Over the last 10 years, the history of blogging has gained popularity and has been validated as a major resource to implement for people and businesses alike to rank well in search engines.

Blogging has allowed for many people and businesses to become credible sources and voices in their industry.

It’s been a great tool to gauge customer satisfaction, both good and bad.

In recent years, blogging has become the option for those looking to boost their SEO efforts.

More specifically speaking, guest posting and blogging has really caught on fire and gone viral.

If you’re not familiar with guest posting and blogging, you’ll definitely want to become and get intimately familiar with both and why are the talk of SEO content marketing.

If you watch the expired domain auctions as I do, you see a wide range of domains expiring regularly.

Some expiring domains are nothing to write about, while others are like finding a needle in a haystack.

So, what’s the difference between the two types of expired domains, you ask?

And in addition, how should you go about finding and buying expired domains of great value in terms of SEO and being competitively priced?

When driving more traffic and business to a small business website, most small business owners dread SEO much like the plague, especially when doing SEO yourself.

I mean, really, where does a small business owner begin when doing SEO themselves?

Rather than determining the real pros and cons of do-it-yourself SEO, most small business owners opt for the traditional advertising methods of magazine ads, banner ads, newspaper ads, Craigslist, AngiesList, HomeAdvisor, etc.

But as the Internet and SEO progresses, your need and dependence on SEO to drive more business or even sustain a business is a looming issue that will not go away and must be addressed cost-effectively and timely.

It’s true that time, money, and labor always seem to find the small business owner holding the short end of the stick on one, if not all, of the previously mentioned.

For those of you that decide never to hire another SEO for anything again in your lives, today’s blog is just for you.

And for every small business owner unable to hire in-house SEO, an SEO professional, or an agency, this blog will help you attack the low-hanging actions of doing SEO yourself.

Let’s get started.

I had an interesting conversation with a potential customer about lowering the website bounce rate and why their website was not garnering favorable search rankings.

As usual, we volley questions and answers back in forth in hopes of shedding light on behaviors that might shout negative SEO, search engine penalties, or exponential room for SEO improvement.

I must admit that this potential customer had performed their SEO due diligence and had much to show for their time and effort.

They had a search-safe optimized website, very active social profiles and signals, and a content marketing plan that they reviewed every month using their web analytics and SEO reporting tools.

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.

If you own, operate or manage a website, I’m sure you’ve heard the latest craze and buzzword, content marketing, tossed around much like a game of horseshoes or washers.

For some, content marketing has become a science of keyword stuffing their content in an effort to increase search rankings.

Content marketing has become a full-fledge game of creating keyword salad.

A dab of this or that with a pinch of that or this, and this magic combination of subtle keywords is suppose to bring about favorable rankings from SEO gods.

For small businesses that believe this keyword salad business of keyword stuffing is the most effective SEO, Google and other search engines think otherwise.

I’ve had the opportunity in the last two weeks to review the SEO efforts of some small businesses that have a local focus when it comes to SEO.

I received an email from a regular blog reader of Kickstart Commerce.

This person totally stoked about how they read my latest blog about finding and buying domain names.

They found an expired domain name to die for, let them tell it.

I was super excited, as I usually am, to hear from our readers about this reader’s good fortune find.

I was elated until I researched the readers’ good fortune domain name.

The reader did almost everything correctly based on their email.

The one missing piece the reader did not note was performing a search on the domain itself for negative or scam reviews using Google or another search engine.

Had the reader performed this simple step, the reader would have figured out that another company had used their so-called good fortune of an expired domain name to run a scam.

I was surprised and heartbroken for the reader when I searched.