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.
If you've ever spat the words "Facebook" or "Twitter" in the face of your client or supervisor before, you probably heard one of the three most predictable responses: 1. What the hell is that? 2. Ooh yeah, we gotta get on that and go viral! 3. I don't care what it is - how do we measure it?
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.
I can always pick out a fool when I hear someone claim they fully get the internet, whether it be a social media snake-oil salesman or a Twitter user with too many followers. The fact of the matter is that while it’s possible (and exciting) to understand one sub-sphere of the internet, there are simply too many spheres for one person to really understand all of them. I simply don’t think it is possible.
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
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.
Fortunately, Coach Wade wasn’t voted off of Survivor this past week. I’m happy about this not just because I’m a fan of his, which I admit I am, but because it means I’ll still get some more traffic from his hilarious turn on the show. The things he says and his sort of delusional ideas and stories start to grow on you, along with his kid-like passion and earnestness. He just wants to be part of the team.
We all know that blogs, when used properly, can be excellent tools for promoting your organization and expanding your client base while providing insight into the interworking of your company. They are also an effective way to generate organic search engine exposure, and, with the right content, quality inbound links for your website.
Two seemingly unrelated announcements in the past few weeks are actually pretty significant when combined with a few other ideas. I’m talking about the release of the Google Analytics Data Export API and the recent announcement that Google is jazzing up the information available from the referrer strings. This post addresses how both can be used to create a profoundly optimised site structure that pretty much tends to itself.
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.
I have recently gotten into SEO/SEM reputation management work, and I encountered Rip Off Report on a professional level. Wondering why it was so hard to get Rip Off Report away from the top of Google, I started reading up all the many articles on Google and Rip Off Report. The site clearly breaks many of Google's guidelines, yet it continues to rank at the top of Google. Rip off Report's legitimacy is that of a mobster, yet Google continues to reward them with a rather high rank.
"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...
I was talking to Rand about this and he suggested I post this here for SEO community feedback. This is not a shameless plug, but a request for people to help us understand our value equation to SEM professionals.