By Julie Gallaher

Like many bloggers, I dream of a day when I can leave my 9-5 job and make a great living on the internet. My travel recommendation site, Things You Should Do, will reach the milestone of 500,000 unique visitors during the next few weeks. I’ve experimented with lots of different methods to grow my traffic and recently discovered Flickr as a power tool.

My strategy of using Flickr groups to build community and create stickiness is paying good dividends. I’ve only just begun, and I’m receiving about 100 visitors per day from Flickr with an incredibly low bounce rate of 12.14% and an average time on site of over 4 minutes.

RESEARCH

By Robert Cerff

A while back the question came by as to what it was that I wanted to when I grew up. I just laughed and replied, “I’m most likely never going to grow up, so there is no need to think about it!” Going back to my first childhood though, I can recall wanting to play computer games for a living – didn’t we all? This got me thinking which, as most know, is quite a rare occurrence.

Remember those classic old arcade games? I’m talking long before anyone even knew what a CD was let alone a DVD, so PlayStation is out the equation. I’m talking about the likes of Space Invaders and Packman. These were games that never ended; you kept playing until you finally lost. The ultimate goal was to aim for a score you knew that nobody could ever beat or at least one that wouldn’t be beaten anytime soon.

By Lydia Mazorol

Every now and then my sales team will come to me to ask if I think a web site will make a good SEO project for us. To have a successful SEO project with a client’s web site, I found that it is necessary to be able to not only assess the web site but your client as well. What I have found are 5 steps, which take about 5 minutes, which will allow a quick glance at assessing a web site, but also, from these same steps, be able to see what it will take to deal with the client of this web site. Will it be “easy” to optimize the web site and will it be “easy” to deal with the client during an SEO project or not?

By Neal Rodriguez

Let me guess: all you submit is stories written by you and published on your own website to digg.com; you get 3, 4 diggs on average; 11 if it’s a good story with a hot title. Don’t bother going through all the work of building a reputable account. The following will almost guarantee you’ll never see the front page of digg.com:

1. Make no friends:

This way your stories, although worthy of being on the front page, will gain no traction – 50 to 60 diggs – to get the attention that will allow the rest of the community to see how good it is and vote it to the front page;

2. Don’t digg anybody else’s stories:

By Stephanie Courtney

If you hated high school as much as the rest of us because it seemed that only the kids with flash and no substance got all the attention, then search engine optimization probably seemed like a homecoming you could only dream about. Face it; search engines became a beacon of marketing hope for those of us who have something to say rather than something to show. But, if the cold hard irony of search engine popularity is only beginning to dawn on you, it might be time to stop celebrating your Carrie-like triumph over image driven mediocrity and smell the SEO rank(ings).

LINK BUILDING – THE SAME OLD POPULARITY CONTEST

By Dave Rigotti

Many companies, who in the past, relied heavily on discounted bid prices due to the lack of competition, are finding it to be more and more difficult to push through the noise (and higher costs) of search engine marketing. In this article, I’ll discuss how advertisers can reduce the costs of clicks, optimize their campaign, and justify higher spend for maximum performance.

By Paweł Szulencki

Inbound links are one of the most important factors that determine your websites worth in the eyes of search engines. The more quality inbound links you have pointing to your website the higher you get in SERP’s. The more inbound links the higher your PageRank is. But how to make people to link naturally to your website?

Tip #1: Organize a contest.

Contests make a great link bait. Couple of hundred of dollars prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of traffic, inbound links and interest to the organizing body.