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Jane Copland

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It was a bit difficult hitting the Compose Entry link in my account to write this, because this will be one of the last blog posts I write as an SEOmoz staff member. At the end of this month and after two and half fantastic years, I'm leaving SEOmoz and Seattle. It's amazingly hard to know how to word something like this: I want to get across so much and there's no way to word it at all cleverly. ...

10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing
Rand Fishkin

10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing

I couldn't help but love Chris Yeh's Outline of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. It's a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing. Let's run through the list:

What the Heck Should We Call *.domain.com?
Rand Fishkin

What the Heck Should We Call *.domain.com?

If you've been playing around with Linkscape a little, you've probably seen our attempts at creating a lot of new naming conventions for metrics and features that were previously the exclusive realm of web indexing researchers, information retrieval scientists and search engineers. Things like mozRank & mozTrust (mT) have seemed to work out fairly well so far, but our testers and members have struggled a bit more with mozRank (mR) vs. Domain mozRank (DmR) - one is for a page while the other applies to a domain - and been seriously confused about FQDs vs. PLDs. Let's address this issue.

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Headsmacking Tip #10 - Incentivize Links
Rand Fishkin

Headsmacking Tip #10 - Incentivize Links

A very short tip, but one that has been proving incredibly valuable to all of our clients of late. When you think about attracting links organically, the process goes something like this: 1. What content can I create that will naturally attract links? 2. What format should I put it in for maximum share-ability? 3. How can I promote it to reach the largest possible relevant audience?

Collecting Past Due Payments From Clients
Sarah Bird

Collecting Past Due Payments From Clients

May It Please the Mozzers, I want to briefly touch on some collections methods and issues today. The first step is to try and collect the money yourself with follow-up invoices, letters and an offer of a payment plan. In this stage you can often accomplish two important things: getting a personal guarantee from the business owner, and getting the...

8 Arguments to Convince Jaded SEO Clients That You Are Trustworthy
A

8 Arguments to Convince Jaded SEO Clients That You Are Trustworthy

One of our sales people asked me recently, “What do I say to clients who don’t trust SEO’s?” For those potential clients who are jaded, who have been scammed by various companies claiming to do search engine optimization, it is difficult to talk to them about ‘improving their rankings’. They have heard that line many times before, often spoken with a thick, foreign accent.

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You've Got 70 Minutes to Vote on this Post
Rand Fishkin

You've Got 70 Minutes to Vote on this Post

This morning at SEOmoz, we're having a dev priorities meeting to decide which items in our queue of tools, upgrades and improvements will take priority for the next 45-60 days. For fun, I thought I'd open it up to our community and ask you - what would you most want to see from us in Q1 of 2009: ...

The Exact Science of Hindsight and How This Helps in SEO
D

The Exact Science of Hindsight and How This Helps in SEO

Over the last few months I've found myself doing slightly less SEO, and in its place I've been thinking about how we can improve the SEO services we offer our clients. SEOs, I've found, tend to be quite a creative bunch, both in the type of work that gets done but also in the way that the work gets done. One of the joys of being in SEO is that the tasks that need to be done and the best way of doing these tasks is permanently evolving. The creative urges mean that often when asked to do two similar tasks a week apart, the tasks are done in a completely different way. From a job satisfaction and creativity point of view, this is fantastic; starting from scratch each time on a task means the creative juices can really flow. From a management and consistency point of view, re-inventing the wheel each time is a nightmare!

Offline Keyword Research for Local Languages
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Offline Keyword Research for Local Languages

In mid-June 2008, I met my friend who has a canvas painted shoes boutique. She requested me to make a blog that promotes her painted shoes boutique. One of the challenges I came across when building the blog was the keyword research, as none of the online keyword research tools I used were able to return good results of searches for our local language (Indonesia). The tools always showed "0" or "not available." The experience made me doubt that there was a market share available for her product over the internet.

Social Media: The People's Choice Awards of the Internet
Rebecca Kelley

Social Media: The People's Choice Awards of the Internet

I've been hearing a lot of grumbling lately about the steady degradation of the quality of content online, especially as it relates to social media and social news sites. I don't necessarily agree with the gripes--was content that magical in 1999? As far as I can recall, there were hamster dances, dancing babies and Geocities pages long before LOLcats, Rickrolls and MySpace. Sure, there are millions and millions more people online now than there were 10 years ago and there are buttloads more pages of content, but to me, the type and quality of content hasn't changed all that much. You still have news articles and research papers and useful information in one corner, and porn, memes, photoshopped images, and general nonsense in another corner.