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.
Why is it that SEO is so hard to sell or explain? This question is something that pops up in blogs and in general conversation almost daily in our industry. Could it be that it’s the name that scares people off? I mean let’s look at what SEO is at the very basic level:
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?
Way too often load time is ignored due to the presumption that everyone else has broadband. Guess what - not everyone does, and those dial-uppers and smart-phone users are leaving your site, ASAP! Kinda makes you wanna just smush 'em, right? No, no, not your users. Your lard-tard images!
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...
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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.
Linkscape has been out for just over 2 months and recently had its first index update. Although it's still in beta (and probably will be for another update or two), I've been using it enough for our client projects that I think it's worthwhile (and high time) to share my personal applications for the tool and its data.
Gabriel Goldenberg recently wrote a post about how search is changing forever. First of all, I would like to make it clear that I agree with Gabriel, search is changing. I think Google is in an early stage of testing what works and what doesn’t. Norwegian search (google.no) hasn't been that much affected by what Rand refers to as blah blah blah as the English search results have yet. However, in Australia (google.com.au) I’ve noticed a lot of testing by Google. One of the keyword terms I was watching did until recently contain a map, but just a couple of days ago the map was removed. I don’t have any explanations to why, but I’m guessing Google learned that the result would do better without the map. We don’t know what Google will end up doing with the search results, but one thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that Google is looking to put most of its money in their own pockets (who wouldn’t?) and want to keep as much traffic as possible within Google owned sites. I don’t think there is any point in sitting here waiting -- what we should do is start adjusting to the future.
I've been watching a lot more of the Dr. House show, and becoming a bit obsessed with some SEO mysteries of my own. Since our last outing into diagnosis went so well, I thought we'd try again. I haven't got either completely solved, but I feel pretty good about some hypotheses. Let's see how you...
I often get dragged away from the computer by my girlfriend to head to the bookstore. My favorite section is the “Web Design” section, obviously. I like to take a look at the SEO books and see what kind of outdated information books are pushing onto the readers. This trip was a little different because I ran into a college student who was looking at an SEO book. We began talking about SEO and more about the class he was researching SEO for. I gave him my contact information and told him to contact me if he needed any further information on the topic.
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: ...
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!
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.
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.
Hello fellow Mozzers (hopefully my absence lately doesn't make it wrong to say something like that). This holiday season, I wanted to drop by and say hello and warm wishes to friends I haven't chatted with in a while. And to post one short article about something that really got under my skin this evening. Like many of you, I have a boatload of side websites that I run for business and hobby both. One of those sites gets a decent amount of traffic this time of year, due to the annual controversy surrounding a college football playoff system. My site, BCSFootballPlayoffs.com, is a couple of years old and is a place where I post my two cents on what I feel would be an ideal and exciting college football playoff system. My site gets decent traffic and is ranked #3 on Yahoo for "college football playoff system".