With the Winter Holidays upon us; following is my monthly roundup of the best articles in the SEO and internet marketing niche for the month of December 2015.

“Trends That Will Dominate 2016” by Nicholas Bodell on Brid.tv blog. The New Year of 2016 is almost here and many of the bloggers create posts trying to guess what the most popular trends will be in the New Year. This is one of such post about online marketing strategy trends that will dominate 2016.

Following are quotes from the article:

• Start building high-quality content and brand yourself as well as your content, company, business.
• High-quality media rich content is the new SEO.
• Focus on traffic from social networks not vanity metrics i.e. likes and shares
• Videos are expected to make up 60% of all mobile data traffic by 2020. Don’t miss out!
• Email marketing still is one of the most effective means to reach your targeted customers.

“$100,855 by segmenting to 6500 emails” by Sol on SJO.com blog. In this post, the author explains how he generated over $100,000 by segmenting its email list at Examine.com to 6,500 emails. This is a post that you really should read for yourself in order to glean the best information from it. However, I will say that they generated 93 monthly, 128 yearly and 19 lifetime sales with 95% of them coming from the email list.

“Is Penguin 4.0 coming in March 2016?” by Chuck Price on Search Engine Watch blog. Penguin is probably the most dangerous and the most specified algorithm by Google. Back in April of 2012, the whole SEO world was shocked when the first Penguin went live. Now, when all professional webmasters know exactly what Penguin is and how to avoid the penalty; they started cautiously gathering links. That made the new updates of Penguin stop being so scary. On the other hand, if you still want to be sure that your site is safe; start working with disavow file today.

“White Hat SEO Case Study: How To Get a #1 Ranking” by Brian Dean at Backlinko. As we know, Brian always produces the highest quality articles about SEO and this one is not an exception. The post itself is very detailed. After reading it, you can find exactly how to use the Skyscraper technique to generate thousands of pageviews and get #1 ranking in Google and thousands in monthly recurring revenue.

“55 A/B Testing Best Practices Every Marketer Should Know” by Giles Thomas at Acquire Convert. A/B practice is very important if you are selling something on your site. New page design, new template, new basket, new buy button, etc requires quality A/B testing if you want to know exactly if your changes really work.

Giles has done some fantastic work and collected 55 A/B testing practices that are best for the marketer. Personally for me, I was not familiar with the majority of them, but it does not mean they are not useful. I will definitely save some of them for my future work.

“Brands That Won (and Lost) Google in 2015” by Dr. Peter J. Meyers on Moz blog. Biggest winners in 2015 are:

Most improved in 2015 are:

Biggest losers in 2015:

“SEW’s 10 most popular articles of 2015” by Graham Charlton on Search Engine Watch blog. I will not provide links to all 10 articles but will, instead, just mention their topics.You can review each article by following the link above:

1. 12 good, bad and ugly web design trends for 2016
2. 14 ways to reduce your site’s bounce rates
3. Google Mobilegeddon has officially arrived.
4. Internal linking for SEO: examples and best practices
5. How to completely dominate Google’s first page.
6. 8 ways content marketing and SEO can work together
7. 10 years of Google Analytics… and 10 features you’re probably not using.
8. How do I get a search box to appear in my site’s search results?
9. Do you have to come first in search anymore?
10. How cannibalisation can harm your search rankings.

“How Four-Numbers Can Send You Millions of Visitors from Google in 2016” on Viperchill blog. Don’t wait until the end of 2016 to implement things that work well for your site. If you wait until the middle of the year to get the site set-up; it may just be too late.

Begin working quickly on building social signals, private network links, guest blogging links, article links, and other kind of links that can bring you good traffic.

“50 Influential Women in Digital Marketing” by Ashley Zeckman on TopRankBlog. Personally, I think that most webmasters are male. Therefore, we are not aware of many influential females in this industry. On the other hand, there are, in fact, a significantly higher number of women in SEO/webmaster world than you may have thought.

In the post above, you will find a great combination of brand marketers that span decades of experience with different areas of expertise.

“The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging: 250+ Opportunities” by Maham S. Chappal on Marketdoc blog. Guest blogging is still one of the most popular backlink techniques in existence. Guest blogging can increase your brand’s online visibility.

In this post, you will find some fantastic opportunities of guest blogging. The article itself is very long, but it’s worth the time it will take to read it. Actually, there are many more websites that accept free guest blogging than you think. The majority of them do not have a special page for that because some people think it is not allowed. However, when you get in touch with the owner; you will discover that he or she is able and happy to accept a guest post.

Another very important thing is the quality of the post. Obviously, no one wants to publish low quality posts on their site. So, if you are offering some content to host on 3d party blogs – be sure that your content is of the highest quality.

There you have the best posts, in my opinion, for the month of December 2015! I hope you enjoyed them, too! Please share your comments below or contact me via this form or via my Twitter account.