Posts by PixelatedKarma

Pinterest just like any other social media platform will be important depending on the demographic you are trying to reach. You need to know your product and your demographic (who you are trying to sell the product too). If you are trying to market a food product and your target demographic is women between 25-34 years old in household income brackets above $100k/yr USD - Pinterest may be where you want to focus all of your social media efforts. If you are trying to sell a product to males in that same genre; you are going to find your ROI is horrible and you will probably be out of business and/or customers relatively quickly.

This off topic however are many many many solutions out there, most of which you can find through a quick google search.

However depending on the age of your business, your business goals, etc. you may want to consider a custom solution that can provide something tailor fitted to your operation and which can provide all levels of people working at your company with the information that they need (ie. quick data visualization for the owner, order details for the person cooking the food, etc.).

Sure, why not? Adsense has become increasingly better at providing relevant advertising on websites and embedded video so you can be sure that a user will see ads geared more to their specific demographic which will help keep them engaged. I don't see anything wrong with it as it just provides a secondary revenue stream for a website owner.

Google takes into account social signals when ranking a website. This includes how much your website's content gets shared, the amount of followers you have, and the amounts of likes/favorites you have.

Google uses this ranking algorithim because unlike other ranking factors, social media can accurately guage a website's interaction and popularity among its fans/users. This means that if you have quality content and an active user base its probably worthy of your site being higher in the SERPs because you are providing value which is something that Google has been valuing now for the last 18+ months pretty heavily.

You didnt provide enough details for us to help.

Is your website new? If not, how old is it?
If you have a new website it could take 2-3 months for your website to get crawled, especially if you don't have a good inbound link strategy.

How often is content updated on it?
If you have an old website but you have not given it any attention in the last few months; google may have slowed the crawl rate of your website as well this is because Google looks at your website and goes "hey this content isnt being updated, why should we spend the time and resources on crawling it if content isn't updated regularly?"

How many unique visitors does your website get a day?
Using google analytics you should be able to see exactly how many people Google is recording to your website. If you aren't hitting high enough numbers; Google won't crawl you often enough, it just isnt worth their time. And if you are running a personal blog, no your mom visiting your blog 50+ times a day won't count as individual visits in Google's eyes.

How popular is your website?
I know lots of people trash on Alexa; but sites <1,000,000 tend to be crawled on a more regular basis. After all Alexa is considered a social signal by Google.

Does your website have good social signals?
Further to above, are you on the proper social media channels? Are those …

@ Husky3700 http://www.google.com/ads/

SMO - Social Media Optimization; the process of optimizing your social media pages in an attempt to gain more followers/likes/etc. which in turn helps boost social ranking signals on Search Engines.

SMM - Social Media Marketing is the process of marketing your product and/or service through PPC, Copy, and Viral Content.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing generally refers just to PPC. Generally someone who specializes in SEM is competent in running successful Adwords or other online advertising campaigns.

http://adwords.blogspot.ca/2014/08/close-variant-matching-for-all-exact.html

That's the official Adwords blog.

Since this thread was brought back from the dead; I have a question if any of these users are still active. How did your facebook campaigns go for you?

All of you seem very much pro-facebook (rightfully so with it being so large with such endless possibilities); but I really need to ask how many of you have actually had success with converting your likes into paying customers? How much of your content has went viral? How many of you were so disappointed that your target niche weren't biting that you ended up having to do FB's PPC to get the users from FB to your actual site? Have you come to realize how limited the organic reach of your FB page's posts are?

I'd almost be willing to bet that 10% of the people who responded originally to this post had anywhere near the results they claimed the original poster would have with Facebook.

I dunno maybe your target demographic was found on Facebook and maybe you've done amazing; but it would be interesting to hear after 4 months where you guys have gotten too.

