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I think the hardest part of SEO marketing is doing outreach and getting some good external links from the authority Site. I'm trying to get for my peakperformancehr.ca want some help.

I think the topic has been explored fairly well thus far, but I would add in my two cents because I think it is a topic that will become more and more prominent in digital marketing discussions in the years to come. SEO & UX Years ago, these were two completely separate items that warranted different discussions. Technical SEO was king with user experience taking second place to quality content and website design. As search engines have become more prevalent and popular, however, major search engines have really tried to alter their algorithms to support content and user experience (Panda and Hummingbird updates come immediately to mind) and technical SEO has been reduced in importance (see: Penguin update). I think this trend will continue as search algorithms become more complex and better at understanding what humans look for when researching a product, service, business or anything else on the web. However... ARE WE MOVING TOWARDS UX TOO QUICKLY? While there are a few die-hards that believe technical SEO is still the way to rank websites, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that there are 2 schools of thought: Technical SEO's who believe the algorithm is the end-all and be-all of search Digital Marketers who feel user experience and marketing are the way to gain success The difficulty of this debate arises with how quickly you alter your approach to digital marketing to coincide with the changes occurring in search algorithms and user intake channels. HOW HARD TRANSITIONING CAN BE I worked as an SEO consultant with 2 agencies who fell on opposite sides of the spectrum for this debate at roughly the same time. Here's what I found: If you choose UX over SEO, you receive fewer visitors to your website, but they are more likely to convert into customers or users. If you choose SEO over UX, you receive more visitors to your website, but fewer convert into customers or users. Both businesses opted to take a more mid-stream path and focus equally on SEO and UX, but we found the transition was much easier for the agency that had focused on UX first. The website architecture was set up, the visuals were in place, sales funnels were established - the foundations of a successful campaign. All they had to do was some minor on-site optimization and conduct a decent link building campaign and they were off to the races. On the other hand, the business that had focused on SEO undertook some pretty expensive web development projects to get caught up and still had to perform their SEO all over again. They were ranking well but no one was opting in to their service. They had an extended period of down time and faced some pretty difficult choices with regards to their bottom line and staff. In other words, if you are focusing only on SEO, things are going to get worse before they get better if you decide to build your UX. If you are only focusing on UX, chances are things will only improve with SEO. THE BEST PATH FOR DIFFERENT BUSINESSES You might think that the best solution is to move towards the middle of the UX/SEO spectrum, where you get a decent number of visitors and a decent number of conversions, but I have not found this to be the case. It is almost always situation-specific. For example, if you are working on behalf of a corporate law firm, there are typically not enough people searching for your services to make SEO necessary beyond basic local targeting and a bit of link building. On the other hand, UX is enormously important to these clients, who want simple, quick, effective solutions to their problems. On the other hand, if you are attempting to gain awareness for a new product or operate a money-making mobile app, perhaps user experience on your website is less important than getting people in a position to opt-in to your business venture. KEY TAKEAWAYS For me, the lessons I have learned for UX vs. SEO are: Always start with UX Your UX is the foundation of your digital campaign and will be the way that you make your profits. Don't skimp on planning and resources for this since it will dictate your success down the road. It doesn't matter how many people find your site if no one opts in for your products or services because they can't navigate your website or don't like the look of your business. Use SEO to accentuate your UX SEO is a great tool for bringing people to your website. I equate SEO to a loudspeaker and UX to your store - you can announce your presence to the world with SEO and people will start coming to your store. However, they need to be impressed once they find your store (your UX) or they will leave without buying anything. We work in a transitive world Search engines are not stationary. They are constantly changing and we as digital marketers have to change with them. To this end, UX is becoming increasingly important in search while SEO is beginning to lose its power. That being said, we are still years away from a day when SEO is useless, so we need to think hard about how we are going to implement it. Establish communication channels between UX and SEO professionals Since you will likely need to incorporate UX and SEO into your digital marketing campaign, it is very important that you start off with established lines of communication between both groups. If you want one group to take the lead, make sure everyone is on board. If you want a more democratic approach, that's fine, but make sure both groups are in constant contact to ensure there are no accidents that set you back. For the most part, both groups should be making suggestions that help each other, but there will be times when you have to make a choice. When those decisions come up, think about whether you want to bring more people to your site or improve you sales numbers. That will determine which group you choose to support. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS  conduct A/B testing I cannot stress this point enough. The beauty of our industry is that we get the chance to go back and erase our mistakes and try something new if our strategy doesn't work. That being said, we want to make sure that our choices are made on real-world numbers and stats. If your teams can't agree on a course of action, run a split test and see which results you prefer. Then incorporate those changes. Hope this has helped some of you - I know I wish I knew this when I first began my digital marketing career. Would've saved a lot of face palms and heartache.

I just thought of another one last night... I would do terrible things to have some way of knowing whether or not a domain has been penalised in the past. The fact that a domain can essentially be rendered un-rankable if the history is bad enough is worrying. The fact that we can only possibly learn this the hard way is terrifying! No matter how well you manage expectations and communicate with the client, if you get stuck trying to rank a domain in that state you will fail and you will also be the one lumped with 100% of the blame. I suppose this would require some co-operation from Google to make it possible which is likely why it doesn't already exist.

Nice new article on the subject, with input from none other than our very own Dr. Pete! Should You Worry About Voice Search? via Entrepreneur

Donald, you are exactly right.  If you optimize for Google you automatically get at least some benefit on other search engines. Imagine if another search engine gave explicit instructions for optimizaiton.  How much would they differ  from what you already do for Google.  Probably not much, is my guess. Yesterday one of my sites received 187 visits from duckduckgo.com.  That was about 0.2% of my traffic.  I didn't do a thing to get that traffic.  It fell from the sky.

Always happy to see an EGOL response. For me the issue really is one of credulity. When regularly I am approached by those who want to put something on one of our websites or client's websites I am always struck by how blatant they are and how assumptive they try to be. These we can call content marketers, but I like EGOL's reference - they are solicitors. They are not unlike when I was in another business and had a lot of customers; regularly people would approach with the world famous ... "VALUE ADD!" We were supposed to let them market to our customers for free because there world changing product or service was so massively valuable. I think my sarcasm tells you my answer to them was the same as my answer to any content marketer, good bye. Please stop the spam. With requests to write something I am fairly cautious but do have a couple of known business or marketing blogs that I infrequently contribute to. Since they are publishing media on the web, I am fine with calling them publicists. Interesting discussion you started Felicia, Robert