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.
As my Dad always says, "It's better to be on page 2 in the editorial than on page 7 as an advertisement." This advice has been the guiding principle when it comes to the public relations strategy at Voices.com. In fact, I've proven this to be so effective in public relations that I've applied it to SEO as well. How does the advice translate?
I've been neglecting the Thursday roundups lately due to chronic deadlines and client work taking precedent over sitting down for four hours and putting together a post full of links. However, since I've received clamorings to resume the roundup (and because Rand is sad that I haven't been blogging much lately), I figured I'd hunker down and get you all up to date on what's been going on the past couple months. I'll also be "Andy Dufresne-ing" old YOUmoz entries and Marketplace listings into subsequent roundups until we're all caught up, so don't feel sad if you contributed to the site some way in the past and aren't listed below--I'll get to you! My apologies for some of the more "dated" news--hope you enjoy this mega long, uber-huge roundup!
Hi all, I'm Chas, the lead developer for Blogscape here at SEOmoz. I'd like to share a brief story about finding a semi-hidden link campaign while testing Blogscape this week. I watch the 'Movers and Shakers' feature of Blogscape somewhat obsessively -- both to research Blogscape's quality of data and to k...
Hello, I'm here today to talk about Google penalties. There's much talk and confusion in the SEO industry about penalties. We're always seeing in Q&A questions like: Do I have a penalty? Why do I have a penalty? How can I get rid of my penalty? ...
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
When creating a pay-per-click ad (PPC) ad, it is easy to overlook the importance of the display URL. However, search engine marketers have only a limited number of lines of text to work with and should take maximum advantage of each of them. This article summarizes the results of an eye tracking study and reviews the findings of two other tests of display URLs. The eye tracking study demonstrated that the display URL in PPC ads captures a significant portion of the gaze time allocated to the ads. The results of the other two tests showed that display URLs can have a meaningful impact upon click-thru rates.
I've been away from my "headsmacking" series (see the first 11 here) a bit too long, and despite an early morning flight to Reykjavik tomorrow for the RIMC, this subject is certainly deserving of attention. Besides, Mystery Guest always says I can sleep...
Common Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines -------------------- Unfortunately, over the past 12 years, a great number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate and what's required to perform effectively. In this section, we'll cover the most common of these, and explain the "real story" behind the myth.
Say you've got a competitor or perhaps competitors that are starting to trump you on the first page where you've been vehemently optimizing your website(s) and building valuable links, and without a seemingly good reason. What is an SEO to do but to start digging? Well, a good SEO digs the basics and an excellent SEO goes much further to understand the demographic, suspected patterns and technical advantages the competitor(s) has/have.
Approximately a year ago, I decided to start my own website - a semiconductor supplier directory company called Semi-Directory. I admit it’s a bit of a dry topic, but please bear with me as this post isn’t about the site per se. Instead, I thought it might be a good idea to share my progress over the last 12 months, and provide evidence that SEO actually works! (duh - as though you didn’t know that already). Still, it’s nice to see tangible evidence that this is the case now and again. Right?
A couple of weeks ago, Rand mentioned "awesome links" in the Buckets & Buckets of Keywords Whiteboard Friday. Since then we've had several people ask us exactly what makes a link awesome? Well, never fear, that's what we'll discuss today: what makes a link particularly high-quality and powerful, and how one can go about getting these radical links. ...
Earlier this week Rand and I spoke at the third annual Searchfest, put on by SEMpdx and a load of lovely sponsors. Loyal readers and R. Kelley fanboys (and girls) will remember that my first ever speaking engagement was at the first Searchfest two years ago. The organizers were gracious enough to overlook my profound suckitude and invited me back to speak about link building last year. This time around, they asked me to participate on the blogging panel with Stoney deGeyter and Heather Lloyd Martin. I wasn't sure what to cover since the panel details simply said "Blogging," so I talked about various blogging myths. It seemed to go over fairly well considering it was 9:00 am--I think my half naked pictures of David Hasselhoff helped.
When it comes to finding links, since the dawn of SEO one constant piece of advice has been to look at your competitors links for opportunities. Unfortunately, this means wading through the muck in order to find the gems. How do you gather, organize and prioritize all of those links? Wouldn't it be nice to take a power-hose to all that mud and grime to more easily uncover the best prospects? It's not that difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide for doing just that!
The following post is a collaborative effort by myself and David Klein (DK), who does far more Facebook advertising consulting than SEOmoz :-) He recently visited with the Facebook crew and has been helping more online marketers get comfortable and invested in the space.
So you're pretty much top of your SEM/SEO field in your neck of the woods and confident of converting most enquirers into satisfied, happy customers. What happens when you get to see/talk with a potentially new client and they come up with objection after objection to get you to drop your prices, or worse, promise something you cannot guarantee (e.g., a number 1 organic ranking on Google)?