, and keep an eye on the links pointing to your site. What is the quality of those links? Do any of the links look fishy?

As soon as you identify fishy links, you can then try to remove the links by emailing the webmaster. If that doesn't work, head to Google's disavow tool and disavow those links. For people looking to protect their sites from algorithmic updates or penalties, backlink audits are now a webmaster's best friend.

If your website has suffered from lost rankings and search traffic, here's a method to determine whether negative SEO is to blame.

A Victim of Negative SEO?

A few weeks ago I received an email from a webmaster whose Google organic traffic dropped by almost 50 percent within days of Penguin 2.0. He couldn't understand why, given that he'd never engaged in SEO practices or link building. What could've caused such a massive decrease in traffic and rankings?

The site is a 15-year-old finance magazine with thousands of news stories and analysis, evergreen articles, and nothing but organic links. For over a decade it has ranked quite highly for very generic informational financial keywords – everything from information about the economies of different countries, to very detailed specifics about large corporations.

With a long tail of over 70,000 keywords, it's a site that truly adds value to the search engine results and has always used content to attract links and high search engine rankings.

The site received no notifications from Google. They simply saw a massive decrease in organic traffic starting May 22, which leads me to believe they were impacted by Penguin 2.0.

In short, he did exactly what Google preaches as safe SEO. Great content, great user experience, no manipulative link practices, and nothing but value.

So what happened to this site? Why did it lose 50 percent of its organic traffic from Google?

Backlink Audit

I started by running a LinkDetox report to analyze the backlinks. Immediately I knew something was wrong:

Upon further investigation, 55 percent of his links were suspicious, while 7 percent (almost 500) of the links were toxic:

So the first step was to research those 7 percent toxic links, how they were acquired, and what types of links they were.

In LinkDetox, you can segment by Link Type, so I was able to first view only the links that were considered toxic. According to Link Detox, toxic links are links from domains that aren't indexed in Google, as well as links from domains whose theme is listed as malware, malicious, or having a virus.

Immediately I noticed that he had many links from sites that ended in .pl. The anchor text of the links was the title of the page that they linked to.

It seemed that the sites targeted "credit cards", which is very loosely in this site's niche. It was easy to see that these were scraped links to be spun and dropped on spam URLs. I also saw many domains that had expired and were re-registered for the purpose of creating content sites for link farms.

Also, check out the spike in backlinks:

From this I knew that most of the toxic links were spam, and links that were not generated by the target site. I also saw many links to other authority sites, including entrepreneur.com and venturebeat.com. It seems that this site was classified as an "authority site" and was being used as part of a spammers way of adding authority links to their outbound link profile.

Did Penguin Cause the Massive Traffic Loss?

I further investigated the backlink profile, checking for other red flags.

His Money vs Brand ratio looked perfectly healthy:

His ratio of "Follow" links was a little high, but this was to be expected given the source of his negative backlinks:

Again, he had a slightly elevated number of text links as compared to competitors, which was another minor red flag:

One finding that was quite significant was his Deep Link Ratio, which was much too high when compared with others in his industry:

In terms of authority, his link distribution by SEMrush keyword rankings was average when compared to competitors:

Surprisingly, his backlinks had better TitleRank than competitors, meaning that the target site's backlinks ranked for their exact match title in Google – an indication of trust:

Penalized sites don't rank for their exact match title.

The final area of analysis was the PageRank distribution of the backlinks:

Even though he has a great number of high quality links, the percentage of links that aren't indexed in Google is substantially great. Close to 65 percent of the site's backlinks aren't indexed in Google.

In most cases, this indicates poor link building strategies, and is a typical profile for sites that employ spam link building tactics.

In this case, the high quantity of links from pages that are penalized, or not indexed in Google, was a case of automatic links built by spammers!

As a result of having a prominent site that was considered by spammers to be an authority in the finance field, this site suffered a massive decrease in traffic from Google.

Avoid Penguin & Unnatural Link Penalties

A backlink audit could've prevented this site from being penalized from Google and losing close to 50% of their traffic. If a backlink audit had been conducted, the site owner could've disavowed these spam links, performed outreach to get these links removed, and documented his efforts in case of future problems.

If the toxic links had been disavowed, all of the ratios would've been normalized and this site would've never been pegged as spam and penalized by Penguin.

Backlink Audits

Whatever tool you use - whether it's Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OpenSiteExplorer – it's important that you run and evaluate your links on a monthly basis. Once you have the links, make sure you have metrics for each of the links in order to evaluate their health.

