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 don't know what everyone else's client roster looks like, but for us it's all over the map, both literally and figuratively. Not only have our clients allowed us to fulfill our dream of manifest destiny (almost), but they range from billion dollar corporations to one person start ups and everything in between. Obviously, the means and the goals of these types of businesses are drastically different, and from our standpoint they each require us to use different "SEO muscles."
It was just a few short weeks ago that we launched the last index update. And here we are to do it again. Ben's gotten faster at his parts of the update, from 4 or 5 weeks to just two, with me dragging my feet for another week or so. So that's right, we're down...
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!
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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...
Here's something painfully obvious - it almost feels weird to type it: "SEOs and search marketers need to pay more attention than ever before and step up their game." Yes, I am the master of the obvious. But I'm also telling the truth - we're being counted on by our bosses and clients more than ever. We're being squeezed to produce more than we used to. In some cases, we're the last chance a faltering business has! We're getting worked hard.
For my first YOUmoz blog post I'd like to be a bit confrontational. Not in a nasty way, just because I've been searching for the answer to this question for a while. Rand posted something of interest in his 12 Easy Mistakes that Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field post about wasting PageRank on pages which are blocked with robots.txt directives, something which I had been doing and something I'd been mulling over for a while.
Imagine for a moment that you've spent the last three hours watching your boss imbibe, and that he (or she) is shamelessly sloshed. Just as things are really getting comfortable, your boss drops this little jewel of information into your lap:
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? ...
PPC gets 15% of the clicks and 85% of the search budget. SEO gets 85% of the clicks but just 15% of the budget. Rand called this a disconnect, I saw it as an opportunity - SEOs are cheap. But now, it appears to be shrinking. Aaron Wall pointed out that paid search spending is down and SEO is up.
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.
Linkbaiting is one of the most universally effective tactics for promoting a site, both for search engine rankings and short-term traffic boosts. I remember Rand Fishkin saying these words in a guest post on Search Engine Journal way back in 2005. Even today, linkbaiting proves to be an effective way for attracting more eye balls to your website and becoming the center of attraction.
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...
Pondering whether some extra certification or credentials might help land me the next opportune gig, I perused through some of the Top 10 Marketing Departments (according to US News 2009) to see what they had to offer. Given they are the "BEST Marketing programs in the nation," you would think they would have a clue about the Internet being an important medium, if not the most efficient and most powerful marketing medium in history.