People need to use "common sense" when submitting to directories (I know, I know - common sense is not all that common but stick with me for a minute). There really are no rules because every niche of every business which is online is slightly different. When you look at why directories went from being the go-to back in the early 2000s for inbound links to being frowned upon its because people over did it much like how in 2014 people are now over doing guest blogging to the point Google is now frowning upon it. Anyone who has been online for any decent amount of time can probably label off more then a handful of directories that looked like they were built in an hour using homestead's old website builder - these are not directories you want your brand associated with. If the directory looks like a spam directory; its probably going to hurt your website. If however the directory is a reputable directory relevant to the content of your website then that link is going to help you.

Some quick rules of thumb:
* Only submit to a directory and/or directory categorys which match the content of your website (ie. a web design directory for a web design website)
* Favor submitting to directories which are local to your target market places
* Favor government and educational directories if applicable, but keep it relevant to your niche
* ONLY submit to directories with a …

Create a quality website, with quality content that can go viral; share it on social media and win OR you could spend thousands and rent your traffic through PPC. But if your website has been live for any amount of time you should ask yourself; why aren't people coming to my site? Is it because nobody is interested in your product? Is it because your website doesn't look professional so those who do arrive at it bounce quickly? Are you not providing your user any real value in visiting your website? Once you can answer those questions you will get traffic.

You could use a free tool like opensiteexplorer. It should show you what links it sees on a site. There are many many other better tools for link analysis out there but the best ones I found personnally are some of the premium versions of downloadable tools. They will pull alot of links for you and then part of the fun is figuring out what each site is (forum, blog, etc.) and how they got the link.

Google is your best friend. I see that you are connected with a Car Rental service in Van City. I would highly recommend you begin doing research on your competitor's inbound links and figure out which are high PR/high mR websites. You may want to focus more on the latter as PR seems pretty much dead and there hasn't been an update to publicly visible Google PR since December of last year. Atleast mozRank is updated on a fairly regular basis.

We have not done alot with Adobe Business Catalyst as a Company and we don't generally recommend it to our Clients not because it isn't a good product but because it lacks versatility. Now it isn't all that bad because for someone who just wants to easily launch their Company website and call it a day; its more then sufficient and the $17/mo entry fee is pretty cheap compared to what some more high end CMS can run for even the initial price tag.

However if you are looking for long term scalability then something like drupal is generally the direction we prefer to suggest or even creating our own CMS from scratch depending on the needs of the business and what they are all about. But every business is different; so your question may actually require a bit more homework then what I've just told you.

If I were you I would first go back and take a serious look at your business plan, the direction your Company is headed, and also the direction your Company wants to go. If its a simple CMS then 100% adobe catalyst and even your previous route of wordpress should be more then sufficent for you. However if you are going to require major functionality additions in 1-5 years; you might be best to stick with wordpress or to switch over to drupal because to find developers that will be able to create those addons for you will be alot less costly on …

I would tend to agree because SEO as we know it very much revolves around Google itself. However on the other hand saying that Google is the father of SEO is also like saying the catholic church is the father of organized religion. Just because they currently hold the most power and generally dictate the drive for SEO does this really quantify Google as being the ruling power.

If we look back I'm sure we can see the founding fathers of SEO through a relatively easy Google search and by comparing the facts as presented (as mentioned previously), and by founding fathers I mean the people responsible for originally tinkering with their websites to try and increase their SERPs.

But SEO 15 years ago isn't really close to what SEO is today; nor will it be the same in another 15 years (especially if the internet of things takes foothold). Can you really imagine doing onpage optimizing for your website for a household bathroom mirror? I imagine that would be quite similar to optimizing a website for mobile/tablet search nowadays with vastly different criteria. Are we destined to now have our SEO dictated by Google? Or will Baidu eventually infringe enough on Google's space to make Baidu's algorithims the new SEO testiment? After all - even Rome fell once upon a time. Maybe with iphone6 adopting DuckduckGo - maybe we'll see a different shift in direction. After all users are becoming increasingly more aware of the requirements of privacy and …

"The Google “Zebra” update is both rumor and an SEO inside-joke. As of today, there is no Google Zebra update. The myth arose after comments Matt Cutts made at a conference regarding merchant quality. It was dubbed “Zebra” because Google seemed to favor black and white animal names for their algorithm updates aka “Panda” and “Penguin” (the recent Hummingbird, not withstanding!)."

