Everyone knows that SEO has always taken a beating over the years. SEO has been viewed as a necessary evil to grow one’s business in the age of internet marketing.

For most small businesses, SEO has been a nightmare experience with an industry full of nothing but money hungry crooks holding a website and search rankings hostage in lieu of thousands of dollars and empty promises.

The SEO industry, as is any other industry, has its share of good, bad and ugly players that market themselves as SEO ninjas, specialists, professionals, internet marketers, inbound marketers, and whatever other phrase of the month comes to mind to make a dollar.

As of late, the top buzzword or phrase of SEO has been content marketing, and how it’s becoming the new SEO and future of internet marketing.

So, just what is content marketing and why has it been coined the new SEO? I’m so glad you asked.

Is it best to have multiple keywords on an optimized page or create multiple optimized pages with different keywords?

I received this question in an email last week from a customer trying to determine the best SEO strategy for optimizing their website content. I thought it was an interesting question, rather questions, for a number of reasons.

I can see through this questioning and quite clear. The customer is grasping at every straw possible to drive do-it-yourself SEO results in the shortest amount of time possible.

They are viewing SEO as a science based on a magical SEO formula to rank well rather than both art and science.

It’s much like a man showering a woman with gifts, dinner, and no conversation of any sort and expecting the woman to fall in love with him for who he is and not what he gives. You get the point, but I digress.

SEO is both an art and science when it comes to refining and finessing your optimized content marketing efforts.

I receive a wide range of emails and phone calls in a given week questioning how to generate content that increases website traffic.

From business owners, website developers, and even other SEO consultants posing as potential customers, everyone wants to know what the secret is when it comes to content marketing that increases search ranking and website traffic.

There are plenty of resources, whether newsletters, websites, blogs, ebooks, etc., telling you the bare bone SEO basics and principles, such as creating content:

• Written with a focus on customers and not search engines
• That is more than 600 words in length, ideally 1000-1500 or more
• That is relevant and specific to your industry and target market
• That educates, informs and solves problems for customers
• That customers will share with the masses
• That is easy-to-read content consisting of short sentences and containing every day layman terms
• Using specific keywords and keyword variations in moderation
• That includes the use of header tags with keywords within header tags
• Containing moderately supportive external and internal links, images, and videos

And the list goes on with other value-add content marketing strategies and techniques to help increase not only your website or blog’s search engine ranking, but also increase the likelihood your content is shared with the masses and increasing overall website traffic.

Today’s post on content marketing will guarantee you success should you religiously understand, comprehend and flawlessly execute each aspect.

Let’s get started.

Individuals often enter into domain investing in hopes of becoming the industry’s next “rags to riches” story, or at least make enough money to have made it worth their time.

Today’s podcast guest was introduced to domain investing few years back by way of DomainX — a domain investing conference based in India.

Okay, it’s been a while since I shared a WordPress tutorial, and today’s your lucky day.

Of all the many questions posed on a weekly basis from various prospects and customers with WordPress websites, the question of how difficult it is to create a popup, modal, or content overlay is quite frequent.

Many are focused on their line of business and not so much the technical experts of the ins and outs of their website. That said, the creation of popups, modals and content overlays in WordPress might as well be rocket science.

And although it’s not my first time around the block providing this type of WordPress solution for those that desire functionality for their website, I’ll share with you two WordPress plugins I’ve started using on more and more projects.

Everyone and their grandmother, if not great-grandmother by now, use emoji — billions daily in collective use — to communicate a multitude of thoughts and expressions daily.

Whether by email, text, chat, clothing, or billboards, emoji marketing has nearly touched every possible form of communication, including domain names.

From Apple to Taco Bell to Domino’s to name a few, a growing number of brands are committing more and more marketing and advertising dollars to the use of emoji marketing.

One of the most recent announcements for brands entering the emoji marketing space with their own branded emoji — the pickup truck — is Ford Motor Company.

Emoji domains burst onto the scene over a year or so ago with a handful of domain investors, speculators, and hobbyists registering nearly 21,000 .WS emoji domains and a few hundred .TO emoji domains.

While the emoji domain craze has subsided with just under 1,500 .WS domains registered (best guess) and mostly single-character, the market for emoji domains has started the journey towards emoji marketing education and usage.