Blogger-Nation: Best articles of 2011

Essential advice for professional online marketers

The Best of 2011

Use the following best articles (and a few videos) of 2011 to save time and money on SEO in 2012. You'll learn about both the established basics of SEO like choosing the right target keywords, quality content and link building; and the visitor behavior-centred SEO of the future.

SEO

The biggest SEO story of 2011 broke on the 24th Feb 2011 when Google's Panda Update affected 12% of search results and halved many sites' visitor numbers. The Google Panda update survival guide shows you how to find out if your site was Panda slapped and what to do about it.

In Why Google Panda slapped quality sites, Mark Nunney investigated why Panda is hurting so many established high quality content sites and what we can learn from it.

Panda leads us to The New SEO. In an edited extract from his new book, SEO for Profit, Mark looked at how search engines are increasingly using a site's branding, visitor behavior and social data.

SEO for editorial teams, journalists and writers, and its partner piece on link building, are gentle introductions to the basics of SEO.

If you're in SEO for business then read and follow The Rules of SEO for Profit

And if you're serious about SEO then learn How to be an expert SEO

But no matter how good you get, make sure you know How to get things done in SEO and save some time with Artificial SEO intelligence

Link building

Wordtracker Link Builder finds you thousands of link prospects and organizes them into different strategies. Ken McGaffin explores those different Link building strategies for blogs, news sites, social media, job sites, directories, shopping sites, trusted sites, business sites, those that already link to your site and those that link to more than one competitor.

Whatever link building strategies you pursue, Quality links need quality content

Does your link building use the secret of the 'magic middle'?

How do you persuade busy bloggers to link to you? Ken McGaffin explained how in Link building and the craft of persuasion

Want to know what happens when link building is done right? Read how Link building hero, Nick Russill, gets links for snow-forecast.com without asking

Content

Ever feel like you're in a rut when it comes to writing articles? Karon Thackston (author of Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links) has the answer to your problem with 13 article styles that deliver results

There's more to content than writing and Gareth Davies detailed 5 ways video can seriously help your SEO

No matter how good your content, if you want it read and shared then you need great headlines. Ken McGaffin interviewed Nick Usborne, expert headline writer and author of Killer Headlines for Web Content and asked him How to write killer headlines

When your quality content and irresistible headlines appear on your site, take Ben Hunt's advice and make sure you avoid the Worst 5 web design mistakes

Get social with Wordtracker on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn

Join fellow Wordtrackers on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn for unique content, chat and networking.