Click Here For An Article from SEJ on this

To answer your questions:
1. What are infographics?
Infographics are an indepth way of communicating an idea or content in a visual form
2. Why does it work for SEO?
Google and Bing both love images; when you see on-page seo advice about keywording images. It's because search engines rate images extremely high in their algorithm. By providing infographics on a regular basis; you are getting the best of all worlds - you can link them to your pinterest (SMM), keyword them (on-page), and you are still providing content which in 2014 is king
3. How to Use it?
Create your own infographics, post them as individual blog entries, share them to Pinterest/Instagram/wherever you are focusing social media efforts. If they are good they will get shared and thus create contextual inbound links to your website.
4. The benefits of to SEO
See the rest of my answer

It all depends on what we are marketing. Joe's plumbing service isn't going to have the same marketing requirements as John Doe's Pizza Delivery or Jane's Gaming Clan.

See Joe's plumbing service is going to do better focusing on offline marketing, direct response marketing, PPC campaigns on google, yelp, yp, etc. Because that is where people will be interacting with that brand and seeking out similar services. Social media as great as it is will help build relationships with a small minority of their customers but wont give them the desired impact that they desire because quite frankly not alot of people want to see a status update on what their plumber is up to unless they need him/her. Service companies like Joes probably wont see a huge benefit to even having a website if it is just a small plumbing outfit; however if they begin franchising then they enter into a phase where they really do need to push SEO to get their name out there. But at that point the website generally isnt just for publicity, its viewed more as a tool with an employee login - maybe even a CTA to book plumbing services online for their customers.

John Doe's Pizza will benefit more from facebook/instagram/twitter/etc. because their target demographics will be present on those platforms; and the best part is, everyone wants to post food porn on their status feeds. Now while offline marketing will still be effective (forget copy and content - word of mouth …

Hello and welcome;

First I'd like to say that pay per download is pretty much CPA (Cost Per Action); an advertiser or yourself is paying for each successful action - in this case a download.

This is such a broad question because its so situational. I guess to begin the first thing any webmaster wants to do is ensure they are providing the best possible user experience to the people visiting their website. So if your revenues are coming from forcing people to download and install spam; you haven't achieved this because very rarely are you going to have repeat visitors.

From there I would then wonder about the way that your content is presented; is it presented in a spammy fashion? Does your website appear to look like it was built in 1996? Chances are if the answer is yes or possibly to either of these questions - CPA is not going to be effective for you.

So lets say you have managed to create a great user experience and you have presented yourself in a clean and professional manner - awesome, congrats you are now posing yourself to have a successful CPA campaign. Now if you are somewhat of a decent marketer you should have your site laid out so that people are instantly offered that CPA through a call to action - if they dont do the conversion then you provide something to keep them engaged (ie. content as to why they need it); at the bottom …

Generally there is a reason that Google bans adsense accounts. Even if the content is 100% where it should be, with perfect semantic mark up and no spam - there is a chance those sites can still have their adsense accounts banned or temporarily suspended. Generally its from my past observations that either the webmaster of that site or a vested party uses some black hat tricks to artificially boost traffic and sometimes even Adwords clicks. It might work for awhile but big daddy google will almost always find out.

The idea behind dublin core is pure standardization for cataloging multiple types of resources (including but not limited to webpages and online media such as videos, pictures, etc.). It's debateable how much weight search engines give to websites that utilize dublin core meta tags however the general consensus seems to be that if you had two sites that otherwise would rank in the same position; the website with the addition of dublin core meta data would probably rank one spot higher in the SERPs because of the fact that Dublin Core is considered a minor SEO modifier. Honestly we (Pixelated Karma) now use dublin core on all of our web projects, especially the larger and more complex ones where we implement an internal search engine. This makes developing an internal search engine somewhat a breeze especially on extremely dynamic websites and web apps. However if you are thinking of converting an old site to dublin core; I personnally dont think its worth it.

