The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.
Acquiring users and getting them to take an action on your site is the absolute core of web marketing. Whether that action is making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a demo...it doesn't matter, if you're doing business online, your job is to acquire users and get them to take an action. There are a million ways to go about this process, but it's crucial for y...
Since I'm a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it's redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append "movie" to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).
Dear 2007 Rand Fishkin, Hi there - it's me - your 2009 self. I know it's highly unlikely you'll ever get this email, but who knows? The flow of time could chaotically spasm and somehow drop a printed copy of this on your lap - stranger things have happened. And, in that unlikely event, here's a few quick things you should know:...
My Twitter account has close to 1000 followers, which is not an amazing number but still a decent enough to have an effect on referral traffic patterns (and it's a nice, even figure). So what benefit is 1000 followers to your site if you don't tweet or promote your site directly? I'm not a full-time Twitter guru, and have other accounts that I manage on behalf of clients that generate more interest, so my thought is with my own account how much traffic would I get out of people visiting my site via my profile link because they wanted to learn more about my agency? This is different to a number of Twitter accounts who actively tweet and encourage people to visit their website. I need to know the value of that profile URL for my agency.
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At this week's SMX, Rand made a comment about two big brands that ranked at #2 and #3 for their industry's generic keyword behind an exact match domain. Referring to SERPs Click-Through-Rate data, he suggested that you could calculate how much more traffic the larger brand could receive from the keyword by moving from position 2 to position 1.
This week's Whiteboard Friday comes to you courtesy of a few friends from the Twitterverse. We had Lindsay put out a call for WBF ideas and, among the suggestions, a few of our followers asked for tips on linking strategies and embedded content, so here we are, thanks to... @mattlambert @khu...
The beginning of this month (May 2nd, to be exact) marked my 3 year anniversary as a blogger. My first post on SEOmoz was a paragraph long and consisted of asking our readers if they know of any Spanish-language SEO blogs. It attracted 18 comments. Huzzah! Since then, I've published 241 more posts, with this one being #243. I thought I'd reflect back on my three years of blogging and share the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and the lessons I've learned along the way.
If you haven't noticed URL rewriting, you haven't been thinking like a search engine optimizer. More and more sites are using this technology to create human-readable (and SEO-friendly) URLs. If your site is one of them, good for you. Read on and you might find some reassuring data to back up your excellent decision. If you are not familiar with how URL rewriting will improve organic search ranking and traffic to your site, I don't blame you. It's not a hard concept to grasp, but it's rarely covered well in SEO publications. Few sites are using it, and this creates an opportunity for you to get ahead in ranking. If you have any search competition, you should already be thinking about how to improve the way you present data to engines.
A note to all new and learning online marketers, I have been reading SEO & PPC resources, blogs and forums for much longer then I have been contributing to them. In fact, it is only in the last year, and more seriously in the last 6 months, that I have spent any real time in the online SEO communities. So I don't know how some who have been around for much longer have managed to stick around without killing someone. No wonder Darren sometimes comes across as cranky!
URL rewrites and 301 redirects... you talk about them, you recommend them, but do you truly understand how they work? Sure, you know that rewriting a URL means that the URL displayed in the browser changes to be more SEO (and user) friendly. And you know that a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. But let's dig a little deeper, and explain how they work together.
A very simple return to the headsmacking series this week (as it's late here in London and I've been up my usual 40+ hours traveling). We've been noticing that a number of websites seeking to block bot access to pages on their domain have been employing robots.txt to do so. While this is certainly a fine practice, the questions we've been getting show that there's a few misunderstanding...
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Google crashed between 8:40 and 9:55 ET yesterday, preventing people from Googling to find out why Google wasn't working. Oh noes! Speaking of Google, they recently overhauled Google News as well as updated their blog search algorithm, and they're allowing trademarks to be used in US Adwords copy. Geez, no wonder there was downtime. Methinks Google needs a little R&R.
"Old McSpammer had a farm, e-i-e-i-oh, And on that farm he built some links, e-i-e-i-oh With a backlink here, and a backlink there, Here a link, there a link, Everywhere a link, link..." You get the idea. Back in the day, building your own network of sites designed to link to each other and build link popularity was an easy way to help b...
(Intro: For those who aren't aware, last week I challenged Will Critchlow to a presentation-off during SMX London). I see how it is, Will. Don't try to deny it. You can't win on points, so y...