It is the second month of the year, and here is my monthly roundup of the best articles in SEO and internet marketing niche for the month of February, 2015.

If you think that I missed something, then you can get in touch via this form or by using my Twitter account.

“How To Advertise Your Blog On Top Social Media Sites” by Liudas Butkus. At first, after reading the topic title, I thought it would be about free advertising. However, even talking about paid advertising, the author impressed me. The post itself is not very long and, at the same time, has all important information about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Reddit advertising.

In addition, the author did a video tutorial for each social platform. Well done, man!

“How Hashtags Work on Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr” by Ann Smarty on Moz blog. Very nice info collected by the author. She described the most popular social platforms:

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Google Plus
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• Tumblr
• Flickr

For each of the platforms above, she added useful resources that will help you to track hashtags, find the hottest hashtags, etc.

“The Myth of the Penguin “Penalty” by Chuck Price on Search Engine Watch. Personally, I still do not completely agree that it is possible to fully recover from Penguin update. This is my point that I argued well in this post “Difference Between Manual And Algorithmic Penalty: Recovery Methods And Why You Do Not Need To Wait For Fast Results”.

In this post, the author included a few very interesting myths and, at the same time, refuted them based on comments from Google team. Again, I do not think that we should trust Matt Cutts, John Mueller and other Googlers every time. But still, they have something to say:

• Myth #1 – You Must Perform a Manual Link Removal
• Myth #2 – You Must Perform a Link Audit and Submit a Disavow File
• Myth #3 – It Can’t Be Penguin – I Never Got a Penalty Notice
• Myth #4 – You Need to Submit a Reconsideration Request ASAP
• Myth #5 – It’s Impossible to Recover Once a Site Has Been Penguin Slapped

“Get 8% of Your Blog Readers to Give Up Their Email. Here’s How” by Jurij Burchenya. One of the most effective techniques to grow your blog is to create good email list so every time you publish a new post, you just need to inform all your subscribers. In this article, the author highlights the following:

• Using a feature box
• Adding a widget with your newsletter into right/left sidebar
• At the bottom of each post – ask your readers to subscribe
• Don’t forget about pop-ups
• Adding opt-in form to your “About” page
• Adding a link into footer
• Adding a notification to the top of each page
• Adding newsletter page to navigation menu
• Working with blog comments to encourage users to subscribe to your email newsletter

“Preparing for Penguin 4.0: A Google Penalty Prevention Protocol” by Marcela De Vivo for Search Engine Watch. The webmaster world is expecting to see a new Penguin update very soon and it means that:

• Those who have a site that was not penalised in the past, must be careful with link building
• Those who have a site that was penalised, must clean their backlink profile

In this article, Marcela talks about what links you should be careful with, how to identify them, and how to remove them. One of the most important factors you should remember is that Penguin is an algorithm and, even if you did everything correctly, you will see the results only within next update.

“How I Increased My Search Traffic by 47% from Translating My Blog into 82 Languages” by Neil Patel at Quicksprout blog. First of all, I would like to say that this trick will work only for blogs with good traffic and with good content. There is no point in translating your blog into another language if you have 100 or 200 weekly users.

Such blogs as Quickspout are very popular, and it is not a big surprise that SEO webmasters worldwide are interested in its content. But those who do not speak English can’t do that, so Neil decided to give them such an opportunity and translate his blog into 82 languages. At the end of this experiment, his analytics stats show +47% traffic. If you run a WordPress powered blog, then you must consider this free plugin that will help you to translate your blog content into other languages. They offer 92 possible languages.

“10 Amazing Facts About Pinterest Marketing That Will Surprise You” by Yohana Petrovic for Jeff Bullas’ blog. It is true that not many social media experts are still paying a lot of attention to Pinterest marketing. They mostly work with Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But, in this post, you will read some very interesting facts about Pinterest marketing that will surprise you.

Let me tell you just few of them:

• 79% of Pinterest users are female
• 88% purchase a product they pinned
• 49% purchase 5 or more products they pinned
• Pinterest is the fastest growing website by overall member growth
• It is the second social networks by growth in members
• Its members like to spend
• Those “pins” have a huge potential to go viral

“5 Mobile Tips to Keep You at the Top of the Rankings” by Mike O’Brien at Search Engine Watch. I wonder why not many webmasters focus on mobile rankings. As we know, the internet goes into the mobile world and, at the same time, it is not the same to promote a website for desktop Google and for mobile Google.

One of the most important features Google is offering is a mobile usability checker. So if you see a warning that your site does not display well at mobile, you must fix that.

Another very important observation by the author is site speed. Because mobile users very often access internet from the places with slow connection and it means that if you do not have fast load speed – you may lose potential buyers. 36% of UK consumers said, according to the latest research, they will leave a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

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