The reason I say I dont think its worth converting older websites is because unless you have planned a complete re-design of the website, planning a major re-launch, etc. then to convert isn't going to make a significant enough change to your website to be worth it; not when other SEO tactics such as working on increasing social signals and content are shown to be far more valuable to increasing your rank. However if you are utilizing a good template system on that old website then it …

freelancer.com is usually pretty effective for somebody looking for a freelance professional and prices are usually relatively low - no garauntees on the work though.

Here is a brief summary of Search Metrics report on effective SEO trends for 2014:
http://searchengineland.com/searchmetrics-released-seo-ranking-factors-2014-content-now-really-king-202756

For those doing local SEO and who don't believe in directories. You should really take a step back and read this post on SEL:
http://searchengineland.com/optimizing-business-internet-yellow-pages-directories-202414

Directories are coming back; maybe not for overall SEO but definitely for local and definitely if you want presence in a tough location like China.

Let me first start by saying that this is kind of a complex question. In theory its alot like learning to drive. You take the course (I'm assuming you are doing your Google Partners program) and then you get fed to the wolves and after a few fender benders hopefully you become a good driver.

The best thing you can do for the course itself is to keep studying their prepared tutorials. The reason I say this is because its extremely easy to get off on a tangent on Google's blog, SEL, etc. Yes these resources are valuable and up to date however they wrote the test for a period of time and have developed the materials that they provide to match that test. Since writing those materials they have probably done 1000+ minor tweaks so going with the shortcuts taught at the many many internet sites out there might not be 100% what google wants to hear on their partners test if that makes sense?

Now just like driving, when you leave the classroom sometimes theory and reality don't see eye to eye with each other mainly because PPC like many other forms of marketing are becoming increasingly more complex. For example some agencies have individuals set aside just for researching keywords for ad campaigns and some people do nothing but measure campaign progress. Very specialized but for larger campaigns sometimes they are completely necessary to have these individuals. Really the only tried, tested and true method you can …

It's one of those things.....unfortunately even following security best practices for developers with the way technology changes at such a fast pace something will almost always get missed at initial launch and even as time goes on. To use iCloud as an example, apple has some of the brightest, smartest developers in their work force. They utilize multi- layered security....yet they missed preventing brute force attacks something that is one of the oldest types of hacking in the history of the internet. It happens and as long as everyone and their dog considers themselves a developer and as long as we as internet users keep trusting more and more information online, these breaches will continue.

A great man once said; if it can be built....it can also be taken apart.

I think between iCloud being breached, this happening, the target attacks, etc. This is all just about par for the course. I think it'll be a long time before we see the end of breaches like this.

@cathiedsquared - Unfortunately yahoo doesn't do anything for Canadian or UK small businesses, for free anyways. However the good news is it is a lot easier for Canadian and UK based businesses to get listed in government directories - which from our past experiences carry a bit more weight in the SERPs then yahoo.

As for going about getting the free listing, when signing up on yahoo directory there is a super small "fine print" link if you run a hobby or not for profit site which provides a free listing. However if yahoo suspects you are monetizing the site, providing a product or service; then they will pull your listing unless you pay the annual fee.

Now if you are a small US based business and you can provide proof of a physical US address there is a back door through submitting your website through yahoo's small business portal, which is free and lists you in yahoo's main directory.

Just to add one thing, yahoo does offer free listings if you can prove you are running a website for a non-profit, as a hobby, etc. Also they will give you a free listing if the site is local for a small business and in the US but it's a bit difficult to go that route without jumping through a few hoops.

@biometric Google's last local search update actually made being listed in appropriate directories a very crucial part of seo. However spamming directories like the old days is definitely dead.

Maybe blue hat SEO is when you use 5+ year old SEO tactics and make little or no effect on search engine ranks hahaha. Read Google Best Practices, learn each aspect of SEO indepth and as Happy Geek has said you will be doing SEO the right way.

Mat is correct; you need to find relevancy whether it be PPC related or social media campaigns.

