It’s always important to look back at the work you’ve done and see if you can use that knowledge once again. It’s easy for things to get pushed to back of the line when you’re continually running with new ideas and burying yourself in new projects, but it’s never too late to take a look back. With that in mind, we’ve decided to bring back some of our most popular posts from 2013 to help our readers succeed:

1. How Public Relations Can Help SEO. By Adam Heitzman

When you think of PR you think visibility in the news and in the community, but it’s usually the job of SEO and marketing departments to earn the online visibility. However, there are quite a few ways that PR pros can work together with an SEO department—content experience, reputation, connections, etc.—that this article discusses in detail.

2. Top 10 Reputation Management Tools Online. By Scott Langdon

This article is just how it sounds. A straightforward article explaining the four reasons you need reputation management tools, ten tools complete with the trial time you have to test, and how to get started.

3. SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Websites. By Amanda DiSilvestro

This was a popular post because it singles out ecommerce websites, which isn’t as common as writing for small businesses in general. It is formatted like a checklist with 13 different things to keep in mind, so it’s easy to understand and very thorough.

4. Tips to Make Blogging Interesting. By Guest Blogger John Rampton of Search Engine Journal (published 2012).

This is one post that was published at the end of 2012, but it was popular enough to add to our list. John Rampton is now the managing editor of one of our favorite sites, Search Engine Journal, so you know you’re getting good information whenever he contributes a guest article. This was a popular one because it gives unique tips about keeping your blog interesting—something every blog owner, no matter what the subject matter, can benefit from reading.

5. Taking the BingItOn Challenge: Is Bing Better Than Google? By Amanda DiSilvestro

When you visit this article, you will get a feel for why it was so popular. The bottom line: The BingItOn challenge is fun. Readers want to try it to decide which search engine they really do like better.

6. 10 SEO Mobile Apps You Should Know About. By Adam Heitzman

Once again, an article that lists. 10 mobile apps in 2013, along with a little description of each, is an easy way to take a look at everything available side by side and assess what might be best for your specific company.

7. How HTML5 Helps Improve Your SEO Efforts. By Scott Langdon

Articles about HTML are always hot topics, and they aren’t easy to write. Langdon does a great job of putting complicated material into an easy to understand format with bullet points covering !DOCTYPE, input types, local storage, and the newest HTML5 tags.

8. SEO Link Building Should Also Generate Traffic. By Guest Blogger Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing.

Nick Stamoulis is one of those people you see everywhere online. He knows search and social and seems to have written on every topic imaginable, which is why we are thrilled to have him as a guest contributor. This piece discussed link quality versus link quantity and no-follow ver do-follow for generating traffic.

9. Enhanced Campaigns: Google versus Bing. By Amanda DiSilvestro

Everyone loves a good “Google versus Bing” debate, and this one is complete with a verdict. Google first introduced enhanced campaigns, but many were unhappy with the changes made because creating one campaign for two scenarios didn’t seem easier. Bing responded, and the debate begins!

10. SEO Guidelines: Sponsored Content vs. Ecommerce Partnerships vs. Partner Links. By Amanda DiSilvestro

This article discusses the SEO guidelines you find with sponsored content, such as no-follow links, SEO guidelines for partner links, and SEO guidelines for ecommerce partnerships. These things can get easily mixed up, so  having the guidelines you need to follow all in one place has been helpful for our readers.

Also check out some of our most popular guest articles from the first part of 2013:

1. Tips and Tricks to Researching the Social Web. Published on Small Biz Trends.

Here you will find four sections to the article: Forums and Q&A tools, trends and search in social media, organizational tools, and social media tips. All have to do with finding your way through what many call the “social” web, or the search that takes place on the many social networks.

2. Yelp Optimization: How to Claim and Optimize Your Business Listing. Published on Search Engine Watch.

There is so much information out there regarding Yelp, so it can be overwhelming to try and sort through it all. If you’re looking for a write-up that explains how to get your business listed and a few optimization tactics, this post is full of screenshots and aims to keep things simple and direct.

3. Google+ Ripples Explained. Published on Search Engine Journal.

This article got the attention of many, including a few from Google itself, because it discusses a topic that has been kept quiet for a while. Google+ Ripples is a great way to see who has been sharing your content, where the big influencers of your content are, and thus giving you great insight into how you can continue the “ripple” effect.