Here's what to do:

• Identify all the backlinks from sites that aren't indexed in Google. If they aren't indexed in Google, there's a good chance they are penalized. Take a manual look at a few to make sure nothing else is going on (e.g., perhaps they just moved to a new domain, or there's an error in reporting). Add all the N/A sites to your file.
• Look for backlinks from link or article directories. These are fairly easy to identify. LinkDetox will categorize those automatically and allow you to filter them out. Scan each of these to make sure you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, as perhaps a few of these might be healthy.
• Identify links from sites that may be virus infected or have malware. These are identified as Toxic 2 in LinkDetox.
• Look for paid links. Google has long been at war with link buying and it's an obvious target. Find any links that have been paid and add them to the list. You can find these by sorting the results by PageRank descending. Evaluate all the high PR links as those are likely the ones that were purchased. Look at each and every one of the high quality links to assess how they were acquired. It's almost always pretty obvious if the link was organic or purchased.
• Take the list of backlinks and run it through the Juice Tool to scan for other red flags. One of my favorite metrics to evaluate is TitleRank. Generally, pages that aren't ranking for their exact match title have a good chance of having a functional penalty or not having enough authority. In the Juice report, you can see the exact title to determine if it's a valid title (for example, if the title is "Home", of course they won't rank for it, whether they have a penalty). If the TitleRank is 30+, you can review that link by doing a quick check, and if the site looks spammy, add it to your "Bad Links" file. Do a quick scan for other factors, such as PageRank and DomainAuthority, to see if anything else seems out of place.

By the end of this stage, you'll have a spreadsheet with the most harmful backlinks to a site.

Upload this Disavow File, to make sure the worst of your backlinks aren't harming your site. Make sure you then upload this disavow file when performing further tests on Link Detox as excluding these domains will affect your ratios.

Don't be a Victim of Negative SEO!

Negative SEO works; it's a very real threat to all webmasters. Why spend the time, money, and resources building high quality links and content assets when you can work your way to the top by penalizing your competitors?

There are many unethical people out there; don't let them cause you to lose your site's visibility. Add backlink audits and link profile protection as part of your monthly SEO tasks to keep your site's traffic safe. It's no longer optional.

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What Is Search Engin Optimization ? Learn About Search Engine Optimization!

Learn About Search Engine Optimization!

Search Engine Optimization most commonly known as SEO is the process of driving organic traffic (free traffic) to a company’s website through search engine results.

Why Should I Use SEO?

Most internet users use search engines to find information, products or services that they are looking for, in fact ‘93 percent of users worldwide use search engines to find websites’ - Forester Research.

Search engine optimization techniques allow you to be found amongst the millions of web pages available on the internet. Many of your competitors will already be using these techniques and benefiting from the traffic that this online marketing is producing.

SEO allows search engines to find your website easily, identifying the content available on the site and its relevancy to search engine users. Search engines aim to deliver the most relevant search results to their users, so they use a variety of techniques to assess website content to ensure that they are delivering the most relevant search results for their users.

Some SEO techniques that are assessed include:

• Page Meta Tags
• Page Content
• Internal Links
• Inbound Links

How Does SEO Work?

Search Engines have things called spiders, or bots that crawl the internet servers to find content on websites that it then stores in its index. Websites are then filtered according to the search engines algorithms which then store the information that fits its criteria. When a user is performing a search, the search engine will access this index to find the most relevant information it has for the user based on their search keyword or key terms and deliver it to them.

There are a variety of factors that are assessed by search engines to determine the relevancy of the content delivered to search engines users. These include:

• Page Rank - Google page rank value base on website popularity, age and content
• Website Links - This includes inbound and outbound links
• Page Content - Meta Tags, alt tags and on page content

SEO Benefits

The process of performing SEO is lengthy but has great benefits for those that can achieve 1st page rankings in top search engine results such as Google or Yahoo for keywords or key terms that best define the contents of their site.

What is the Difference between SEM and SEO?

Search Engine Marketing commonly known as SEM is the process of driving search engine traffic through paid Pay Per Click (PPC) and unpaid methods, such as Search Engine Optimization. SEO is solely the process of driving traffic to a site through organic search engine results.

How do I Perform SEO on My Website?

SEO is an ongoing process that can take time and effort to master. A combination of SEO techniques will help your site to rank highly with search engines, ultimately driving more traffic to your website.