Sure getting on social networks might increase awareness of your product/service but not getting on the right social network and targeting the right customers will result in fewer conversions and makes your efforts a waste of time.

I saw this on Search Engine Land this morning. I agree with the study that the average website will see far more traffic from organic search. The problem is, that looks at the average website (and who knows what their test sampling is). I have seen some websites which have below 200 SERP for every keyword yet their bulk traffic is coming from direct input because they have focused offline marketing so hard.

Then we have the stackoverflows vs the huffpost (two very different types of websites). Stackoverflow I can bet recieves 75%+ of its traffic from organic search while I bet huffpost nowadays probably recieves close to 75% of its traffic through either direct input or social media due to its focus on content marketing.

When it comes to a website, your traffic sources are always going to be dependent on your marketing focus and the relevancy of your marketing to your niche. I have touched upon this in other posts on this forum, but one thing that this study does conclude is that hail mary approaches to social media marketing are pointless and useless wastes of time.

Yes the widget does count. It won't be an immediate result but one that will show up after about 3-7 days.

@kelly, you can believe what you will. Yes the specifics of traffic do play a role, in fact do an experiment for me. Setup a macro script on a website you are monitoring to re-visit it once per day. Notice how your rank initially goes down but then suddenly you lose more then you gained? That's because Alexa needs to see the traffic specifics of a site to ensure you aren't gaming them (it goes beyond # of visits as posted above). Now try getting high quality traffic through the methods I've mentioned above, including inbound links from High alexa ranked sites ( top 100k), see how your rank goes down and stays down? Alexa has said themselves, that they take into account inbound links from sites they can see. Those are sites with the widget installed, sites which are frequented by individuals with the Alexa toolbar, and sites where the stats are publicly available.

Infact if you really don't believe me, please don't try it with any of your clients and please don't tell them about it. That way our clients can see the better result, especially the ones who want top dollar for their advertising space.

Also Kelly, yes your friends are in part right but they're wrong that it's just traffic. To tell someone to increase their visitors just to decrease their alexa rank isn't doing justice to that person. With all the ranking signals I mentioned above, if you can't accurately convey that to the person …

@Kelly and Ketul - please see my answer above. It's more then just visits.

Going to SSL is a good thing in principle. As stated before as much as I appreciate where the web is heading this does spell the demise for alot of smaller hobby websites (ones which don't necessarily generate the revenue to afford the extra $100 a year for an SSL cert) and it also adds another cost factor for startups. Now granted some web hosting companies now offer SSL certs for shared hosting plans but a concern I have is that down the road this may become a "whoever can pay the most gets a better search engine rank" game. With varying levels of security with SSL, how long will it be until Google says that the guys with the $500+ certs should have a higher rank then the ones with the self signed certificates?

The other issue I have had is one you brought forth in a previous post Dani; how long will it take for analytics/webmaster tools to catch up in reporting to provide the same depth of analytics that we are used to recieving now? I dunno about other website owners but I like knowing where my traffic came from so I know which platforms to target the most.

Those are my views, but in the end when the bugs are worked out the web will be a better place. This is just a growing pain between point A and point B. We now also make an effort to educate our clients and prospective clients on internet …

Great post Geek; now lots are aware of the security flaws in snapchat which relies on things caching on your device's storage. The one hope are new items such as crypto-phone and Mark Cuban's cyber dust may actually provide users a bit more safety to their privacy (due to relying on encrypting information in the system memory versus system storage); but like anything it is not 100% fool proof.

In the last little bit we have seen a change in the technology industry; where we have went from code first to design first. I think in the future we may see the user experience (including security protocols) get designed prior to the user interfaces prior to the actual development.