If there is ever a topic you would like covered, feel free to let us know in the comments or send us an email. Whether we know the answer or not, we’d be happy to do some research and write something up to help your SEO efforts succeed.

Getting many of the SEO and social media experts of today in one place is a great way to compare thoughts and figure out what direction to take your business in the coming months. We asked eight industry leaders the following question:

What new SEO or social media tool (or new feature of a tool) are you most excited about using in 2013? Tell us a little bit about what makes the tool unique, how you plan to use it for your specific business, why it’s going to be important, etc.

Below are the expert opinions including tools about social sharing and reporting, gmail tricks, and even some of their very own tools that they are excited about using this year.

Ann Smarty: Owner of MyBlogGuest and SEOSmarty.

This year I have been really digging into Google’s Author Stats within the Webmaster Tools Labs. Google’s Authorship is something I’ve been paying closer attention to this year (as I am an active content creator) and I believe it’s the hugest web-marketing trend nowadays. The click-through for some of my authorship-articles is amazing: Some articles rank #8 and still get ~30% click-though! Could you have imagined anything like this back in the days when none of the positions really mattered except #1?

The tool gives some deep insight into how Google determines authors when authorship is not set as well. I have described some of my most interesting findings here as well: Google Trying to Identify the Author: Fails and Puzzles. The tool is very new and it will be interesting to see how it is going to evolve!

John Rampton: Managing Editor for Search Engine Journal

Serps.com. It’s a pretty sweet tool that tracks your rankings and gives you personalized reports that you can customize for different clients.  I love their reporting functionality.  Ever since Raven stopped showing some of the data I have relied on Serps.com. You can get a full demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgiAqNI_Lg

I think especially for agencies, you can CNAME the app to your own domain, so dashboard.highervisibility.com<http://dashboard.highervisibility.com/> for example, and fully white-label the app in just a few minutes.  Makes it look like I’ve got some sweet custom software for them (at no extra charge)

Something else that really sets it apart from everyone else is their alerts function. If they detect a higher than normal amount of rankings shift for my site, they send me a detailed alert with everything I need to know about it. It’s awesome so you’re not caught off guard. It’s little things like that, that give me a competitive edge above my competitors.

Gerald Weber: Founder of SEM-Group.

The tool I’m the most excited about is Viral Content Buzz (disclaimer: I’m VCB’s co-founder). That being said, it really IS the tool I’m the most excited about, and the main reasons for my enthusiasm don’t have to do with me being a part owner.

Since I’ve been heavily involved in social media sharing for quite awhile now, I know firsthand how much time, energy and effort it takes to REALLY promote a great piece of content well. Although it can be very satisfying, it can also be a resource drain. So after looking for a more scalable or efficient solution and realizing there wasn’t one that was fully committed to quality, I decided to help build it!

We use VCB internally to generate “social buzz” on our blog posts and all of our client guest posts. If you want to see exactly how we’re helping bloggers and content marketers get more social shares for their best content, be sure to check out this two-minute video overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAVBEr2YgWo

Ashley Moreno: Marketing Analyst at Volusion

Here at Volusion, we’re very excited about launching with Radian 6. The tool not only enables social media reporting across most platforms, it also enables us to complete new benchmarking while leveraging the voice-of-the customer to improve our product road map. For example, with Radian 6 you can tag content as you read through and respond to different posts. We’ve begun tagging content across multiple platforms (Twitter, blogs, etc.) for review by different departments within our organization, including sales, customer service, technical services, and product. In this way, we can both ensure expert responses to posts, and we can compile customer feedback in a manner that allows decisions-makers within our organization to act on the posts.

In addition, to processing individual social posts, via the tool, we also measure and benchmark what we call “share of voice” on various industry topics relating to our competitors and us. When people talk about topics related to SaaS-model e-commerce solutions, we aggregate that content by company, answering questions like: How often are relevant, community discussions in reference to Volusion vs. one of our competitors? What is the sentiment of those posts? Does Volusion appear in a high percent of posts related to key product features?

