Many bloggers, online entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers choose WordPress as a solution to setting up a free website for their business, since WordPress offers a comprehensive set of web publishing tools that includes a CMS (content management system), hosting, statistics, etc.

But, of course, the free WordPress package has its limitations, the main inconvenience being that you don't have full control of your site's set-up and can't effectively tune it to your needs. However, quite often this is because web publishers are simply not aware of the capabilities a free-hosted WordPress blogs has, and that's what I'd like to cover in this post.

WordPress Stats

Checking web statistics (traffic and engagement) is an integral part of any online promotional campaign. You may have a stunning blog with amazing content, but you need factual data to determine if your blog actually resonates with your audience. Read more »

Do you recognize the painting on the right? It was found in a French electrician's home garage in 2010. And it would be but a simple painting of a hand if it hadn't been identified as a previously unknown work of Pablo Picasso and valued some crazy sum of money. So, authorship matters. If you like a book by an author, you're likely to read another book by the same person.

As Google has been striving to become better at determining quality of webpages since time immemorial, it's only logical that it should one day arrive at the idea of assessing Web content quality based on who creates it.

And, closely connected with the notion of content authorship is the idea of AuthorRank: a reputation score assigned to a particular content creator that also affects where that content ranks in the search results. And this is when it gets interesting for us, SEOs.

From Agent Rank to AuthorRank: the chronology

Even though the Internet exploded with articles about Google's AuthorRank not so long ago, the idea behind this metric is definitely not new. Read more »

LinkAssistant is SEO PowerSuite's link management and link verification tool. Back in the day when link exchange was big, many SEOs were using it for this purpose. However, now that the SEO trends have changed, LinkAssistant is used in a variety of other ways, which I'm going to describe in this post.

Apart from letting you track and verify your backlinks, LinkAssistant has a ton of other capabilities that enable you to do such things as track links in the guest posts you write, verify your anchor texts and many more. For example, here are 15 web marketing tasks you can do with LinkAssistant:

1. Look for authority sites in your niche

If you're just entering a new niche, LinkAssistant can help you find authority websites and hubs in that niche. Besides, LinkAsssitant will provide additional data about each site, which you can use to locate the most highly-trafficked and thematically-relevant sites. Read more »

During the latest SES conference in San Francisco, Matt Cutts shed some light on the structure of Google's Knowledge Graph and mentioned that Google was definitely headed towards social. In its transition from "strings" to "things", Google now seems to be willing to rely on its Knowledge Graph more and more to return real-world answers to the searchers' real-world questions.

Now, where does this leave us, Web marketers? Google's Knowledge Graph may soon become an indispensable ingredient in one's recipe for online success. Luckily, Matt Cutts did reveal the source that underlies much of the Knowledge Graph data - and that source is Google's Freebase.

Freebase, an entity graph of people, places and things

Freebase is a Google-owned database of topics/entities that are associated with real things, people, etc. It is open-source and anyone can contribute to it. Read more »

No doubt, Google+ has been picking up speed and scale lately. The number of Google's properties using G+ has been getting bigger by day, and it may well so happen that, when the ripples from the latest Google algorithm updates die off, everyone will suddenly need Google+.

Why? Because, first, the diversity of Google search results has been increasing, and many of those new types of search results (SPYW listings, for example) are Google Plus-based. Second, the rules by which one plays in the organic SERPs now change as often as ever. Hence, many Web promoters are looking elsewhere for alternatives.

Segmenting one's Web presence

While big brands normally try to cover as many bases as they can, squeezing the max out of whatever online marketing channels one can think of, smaller brands would often use just one to two marketing channels that perform best. Read more »

To me, blog commenting is a unique way to connect with people in the industry. Why? Because leaving a comment is a great conversation starter. Further on, you can follow the person you're interested in on Twitter/Facebook/G+, exchange emails and what not.

Blog commenting is also an effective link building technique. While most blog links are nofollow, they can be great direct traffic channels at the same time. If you leave interesting comments, people will be eager to learn more about you and may click on the link in your name/signature.

Unspoken blog commenting rules

Just like any human activity, blog commenting has its rules and conventions. It's better to get familiar with those before you start commenting, to avoid learning the hard way and to avoid gaining bad reputation.

Here is a blog post we did on commenting etiquette some time ago. To sum it up, when you comment on somebody's post, make it real-life conversation. You wouldn't want a stranger to approach you and say something meaningless or begin selling you merchandise, would you? So, blog commenting is very much like starting a conversation in real life. Just keep that in mind. Read more »

If you were ever looking for an exhaustive piece of information on how redirects are used in SEO, read on, this post is for you.

First off, what are redirects? To put it in other words, redirection is URL forwarding. It's when you type in one URL, but get taken to another URL instead.  Let's say, you enter buylater.com and get redirected to buynow.com.

What are redirects for?

Redirects can be set up using different techniques and may serve a whole variety of purposes.

Let's talk about the cases when redirects are perfectly legitimate and improve user experience. Read more »

Although Google presently holds 83% of the global search market, there are countries that have been consistently slipping out of its grip. One such country is Korea, South Korea to be exact. Ask any Korean what search engine they use, and, most likely, the answer will be... Naver.

Naver - the profile

Naver (derived from navigate) is currently Korea's number one search engine and accounts for over 70% of the search market there. The search engine was launched in 1999 by a group of ex-Samsung employees and has dominated the Korean search industry ever since.

If you haven’t been to Naver's homepage yet, what's likely to strike you right away is how similar it is to Yahoo's. Naver's homepage and its search results pages are much busier than Google's, with lots of images, flash banners, sections, etc.:

Well, this is what lies on the surface - the obvious differences. However, Naver is also different from Google in a much more profound and intricate way. Read more »

This post continues the series of posts on our blog that are dedicated to starting a website from scratch. To catch up, please, read How to Choose a Domain Name with SEO in Mind. Part 1: Brand vs Keywords and How to Choose a Domain Name with SEO in Mind. Part 2. Domain Extension.

So, once you have chosen a domain name for your would-be website, the next step is to pick a Web hosting provider. You can easily compare different offers available by checking out provider ratings and comparison charts - here is an example.

In this article we are going to discuss what to look for in a Web host, bearing in mind that you'd also like your website to be visible in the search engines one day. So, here are some important things to consider:

Server location

The first thing to consider is the country in which the host is located. For SEO purposes, it's better if it is in the same country you're targeting. Google reportedly considers websites more relevant for a particular location if they are also hosted there. Read more »

When Search plus Your World got rolled out, it looked pretty bizarre to me. My first question was, 'What the heck is this?' But, well, that could be just me.

Anyhow, SPYW is here. And, moving beyond the initial reaction like 'Gosh, I hate it' or 'Wow, I love it', I would like to try and analyze what this new feature holds for different parties in the game.

Google

The blessing

There are over 2 billion people using the Internet on the globe. Out of these 2 billion, 90 million users have G+ accounts as of January 2012. This means that about every 20th Internet user will be exposed to the new feature IN FULL. Besides, signed-out users will be exposed to it to some extent, too (think of People and Pages). Read more »