As a Company who designs, develops and markets digital products and services we are well aware of the old adage that what can be built can also be taken apart. That being what it may you try to limit the amount of personal data available if a breach ever does occur. Fortunately the general population is finally starting to smarten up to internet/computer security, partially impart thanks to individuals such as Edward Snowden and the massive media campaign on the heartbleed bug. However when we see the end of people willfully putting personal information online/doing a good job of covering their tracks while online (through https)/the end of 1234 passwords; then maybe we will see a drop in security breaches. But end of the day a program is only as strong …

@Kelly Burby - Oh I agree 100% based off of his/her previous track record of posts; however to judge him/her based off of Page Rank doesn't make logical sense, in the manner stated by DistantGalaxy, especially since all indications and generally SEO community consensus point to Public Page Rank being dead.

The updates to Public Page Rank (the page rank that shows up in all the nice little SEO browser addons - which used to be a great measure on how successful we were as marketers) are becoming fewer and fewer per year so to use Page Rank as a determining factor in whether someone knows what they are talking about is absurd. Any website which was created from now until last December won't have Page Rank, and I'm positive none of your Page Ranks, my Page Ranks, or any other forum members Page Ranks have visibly changed since December; even though I'm sure more then a few people here have changed ranks in the SERPs. Simply because there hasn't been an update pushed public by Google - and there might never be another. Fact is, Google is now keeping that information private along with alot of other pretty crucial details (ie. refer to Search Engine Land's articles on Pigeon) making it harder for people like yourself and me to do our job as internet marketers. However if you want statistical data to hang the guy use something that is updated regularly as its relatively more accurate, something like mozRank …

When you are talking about the website not ranking well I assume that you are referring to SERPs. However if its an Alexa or mozRank issue then you will need to let me know.

A single blog post shouldn't negatively effect your entire website. Google likes new content 750+ words per post (ideally 1500) with pictures. But they also want to see that new content is put in context. So for example if you are running a small business website about flanges, it doesn't benefit your website to have content about pets. Lastly is your content keyword optimized (not over optimized but optimized)?

If the content is perfect and keyword focused for your website then it may be an issue with the technical side of your website. Does every page validate with w3c? What is your link structure like? Does your Google Webmaster account show any errors? Are your URLs search engine friendly? Is your robots.txt blocking any subdirectories so its taking longer for certain things to get crawled? How often is your sitemap being updated? Are you manually submitting your sitemap? Are there errors with your sitemap? Are you properly priotizing articles on your sitemap as per your cascading link structure?

Mainly because its generally easier to respond and keep track of what we are answering.

Well in his defence if he launched his website after December 2013 - he wouldn't have publicly visible Page Rank.

I cant add much to what the above posters have said; however don't stress about edu links. Sure they have weight, but if the rest of your website isn't 100% or as close to perfect as possible then you'd be better off fixing your website so it passes every SEO audit out there. That effort will go further faster then if you battle for days/weeks/months on end trying to get a single inbound link from a .edu website. End of the day, even the admins of .edu's are beginning to become smart to SEO tactics and they know their own value. So even after you fight and win that holy grail of .edu links, there really is no garauntee that it will even be a followed link (even though their nofollow links still count, thats a topic that I mentioned last time you asked about .gov/.edu links).

Now if you don't heed my advice to make everything perfect prior to chasing down .edu/.gov/.whatever links then I'd highly suggest that you build a relationship with an educational institution who teaches/trains/etc. individuals in a discipline similar to the product or service you provide. Maybe your a journalist and your website is about journalism, then I suggest you build a relationship with an institution who teaches journalism and writing. By building that relationship, providing them with VALUABLE resources that they can actually use to teach their students, maybe even taking on an intern or two - then you might be lucky enough to …

First and foremost, many of the major social media companies are present around the globe and available nearly everywhere where an internet connection exists and geo-political relationships aren't blocking access to their service. So you should inititally be focusing your social media activities on the major staple social media services relevant to your website (twitter, pinterest, etc.). You can focus these social media accounts by connecting with people in that region (ie. on twitter you begin following people in melbourne, etc.) and through doing solid Social Media Optimization and Marketing (SMO and SMM). From there you build your reputation (it takes time; our Company still battles with parts of the EU from time to time; even though our name is attached to several Companies there).

