It's that magical time of year when all of us who foolishly assumed the mantle of clairvoyance last December check up on our abilities and repeat our arrogant presumption again. Not surprisingly, something compels me to try again, despite the odds, but I am feeling a bit whimsical tonight, so let's make a game out of the prediction practice. For each prediction (mine and others), w...
The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site...
The race for governor positions across the US is on, and in California it has been a hotly debated race between Republican ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Democratic mediocre-record-producing Jerry Brown. I'm going to vote for a California governor this Tuesday, and while I was doing my research on the candidates, I can't help but to notice how they're doing in search & social. So I poked around in some data, and here's what I've found about what people want to know about our California candidates and how well they're addressing their audiences through search & social channels online. PEOPLE L...
Imitation is underappreciated in today’s business world (and, as we'll later see, in SEO). For example, did you know that: - Coca Cola imitated RC Cola in replicating its diet cola product - Visa and Mastercard imitated the credit card concept from Diners Club - McDonalds took the fast food chain concept from White Castle T...
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As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear: “My name is Earl. My conversion rate sucks, and I can't stop sending expensive PPC traffic to my homepage.” Feel better? You should. You just ...
One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is "What's the best way to learn SEO?" There are many ways to answer, but in this post, I'm going to cover the responses I give most often and those I've seen have the most success. But, before I describe each of these, it pays to understand that not all learning methodologies are the same in style, substance or where the...
Jason Cohen recently authored a post on A/B testing that deserves both broader awareness and a deeper dive. Most of us in the online marketing world are aware of the power A/B tests can bring through improved click-through, sign-up and conversion rates. Getting a higher percentage of visitors to a page to take a desired action is power...
My friends, you’ve made it. You’ve sat through over 10,000 words I’ve shoveled into these SEO Strategy posts (so far), and for that you deserve a serenade. This serenade calls for a nice glass of wine (preferably a good Tokaji to go with the music) and a comfortable seat while we w...
We have all been there once or twice, maybe a few more than that even. You just launched a site or a project, and a few days pass, you login to analytics and webmaster tools to see how things are going. Nothing is there. WAIT. What?!?!?!
First off, just to clarify, this post is a discussion about white-labeling your e-commerce business in a number of ways and the possible SEO ramifications of this, rather than white-labeling SEO services. What's all this white-labeling stuff then? A white-labeling is a site which sells your products directly but under a different domain, brand...
Conversion rate optmization - the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site - has been a hot topic this year. There's both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read R...
Let me start by asking you this. What makes your site: Different? Remarkable? In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself. Now that we’ve gone through ...
If you’ve labored through building out categorized keyword lists in Step 2, you’ve done a lot of the grueling work for your SEO strategy. Give yourself a pat on the back (or more realistically, go get yourself a beer. I’ll be right here when you get back). You should als...
Step 2 isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it’s approached in a slightly different manner in order to use and abuse further in our strategy document. It’s your regular keyword research broken out into categories for segmentation and prioritization, and we’ll use that for prioritizing and determining gaps and opportunities in Step 3 and for competitive research in Step ...