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Recently a site I was working on experienced a huge spike in search traffic from branded keywords. The site was fairly new and no major link building had taken place, and we hadn't worked on approaching any bloggers or media outlets for editorial links. Yet when reviewing our web analytics, we noticed that the spike in traffic were from keywords related to our company name.
Next Tuesday, Pubcon Las Vegas 2008 kicks off, and we're sending a big cadre of mozzers to the show. For the first time ever, SEOmoz will have a booth at Pubcon, so please stop by, check out Linkscape, Trifecta and our other PRO tools and get a special Pubcon show discount on SEOmoz PRO membership. Mozzers in attendance will include:
Last weekend at Scary SEO, Dave Snyder gave a very solid presentation on Information Environment Design…what the rest of us would call Information Architecture. Duncan Morris also wrote about information/site architecture on SEOmoz very recently. While absorbing both of these presentations, I couldn’t help but think once again of the analogy I repeatedly come back to when trying to explain Info/Site Architecture to people: the filing cabinet.
In my last YouMoz entry, I wrote about the use of definition syntax in traffic generation. I expained why one of the pages on my website was garnering so much additional traffic when compared to other pages. We found that a good deal of web searchers were still using the "define:" sy...
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Today is Election Day in the United States, and, by most accounts, is an exceptionally important and historic one. I thought it would be valuable to get a look at the world of SEOs and how we're generally choosing to cast our ballots. There have been a few endorsements around the tech world:
If you have a site that includes user-generated content, you may one day receive a subpoena asking you for personally identifying information about your users. Receiving a subpoena can be intimidating and you often don't have a lot of time to respond. This post is designed to give you some high-level steps to follow.
Lately, the search engines seem to have become more intelligent. I say this because the suggestions they make seem to be more accurate. Now, this obviously goes back to a human decision to leverage data that had already been collected, rather than a vast improvement in the suggestion engine.
Going through SEOmoz's Indextools analytics recently, I noticed that while the popularity of tools like Linkscape & Trifecta have been growing rapidly, they're still not yet on par with our most popular tool, the Rank Checker:
It was quite by chance I stumbled upon this issue early last year, while working on a project (and to be honest, it was the team at Latitude that picked up on it). Basically, one of the sites I was working on with them had some serious bloat in search results, and after digging into the situation, the solution was pretty simple. Although I cannot mention the site here because of NDA’s, I can give you an example of a site that suffers the same problem, and hopefully will give you an idea into how to manage the problem for your own/client sites.
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: On Thursday, November 6th, Exact Target and Marketing Sherpa are launching a free, 8-part webinar series. They'll be extracting actionable intelligence from Marketing Sherpa's new 2009 Email Benchmark Guide. If you attend any of the sessions you'll receive $100 off the guide and $400 off Marketing Sherpa's Email Summit being held in March.
Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) may just be a nicely packaged sales term to re-brand SEO as something more palatable for those not willing to spend money on the "vague" idea of SEO. Nonetheless, it has a specific goal to improve the reputation of someone or something in the search results, often achieved by a process of utilizing many domains to push down the negative results.
I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again: in my opinion, the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I'm going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases 'site' or 'information architecture' interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)
For the next in my headsmacking series, I thought we'd look at the ever-challenging task of earning links to your site. Though it may seem daunting, sprinkling some creativity on the link acquisition puzzle can definitely make the process easier (and sometimes, more fun, too). One of the strategies that seems to elude many site owners and marketers is that of leveraging their vertical content t...
Ok, well since this is my first attempt at a blog post here on SEOmoz I figured I would try and make it about something I at least have modest success with: geotargeting. I work in the lead generation business, but also sell SEO (even though I am in comparison to many a complete noob) as a side business. I find that targeting local businesses, at least for those new to SEO, can give you great, pretty quick results.