The only catch with the tool seems to be price. Radian 6 might be cost-prohibitive for some smaller organizations or newer social media programs. For more info on social media reporting using free, platform-specific tools, like Facebook Insights, check out our blog!

Jon Henshaw: Chief Marketing Officer at Raven Tools.

The tool I’m most excited about using is Raven’s new Site Auditor. I’ve dreamed of making this tool for years, and it finally became a reality in February.

It’s the first tool that automatically crawls and checks everything that I think is important to an SEO, including elements like malware, page speed and schema.org microdata that you don’t see in other tools. There’s one-click filtering to view specific site problems, and all of the data is cross-referenced. For example, if you want to view all of the pages related to a specific error, it’s only one click away.

I plan to use Site Auditor like most of our customers do: to automatically monitor and alert me to problems with all of our sites. When I find them, I’ll use the built-in reporting to send my Webmaster a list of the issues that need to be fixed. Site Auditor’s monthly crawl history report, combined with our Site Performance report, is a great way to see how changes made over time are improving a site overall.

Alexis Grant: Editor of the Brazen Life Blog; Blogging at AlexisGrant.com

Rapportive’s MailChimp integration with my Gmail helps me see what emails readers have opened, which ebooks they’ve bought, which webinars they’ve attended — and all of that information helps me grow my newsletter community and sell more guides and courses. It’s definitely a social tool that’s worth paying attention to, especially if you’re in the ecommerce business.

Viktar Khamianok, CEO of Link-Assistant.Com

I’m really excited with BuzzBundle, its functionality, progress and customer feedback. BuzzBundle is a new tool, we released it in November 2012 in beta, and since then we’ve gradually updated it with advanced features for efficient social media management, reputation monitoring and combining SEO and social.

To date, BuzzBundle is integrated with the broadest range of social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, thousands of blogs and forums. It is the only small business class social media tool to allow updating not only Google+ biz pages, but personal Google+ profiles as well. If you’re looking for a multi-functional social media management app, the recently-out BuzzBundle is your best bet. You can download BuzzBundle for free from our official website.

Tyler Shannon: Brand manager for TechWyse

As Facebook advertising continues to grow, the need to expedite ad creation and deployment will, too. I have been focusing my attention on the recent push in new Facebook advertising options, specifically promoted posts that target the newsfeed. Since Facebook does not allow more than 20% text in Promoted Post images and guessing just isn’t an option for a busy advertiser, my company created a unique tool that allows page managers and advertisers to easily determine whether their image for a promoted post meet Facebook’s text policy guidelines.

Our Facebook Image Text Detection Tool is a fast, easy way to check your images to ensure that they meet Facebook’s guidelines. We had developed this originally for internal use, however recently opened it up to other agencies and the public. No longer will page managers and advertisers need to keep their fingers crossed, worrying about whether or not their promoted post will be approved! Insuring your promoted post meets guidelines helps speed up development times and ensures campaigns do not get delayed by disapprovals.

Check out our innovative tool on the Chrome App Store!

Scott Langdon: Managing Partner for Highervisibility

The tool that we seem to be using more of is Panguin Tool from Barracuda. We have clients joining nearly every day that have had issues with Google updates. Sometimes they have had a bad experience with another firm and other times it is something that the client has done on their end. This tool will access a client’s Google analytics account and match up visitor patterns with specific algorithm changes (Panda, Penguin, and Other). It saves us some time diagnosing which change most likely impacted their website so that we can quickly reference that update and develop our plan of attack on fixing their issues. We get excited about any tool that can save us time on diagnosing issues so that we can spend more time increasing the search rankings for our clients!

Have you tried any of the tools these experts are excited to use? Let us know your experience or teach us about another tool that you’re excited to use in 2013.

In the past, PPC and SEO were usually kept separate, but the lines quickly became blurred as marketers began to realize that the PPC data gathered could really help a company’s SEO efforts succeed. The opposite is true as well, but PPC skills usually come before SEO skills for many companies. In other words, this is a great way to kick off a brand new SEO campaign or improve an existing one. Use what you know to help give you an edge about what you don’t know. Ask yourself: How can I use my PPC data to my SEO advantage?