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How SEO Will Help Your Business

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is now one of the most admired internet marketing strategies being implemented by one or the other internet marketing company around the globe. SEO is the process of setting up a website so that it appears as high as possible in the Search Engine Ranking Pages or SERPs’.

 The largest selling point of the professional SEO Services is that these services are helping high traffic levels to the sales funnel and ultimately producing new customers to existing as well as new businesses. The search engine optimization is helping organizations to increase the visibility of their customer service as well as creative informative content that is valuable and helpful to their customers and business clients.

An organization manufacturing different consumer products or services and having a website with SEO as an internet marketing strategy builds market awareness that in turn increases its sales and improve the concerned organization’s reputation among key stake holders. Most of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and AOL etc display ten results on a page and research show that the results on the first page are more likely to be looked at. Therefore, the higher the ranking a website appears, the more visitors, or users will visit the organization’s website.

Depending upon the objectives for the website, an effective SEO will benefit the business in the following ways:

• Build a reputation among customers, suppliers, employees and other shareholders,
• Broaden awareness about the product and services in new market sectors or new geographical areas,
• Public awareness will be enhanced about the firms services or products,
• Businesses can sell their products and services directly to customers from their website.
• Customer service gets improved by delivering online customer support,
• Organizations can start a dialogue with their customers, business clients through forums, blogs, and feedback pages that can be used to improve products or services and address any issues.

SEO has helped small businesses to compete successfully with large firms and has helped them reach a larger audience with little effort. However, smaller businesses must be aware while choosing various SEO packages offered by SEO service provider as choosing a package that is not suitable for their specific business needs will defeat the entire purpose of opting for an SEO service and its merits.

It is advisable for businesses to choose SEO Company or SEO service providers after a careful and thorough investigation. One can compare the various services offered by multiple SEO service providers before making the right choice. The other important thing to note when choosing your SEO service provider is their reliability and credibility.

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Four SEO Tactics That Still Work After Google Penguin Update

Have your websites been penalized by Penguin 2.0? You are not alone. An important fact to know about this Penguin update is that it is an algorithm change. This means SEO tactics which have been working before might not be working now.

“About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice.” –Matt Cutts

So, what SEO tactics are still working? Here, I will discuss about 4 SEO tactics that I am still using to maintain my page 1 rankings on my website.

1. Press Releases

An old school SEO tactic that have been working for ages. Press releases are articles that get syndicated or distributed across multiple news websites. The cool thing about press releases is that every article you write will be allowed a backlink and as your article gets distributed among the other news websites, your backlinks will increase as well.

There are multiple ways you can get press releases, one of them is by using a service called PRWeb. PRWeb service helps distribute your article to across 100+ different websites including Google News (PR 8), USA Today (PR 8) and Market Watch (PR 8).

The best thing among these press releases is not only the page rank of these websites but the traffic that you will be getting from them which potentially can be up to the thousands.

2. Guest Blogs

Guest blogging is another SEO tactic that is still working wonderfully well after Penguin. Even though, Google targeted guest post spammers in the past, you can still rank your website just with guest blogs. One advantage of guest blogs is the relevancy of the links you get and after Penguin 2.0, link relevancy is a very important factor in Google ranking factors.

There are a few ways you can easily get guest blogs. The first way is to use the manual way which is by searching Google for terms like: “become a contributor” and “write for us” + (your keyword).

For example: “write for us” + travel, “write for us” + SEO

An easier way to get guest blogs is to use guest blogging platforms like MyBlogGuest and BloggerLinkUp. These platforms connect bloggers who are looking for more posts with guest bloggers. That way it is much easier to get a guest post going instead of contacting each website owner on the search engine for a guest post opportunity.

3. Relevant Blog Comments

Most blog comments tactics have been destroyed by Google over the past year with their previous Panda and Penguin updates. This is because link builders are using automation tools like Scrapebox to spam the whole web with their backlinks.

Google has put a tight filter when factoring blog comments to rank websites. However, relevant guest blogs still work in ranking your website.

A good way to get relevant blog comments is to go to Alltop.com then find your niche websites there and finally find pages to comment on.

Another way to find relevant websites to post on is by searching Google with this query: intext: leave a reply + SEO

Just by leaving 5 relevant blog comments linking to your website everyday can do wonders to its rankings.

4. Diversified Anchor Text

The fourth SEO tactic I use is not a link building tactic but a SEO strategy instead. Every backlink that I place I will diversify my anchor texts on that backlink. Meaning I won’t leave the same anchor text over multiple websites.

For example: when placing blog comments, 20% of the time I will use link building, 30% backlink building, 20% learn more here and the last 30% I will use link building after penguin.

