One more big step, million more questions...

1. Yes articles still work

2. Squidoo and those type of sites have become less popular over the years. I haven't tested them out lately so i'm not really sure how effective they are.

3. Same as every other year? Not really sure of the question.

4. You can check out Udemy

Hope this helps

Nathan Kruz

Squidoo has merged with Hubpages.

A lot of very successful marketers have used Ezine Articles, but they usually use it as a part of a bigger matrix of driving traffic. Usually, you can use these pages and social media sites to drop teaser info that will lead to your squeeze page.

SEOBook has loads of free info on their blog that is very good. Their course is very expensive, but it is considered by many to be world-class.

I hope this helps you out my friend!

I'll just add to the above...

As of 2015, and if not before, you really need to concentrate on the social aspect of your marketing endeavours. Not to say that SEO is dead, it isn't, it won't ever die, but the potential is higher and the barriers to entry are lower for social marketing.

Tom

I got an email yesterday from Jonathan Leger talking about that keyword research and ideal site structure in general has changed from Google's perspective. He spoke about Google's increased interest in "topical pages" and a decreased interest in "keyword" pages. I would personally like to learn more about this topic before spending a great deal of time and/or money trying to rank pages to get organic traffic.

Has anyone else heard about this?

On article directories, no: absolutely not. The Panda updates made sure of this. The use of multiple article directories is far more likely to get you penalized than to bring you anything good at all.

Syndication of your articles to sites (not to "pages"!) specifically relevant to your niche, though, can bring really impressive SEO benefits (though those are still very trivial compared with its other typical advantages).

Squidoo doesn't exist any more, thanks mostly to what Google did to it.

That perhaps tells you something about the overall value of those "Web 2.0 sites", especially for "SEO purposes".

However, the answer to your question is "yes": people are still doing it. And presumably they think they're benefitting from it. (I don't believe they're right, though, for the most part.)

The easy questions first, is it?

I believe that in 2015 (exactly as in every other year I've been online), off-page SEO of real value is determined primarily by two things: quality and relevance.

I believe that buying backlinks is a huge mistake.

I believe that (contrary to what so many people claim, some of them wanting to look like "experts" so that they can sell products/services) Google actually gives pretty clear and pretty consistent information about its underlying attitudes to various different types of SEO, and that attempts to "game" their algorithms aren't going to work, and are often going to cause eventual problems, as history has so very reliably and repeatedly shown.

I can't answer your fourth question. (Search-engine traffic - though I get floods of it - has only negligible value to me, compared with traffic from any of my other sources, so I wouldn't really know.)

I always suggest to people that they shouldn't put time and effort into trying to attract SEO traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic, in every single one of my niches, has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use) but I'd hate to have to make a living just from that traffic. If you have a good look round the forum, you'll also see plenty of other Warriors making exactly this point.

This subject I can help you with, perhaps, since article marketing is how I've been making my living for so many years. I'm absolutely baffled by how and why anyone would want 500 articles per month, and extremely skeptical - in principle - about whether (whatever you might be hoping to achieve with them) they'll actually serve your perceived purpose at all. I may be wrong, I suppose, in a specific, individual case of which I don't know the details at all, but anyway I can't really say any more than that without knowing more. Sorry.


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I think the best thing you can do for building your SEO is using forums & social media as far as Google is concerned. Make sure to fill out all of your profile links as well for them. May even want to get an HD video made for your site and put it on Youtube & all the other video sharing sites. Then I would do a press release & possibly some offline advertising as well like business cards, flyers, radio etc