Getting Started with PPC Data for SEO Improvement

Every good SEO campaign uses the information of many different outlets, but companies typically following the hype and run to social media data first, forgetting all the rest. PPC data, however, can help a company’s SEO efforts in many different ways. It all starts with keyword analysis.

Step #1: Consider the keyword terms that are working well for your PPC campaign.

Step #2: Take these keyword terms and find the conversion rates for each of the terms. You don’t want to focus on the number of visits because the quality of these visits is what is so important for SEO.

Step #3: Don’t forget to consider your landing pages for these terms. Check the bounce rate and make sure that the keyword terms actually have something to do with your pages. After all, you do make different choices when you’re paying for a spot on a SERP (you might have the terms going to a specific PPC landing page you created).

Step #4: Consider your audience. Are the terms your analyzing more focused on giving information to someone or making a sale? If you want to use the terms (and their landing pages) for organic, you’re going to want something that is more information than a sales pitch.

Step #5: Make some slight revisions. Once you have really narrowed down all of the keywords that work for PPC and might potentially work for organic, make some revisions and try to perfect these keywords. Give them a try and you might be very surprised.

It’s important that you continually go back (once every few months) and go through this process again. Your keyword terms are going to change, and you’re going to want your organic terms to change, so keep analysis and seeing what you can gather from your PPC data.

Whenever you’re working with your website, it’s important to consider SEO in every decision that you make. Whether it be content, design, navigation, or load time, you want to optimize for your readers first, but keep Google bots at a close second. The better SEO you have the higher you will rank on a Google SERP, the more visibility you will earn, the more clicks you will receive, the more conversions you’ll see. It’s a domino effect, and SEO is that first push you need.

If you’re dabbling in the newly popular infinite scrolling, this idea still remains. In dealing with Infinite Scrolling, the use of SEO is going to be absolutely essential.

What Is Infinite Scrolling, and Why Does It Matter?

For those who are unfamiliar, infinite scrolling is something a website can adopt so that new information is always loading on a page. This means that readers can continually scroll down the page and new information will always appear (it’s infinite). There is no need to click off of the page and wait for something to load to see more information. The information will be loading right there on the page allow a user to just scroll down to see. Social networks such as Facebook are masters of infinite scrolling.

A few benefits of infinite scrolling include:

• Real-Time Information. If your website has real-time information coming through, infinite scrolling is a great way to keep everything updated and allow users to scroll through easily. This is a big reason why almost all of the major social networks, including Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, use infinite scrolling.
• Large Amounts of Data. If your website has large amounts of data, especially data coming to you in real-time such as your tweets or Facebook posts, infinite scrolling gives you an easy way to manage it all.
• Mobile. Infinite scrolling began right around the mobile phenomenon. As more people because to browse the web on their mobile phones, the more businesses saw a need to make scrolling easier. Mobile phones have a small, vertical screen, so information began to be presented more vertically. Infinite scrolling was a no-brainer.

There are, however, many negatives to infinite scrolling. Many find that it is overwhelming to have to continually scroll down to find what they want. There is no sense of a stopping point, and many users don’t find this appealing (part of the reason Google has yet to adopt this on their SERPs). It’s distracting and exhausting, so as a business owner you have to consider whether or not your type of site and the content you are displaying would really benefit from this practice.

SEO Tips for Infinite Scrolling

When it comes to SEO, there is one major thing to keep in mind. It’s really all about making it easy for search engine bots to crawl your site by creating static URLs for each page. Think of it like a comprehensive HTML sitemap except your links aren’t just accessible through a footer link. Below examples:

• Static URLs. You want to make sure that your infinite scroll is built on top of paginated pages (like your archive pages). This means that there should be static links in the backend of your site that take bots from one page to another (unlike what you would see if you were a user). This makes it much easier for bots to crawl your site.

How to Make It Happen: You can tell if you are making it easy for your site to be crawled by disabling JavaScript and then looking to see if there are links to static archive pages, usually organized by year and/or by month. You can also organize this by topic instead, if that makes more sense for your website.

Whatever your reason for wanting to try infinite scrolling on your website, remember that SEO needs to be a priority. You can visit the WordPress plugin directory to download the infinite-scroll plugin and get started.

What are your thoughts on infinite scrolling? How do you feel as a user? How do you feel as a website considering this avenue?