After Penguin 2.0, Google has placed a lot of spam filters on websites with the exact same anchor texts linking back to them. Therefore, be sure to use this anchor text strategy for the backlinks that you are going to build.

Wrapping Up

Press releases, guest blogs, relevant blog comments and diversify your anchor text are the SEO tactics that I am using to maintain my page 1 rankings after Penguin 2.0. The best thing about these SEO tactics is that they have been working for a long time now unlike most of the other SEO tactics that you hear about.

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Is Convincing Your Boss SEO Very Important ??

Are you having a hard time convincing your boss that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for the company? Well you are not alone.

It seems there are a lot of companies with upper management staff that just do not understand the importance of the internet. Perhaps they grew into their careers when traditional marketing was the only option or they do not know much about online marketing and SEO to make an intelligent decision.

Unfortunately, it is up to you to educate them and sell them on the importance of having a powerful SEO strategy that spells success for the company.

Here are a few tips to get you started.

Visual Aids

Nothing says ‘I did my research’ like charts, infographics, diagrams and analytics. Not to mention some people are visual so spelling it out with words and images is definitely the way to go.

Show the Numbers

Remember that you are asking for a budget, so you will need to show some numbers and analytics to back up your SEO proposal.

Gather as much information as you can about what the competitors are doing and how much they are spending on their SEO strategy. No boss wants to be outdone by their competitor.

Online Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing

Your next step is to get your boss to understand that online marketing is the way to advertise a company this day and age. Sure traditional marketing may still work but companies need to also do online advertising.

More and more consumers are turning to the internet to search for the items they want to purchase. They are also using the internet to communicate to their friends whether they like a brand or product.

Free Tools

So who doesn’t like getting things for free…am I right? Since you are asking for an SEO budget, make sure to point out that some of the SEO efforts will be free. Let your boss know about all the cool and FREE SEO tools that are available such as: Google Keywords tool and Wordtracker.

When you’ve gotten your SEO budget approved, we are here to assist you in developing and implementing a successful SEO strategy.

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SEO Predictions for 2013

One of the keys to success, in almost any business discipline, is the ability to see things coming. Following trends and using your knowledge to extrapolate the future is a vital skill, and this is especially true for internet marketers. SEOs, in particular, need to understand how technology, commercial intent, and consumer expectations will influence Google, search engines, social networks, and influencers.

Here’s how we expect SEO to change in the year ahead. We hope this knowledge will help you stay ahead of the competition and find your corner of the market.

1. Gray-Hat Won’t Cut It Anymore

Gray-hat SEO walks the fine line between spam and Google’s webmaster guidelines. Gray-hats don’t use automated link building techniques and typically don’t buy links (there’s some debate on this).

However, a gray hat will engage in many link building techniques that aren’t justifiable as marketing separate from the search engines. For example, they’ll build links from obscure websites that are rarely visited and have little chance of growing. They’ll build links from directories that nobody uses. They’ll fill their sites and guest posts with content about a keyword, instead of content meant to be helpful for users. And so on.

The Penguin and Panda updates have already robbed gray-hat tactics of much of their value, and we expect this trend to continue. While it will likely still be possible to rank using gray-hat tactics, you will struggle more frequently, lose past results, and play catch-up quite often.

Focus on SEO tactics that have direct benefits which aren’t directly related to rankings and search traffic. Link building efforts should also be brand building efforts, and SEO campaigns should be designed so that they are profitable even in the absence of search engine benefit.

2. Website Structure, UI, and UX Will Be Primary Ranking Factors

We don’t expect these factors to overtake links as a ranking factor, but we do expect them to have an increasingly notable impact on your search traffic.

Google used a combination of human quality raters and machine learning to develop Panda, and now they are asking searchers directly to compare search results for their quality as well. We expect more updates to come, and the user interface and user experience are going to play a big part in this.

Why would Google care? Searchers think of the search results as part of the Google experience. If sites rank well with poor UI and UX, users think Google has a poor UI and UX. That’s bad branding for Google.

3. Bounce Rate and Loading Time Will Matter

It’s already been over two years since Google announced that loading time was a ranking factor, and we expect more emphasis on it this year, especially for one particular reason: mobile. The number of people who access the web from their mobile device is now nearly half the number who access from PC. Most people who access the web from their mobile device have a comparatively slow connection, meaning loading time is more noticeable.