Eventually if your marketing team/marketer/you spend enough time connecting then somebody, somewhere is going to give you leads to check out more region specific social media/social bookmarking avenues where you can then spread to. During this time you should also be focused on reading and researching; find every article in australia on tech and read it religiously to watch for new social media/social bookmarking trends. Generally when a new start up comes along with the next promising facebook the press will reference their competitors both locally and internationally. By researching these Companies you begin understanding which ones you want to put your brand's name on and which ones are the best for your target audience.

Now for quicker results something else you should be doing …

Great resource WebOutGateway; acouple others you may want to consider include:
SEO Site Checkup
Link Assistant

Although link assistant's powersuite is a bit advanced and you need to install it, it's free version does give you access to about 4 different tools which can really help to identify issues on your website.

Thanks guys, we appreciate the words of encouragement and will pass it on to the other two users of this account. =)

@johnmicheal - Although on and off page SEO will drastically increase the amount of traffic so will SEM and SMM (when done correctly). As for Page Rank; it is pretty much dead to the general public (Last public update was Dec 2013). Unless you are working for Google where you can actually see the impact your changes are making, for better or worse, then chasing PR is kinda pointless. Especially considering the algorithims for PageRank will probably have changed atleast 8+ times by the time there is / if there is ever another public update to Page Rank. You as an internet marketer would be far better off to chase mozRank which some marketers would argue has alot more difficulty in obtaining due to how many ranking signals it carries.

Since this thread seems to have arrisen from the dead; I'd like to put in my two cents. The answer is dependent on what your website is about. Google+ is a great start because of how it ties in with the rest of Googles products and services which will help your website be "Google official" - thus minorly effecting SEO but the rest will all depend on the audience you are trying to get. You need to remember that the reason SEO exists is to get good rankings in search engines; we want to get good ranks in SE to drive traffic; the reason we drive traffic is to be found; the reason we want to be found is to convert visitors into paying customers (whether through direct lead conversion, using our services offline, or by making money through ad revenue).

For example; Instagram can be extremely effective - but only 17% of users in the last half of 2013 were reported as being adults with 37% of those users being in the age group of 18-29. The majority income bracket in the group of adults was $30,000-$50,000.

If your website is aimed at selling retirement properties; Instagram will not be your most effective social media platform. However if you are selling alcohol then you are definitely on the right path (statistically speaking when you combine those stats with the stats of consumer consumption of alcohol).

That being said as a part of your social media strategy you shouldn't just …

For all the internet marketers out there; you may want to begin formulating a new Adwords strategy for your Clients. Google Adwords is pushing a change which will spell out the end of exact match keywords. This change comes into effect sometime in September. Previously when you setup a campaign you had the ability to opt out of Close Variant keywords. This meant that you could target specific phrases "Web Design Forums", "Website Design Forums", etc. without Close Variant's interferring and subsequently displaying your ad when someone searched for "Website Design Companies" for example. For high competition niches the more specific your Ad, the more targetted your Advertising campaign, the more targetted your advertising campaign - well the higher probability your product was being seen by hot leads not just cold or luke-warm leads.

Although eliminating the option to opt out of Close Variants will broaden the audience your ads will probably reach; the downfalls are huge, for one - expect your advertising budgets to be bigger. Bigger audience, more clicks, more money. And dont forget a larger audience doesn't necessarily mean more conversions. Not to mention that now your advertising will probably end up in alot bigger playing field which also means more competition for your leads to actually find your website.

But not all is lost, for smaller/less experienced marketing agencies and DIY'ers; this change will take out some of the complexities of developing an advertising campaign. For example now you won't need 9+ variants of a keyword …

@savedlema; go into your Google Webmasters Account and click on the left where it says "Crawl", then select the subcategory "Crawl Errors"; it should tell you exactly the pages that Google is having problems crawling.

As for the DNS problems, I can't add much more value to solving your problem then what others above have suggested. However I would suggest that you discuss the issues with your webhost. To me I would assume if Google is having problems with your DNS servers something is going on with your hosts domain name servers.