Internet Marketing Strategy 2.0

If you keep investing time on optimizig your site for Google, or investing in link building efforts of all kinds I suggest you give a good read to this article.

Wriiten by Awini Anburajan on Buzzfeed: "Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013...

...While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

BuzzFeed tracked traffic referrals to over 200 publishers in the BuzzFeed Network, a group of sites that carry BuzzFeed's tracking code and include the Huffington Post, Daily Mail, NewsweekDailyBeast, Time, Sports Illustrated, Us Weekly, and Rolling Stone. Collectively the sites represent an audience of more than 300 million people globally.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period.

While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%."

And check this: "In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers."

Are you ready for this?

Insightful. Informative. Must-read. 8/10

Full article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/aswini/where-did-all-the-search-traffic-go

Nick Eubanks has an excellent case study on SearchEngineWatch demonstrating how a content-based web site, built on an existing publishing platform, can reach high levels of traffic without doing any pro-active link-building activity.

Here's the gist of the story: "Useful content and a solid, well-researched roadmap is the best way to acquire organic traffic.

If your content is serving a purpose, is accessible, and is easy to consume – your readers will build all of the links you will ever need, and your online presence will flourish as a by-product.

Put in the time, do the research, build your own websites, talk to everyone you can, TEST, and you will start seeing improvements in your organic search."

Rightful. These guys got it right. 8/10

Full case study: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2254983/From-0-to-1.4-Million-Visitors-in-6-Months-A-Lesson-in-Building-Organic-Traffic