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.
This week's headsmacking tip is extremely powerful and pretty darn simple to implement. The premise is straightforward - you've got old content that ranks in the top 20-30 results, but never achieves first page (or top 5) rankings. Frequently, we see a lot of sites making the mistake of trying to link build (both internally and externally) to the old content: ...
Those of you who've been running Linkscape reports this weekend may have noticed our new, fresher data in the index. This is our second update (the first was on Dec. 8th of 2008) and it's brought with it a refresh of much of the crawl we originally launched with in October. This update is seriously good news for us, as it's taken far less time, energy and frustration than our first update, and it's good news for our members (and anyone who uses the free data) as much of the web's changes in Q4 2008 are now included in the index. We're working towards updates every 4-5 weeks, but it may be several more before we can get that level of freshness.
This week we're talking about video optimization. Video has become one of the most powerful content formats in recent years--whether as a regular part of a blog (like good ol' Whiteboard Friday) or as a viral content strategy--but when you're using video as a strategy it pays to consider your goals. Are you looking for link generation? Keyword targeted content? Branding and recognition? All of the...
Intrepid surfers of SEOmoz may have already noticed the new additions to our team - Lindsay Perkin Wassell & Adam Feldstein. Many of you in the SEO field know Lindsay well from her role as Director of SEO at OnTargetJobs and frequent speaking and participation at industry conferences. Today, she's joining SEOmoz's team as the manager of our consulting operations. Adam is somewhat new to the world of SEO, though as Group Program Manager of MSN Autos for the last few years, he's certainly put some significant energy into the process. I'm thrilled to have both of these folks on board with us, and think an introduction is definitely deserved.
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One small step in any linkbuilding process that has been written about many times before is to ensure that you (/ your client) has links from all appropriate businesses that they actually have a real relationship with. In the SEO world, it'd be unthinkable to enter into a partnership without a few links between your sites, but in many industries, this happens. Beyond partnerships, what about all your suppliers and customers? This has been written about many times before - along with techniques for getting links from those suppliers (such as offering testimonials). What is harder to find is an easy reference list for who all the suppliers you should approach are.
Virtually everyone who's engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that's relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an impact. Today I'd like to cover the different applications of SEO and talk about how to choose the right SEO objectives for your business.
This week I'm speaking to a number of startups about SEO - something I absolutely love to do as I've complained in the past that many don't pay appropriate attention to SEO. At SEO conferences, we often find humor in the stereotypes surrounding our world, and startups a...
To encourage webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, each of the major search engines have built support and guidance-focused services. Each provides varying levels of value to search marketers, but all of them are worthy of understanding. These tools provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else.
Just What the Heck is Indirect Marketing, Anyway? Indirect marketing is a way for a business to market their product, idea, or service without having to use the methods of SPAM or direct advertising and marketing.The idea behind indirect marketing is instead of sending a message out to your target market directly, just send them something like a friend request, or a vote, or a digg, or anything to get their attention.
Back in the studios fresh for 2009, we're discussing ways to deal with complex content situations. How do you deal with a very popular piece of content that must be available in several versions for your users (single-page, multi-page, downloadable, etc)? While not exactly a duplicate content or c...
We've recently gotten to do (and see results of) some testing around internal links & anchor text and have come to some interesting, if not 100% proven, conclusions. As a disclaimer, SEO testing, whether done in a controlled environment or on live sites, is both challenging to quantify and subject to fair critiques both practically and academically. That said, I feel fairly confident in stating the following findings.
Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.
As a black-hat SEO tool, link farming has been around since approximately the morning after Brin & Page submitted their seminal thesis. It was a bad idea to begin with—demonstrating a poor appreciation of the math behind the PageRank algorithm—and it's become an even worse idea since Google et al started actively pursuing and penalizing link farmers.
My personal ending would be - to Improve the Industry's Professionalism. We're a young industry, which means opportunity, excitement and lots of fantastic entrepreneurs and personalities. Conversely, it also means a lot of unprofessional, immature behavior, even from those of us who should know better (and yes, I'm certainly including my own actions from time to time in that gr...