Users tend to bounce off of a site if it doesn’t load within seconds. Eighty percent of users expect a web page to load within 5 seconds, and 60 percent expect it to load in just 3 seconds. Google has incentives to devalue these pages when there are other relevant alternatives.

Speaking of bouncing off a site, we also expect bounce rate to factor into the rankings. Yes, we know, when Danny Sullivan asked Matt Cutts about bounce rate, he appeared to say that they don’t use it. However, Matt Cutts’ answer was actually a bit evasive:

“Webspam doesn’t use Google Analytics. I asked again before this conference and was told, No, Google does not use analytics in its rankings.”

We never suspected Google was using Analytics to rank pages, at least not directly. But we arecertain Google is tracking user behavior through its search engine. How else could Google Suggest work?

We are confident that Google can and will track bounce rate by measuring when users return to the SERP. If they return to the SERP and click on a different search result, this could indicate that they didn’t find what they were looking for from the page. This is what we mean when we say that bounce rate will become a primary ranking factor.

4. Content that Solves no Problem for Users Will Rarely Rank

With all the machine learning and surveys being done at Google, they will only get better at spotting useless content. We expect this type of content to rank only in cases where there is simply no other option, where there are literally only low quality results for the topic in question.

This is especially true for topics that have a social component. Social sharing has become an activity that far more people are involved in compared to link building. The search engines can’t ignore these signals, and if there is an on topic page with social metrics, it is most likely going to outrank a page without the social networks by the end of this year.

We’re not claiming that social metrics will become more important than links. We are simply stating that they will be a necessary component in all but the most stale topics on the web.

5. Who Shares Will Matter

Perhaps more important than a growing emphasis on social metrics, we expect power influencers to have more impact on the search results. If Rand tweets something or shares it in Google+, this will have more influence on search results than if a brand new profile or somebody with few followers shares the same page.

6. Google Will Be Even More Strict About Link Manipulation

We almost feel like we shouldn’t even have to say it at this point, but links from link directories, article directories, forums, blog comments, low quality guest posts, social bookmarking sites, and so on will be essentially useless by the end of 2013. These types of links won’t likely get you penalized, but they will pass very little value and do nothing for your long term rankings.

7. Authorship Will Influence Rankings

Authorship will allow Google to follow a single writer across all the properties that they have contributed to. By tracking the results of each piece of content, the search engine will be able to issue a score to each writer. This will be factored into Google’s quality score for each page, which will in turn have an impact on rankings. Authorship will also play a part in which social shares matter the most, since influencers will tend to have a higher author rank.

8. Content Marketing and Social Media Optimization Will Be Key Ingredients

While it’s not easy or successful in the long term, it’s still possible for sites to rank without genuine content marketing or a social media strategy. We don’t expect this to remain true by the end of the year.

We expect the search engine to increasingly filter out the influence of low quality sites. There will be a threshold of quality. Sites that have no links from sites below this threshold will simply not rank for anything competitive.

The same will be true for social media. Sites that have little or no social activity associated with them will fail to turn up in the search results for any competitive search term.

None of this is to say that sites without content marketing and social media will never turn up in the search results. We just don’t expect them to show up in cases where relevant pages that dohave content marketing and social metrics exist.

9. Co-Citations Will Replace Anchor Text

Anchor text is simply too easy to manipulate, and Google no longer has any reason to use it as an important ranking signal. Google will instead look for correlations between brand names and keyword phrases. It will pull this information from search queries and it’s massive database of crawled pages throughout the web. Similar factors, like the proximity of keywords to links, as well as their synonyms, will also play a part.

10. Pinterest Will See Continued Growth

This social photo sharing site lost a bit of steam in the second half of 2012. Pinterest will most likely go through some re-branding in an effort to expand it’s audience beyond the rural homemakers that helped build the network, allowing Pinterest to break into a more mainstream market. This will reduce the click through rate a bit, but the overall referral numbers will get higher as traffic grows on the site. We expect it to be hard to ignore Pinterest as a marketing channel in 2013, although not necessarily impossible.

Conclusion

For those who have become accustomed to sub-part marketing techniques, 2013 is going to be a difficult year. We expect to see some players leave the industry in search of other short-term strategies.

For those who stick around, the focus is going to shift toward brand building and profitability even in the absence of rankings. This is going to make it a tougher industry to work in, but a more lucrative one as well. As online activity continues to grow in the US and the world, more opportunities will open up and we’ll see our earning potentials grow.

That’s our take on things. Where do you think things are headed in 2013? Let us know in the comments, and pass this along if you liked what we had to say.

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