How to Track Web Traffic From Print Ads

How to Track Web Traffic From Print Ads
We’ve recently been approached by a NGO that was running a print ad in the local newspaper to promote a fundraising event. The organization, while promoting their marathon via a QR code, needed to know how many people ended up on their website using the redirect URL (server-side redirect from a non-existent web page) embedded into their QR code that was published in the newspaper. In case anyone has run into a similar task and needed to figure out a way to track visits from a redirect, we have an easy solution. Let’s presume that we have a QR code URL www.site.com/printad, and it needs to redirect to www.site.com/fundraising-marathon/in...

Pinterest’s Flaw

Pinterest's Search Flaw
Pinterest has become a popular discussion topic among digital marketers, and it definitely generated a lot of attention and curiosity in the blogosphere.  While there are plenty of articles written about what this aspiring social network does and how to use it, I would like to point out one flaw that I discovered this morning after performing a search on Pinterest hoping to find the WSJ’s infographic titled “25 documents you need before you die.“ After I typed in “25 documents” keyword into the Pinterest’s search bar and clicked the search button, I was presented with a never-ending wall of identical infographics populating my ...

38 Free Online SEO Tools

Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime
With a constantly growing influx of new technologies in the digital marketing industry, job responsibilities of SEOs are no longer focused around the on-page keyword integration and off-page link building strategies. SEOs have been faced with an array of new tasks and challenges related to usability and goal conversion rates. In order to keep up with the overwhelming amount of tasks that online marketers have to do on an every day basis, here is a list of free online SEO tools, which we can use to make our lives easier. - Tools to Spice Up Your Listings on Google - Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime - Tools to Do a Q...

WordPress CMS Usage Stats

CMS migration to WordPress stats
We’ve recently been approached by a charity that was looking for a company to build an online shop. This was a small charity unable to afford a lot of money to use a bespoke CMS, and therefore, their options were limited to open source software solutions that could be modified to suit the organisation’s needs and branding. Our recommendation was to use WordPress CMS for this ecommerce website development project. In order to strengthen the validity of our CMS recommendation, we’ve done some research on the WordPress CMS usage statistics and would like to share them with you in this blog post. In a nutshell, WordPress is th...

Experiment: Value of Backlinks From Public Google Docs

Google Docs SEO experiment
We recently ran an experiment to find out if backlinks from popular public Google Docs (docs that are linked to from multiple domains and major social networking sites) pass any link juice, and now it is time to reveal our findings. What we’ve learnt is that Google Docs links DO NOT PASS any SEO juice. Moreover, public Google Docs are not even indexed by Google, or at least they did not appear in SERPs when we tried to search by unique keywords contained in our test Google document. Here is what we’ve done: 1. We created a public Google Doc containing the following copy: “Google Docs Backlink Experiment By: ArtDriver Feb...

4 Tips For Local SEO

4 Tips For Local SEO
Local SEO has become the process of improving visibility and clickthrough rates of a web page in search results. Getting a website on the first page in Google or Bing can make the difference between an OK year and a GREAT year. If you are a local business, you know that the competition for certain keywords can be difficult to rank on the first page, especially the first position in Google Places. There are a few things you can do to improve your chances of ranking higher in local search results. Here are four essential ingredients to developing a quality local SEO strategy. I. Claim Your Search Engine Page Local search pages in Google, Ya...

Effective Email Marketing – 5 Recommendations

Email marketing recommendations
According to Avinash Kaushik, email marketing, if done right, “can be one of the rock solid workhorse of any company’s marketing strategy.” While there are hundreds of various email marketing providers out there (some of the biggest ones are Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Amazon, etc.) that can do the job for you, it is fundamental to understand the basics of an email marketing campaign and the strategies to make it successful. Mailjet, a real-time Cloud Emailing platform that provides full scalability and better email deliverability (whether it’s marketing, notification or transactional), gives the following recommend...

4 Types of Web Design Clients

Get a Free Quote Form - 4 Types of Clients
This post has been in the making since June 2008, when we first registered an account with Wufoo, a great online contact form builder, and started collecting “get a free quote” submissions on our company’s website. It is about time to reveal some of our findings, and besides making the data interesting and entertaining, we hope this post can be helpful to many web design and SEO firms out there as well as customers who are looking to hire a web development or SEO agency and are about to submit a quote request form explaining their business needs. When we put together our quote form, the main idea behind it was to get custo...

Promote Your Site Via WordPress

Promote Your Site Via WordPress
I could hardly believe my eyes: my profile page on the WordPress official repository site (http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org), the page that listed my plugins, has been erased from the face of the earth! Nearly ten plugins, which I personally coded, sweating long hours, have been removed. Thousands of bloggers have used my plugins; however, this has not prevented WordPress from deleting my page without notice. Even though most of my plugins are now restored, I had to go through hell by removing all demo links going to my sites. You certainly don’t want this to happen to you and your hard work. Does this mean that you can’t promo...

10 Ways to Spot a Black Hat SEO Company

10 Ways to Spot Black Hat SEO Company
With the success some SEO’s have seen delivering high quality services, there has been a rise in black hat SEO’s and various techniques that do not comply with the white hat practices. To the untrained eye, or someone who is not familiar with search engine optimization, it may be hard to spot one of these incompetent SEO’s. You see so many “fly by night” SEO experts, that it is important to be cautious and look for signs to determine the validity of SEO offerings. In reality, there are numerous ways for detecting a black hat, and here are ten of the most common ones: #10 – Watch for Lofty Promises A lot ...