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4/14/2008 Here's the deal: I build links. I build a lot of them - tens of thousands every month. How do I do this? I create fun online quizzes and then provide HTML code with quiz scores that bloggers and website owners can embed on their own sites. A good example is this widget, which tells you if you talk too much in your blog, or ...
9/18/2007 As Rand mentioned in his recent post: Big Changes at SEOmoz, I'm leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. It's been nearly 4 and a half years, which is a millennium in tech-industry time, and I feel that SEOmoz is at a point where I'm comfortable leaving. Previously, I was the only developer, designer, and systems administrator and our entire infrastructure depended on me. With Jeff, and more recently Mel, I can now leave knowing that SEOmoz is in good hands.
8/30/2007 We're rolling out two new features today for our SEOmoz members: the first is a collection of Free SEO Tools for all to use (you just have to have a free seomoz account), the second new feature is an SEO Dashboard for our premium members. Rather than using a ..how do you say.. "keyboard," to tell you about these features, I recorded a screencast so that I could...
6/13/2007 I've just put the finishing touches on a new tool that I think is a killer addition to our current arsenal of SEO tools. It's basically a tricked-out version of the "Where's it Rank?" PHP script that I of...
6/8/2007 We're launching a new section for our premium members this morning: SEOmoz Q&A. This is a place where premium members can ask the SEOmoz staff SEO related questions and receive tips, advice, or just get pointed in the right direction. It works a bit like a trouble ticket system: discussions are opened, closed, rated, and eventual...
5/25/2007 Patrick Sexton (aka feedthebot) over at SEOish contacted a few big names in the search marketing industry and asked: "What would you do if you only had 100 dollars to market your website?" This excellent read includes responses from Aaron Wall, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Kid Disco, Lee Odden, Tod...
4/27/2007 I've added a feature to the Page Strength tool that allows you to do a hard refresh of the data in your report. If you run a report and data is missing try refreshing it and it'll look for factors that were missing and attempt to fetch them again. Please keep the following in mind: Refreshing will only re-fetch data that is missing, n...
4/23/2007 Myspace launched a social news site last week that allows users to vote on stories and democratically determine popularity, much like Digg. I've spent some time getting a feel for how it works and my opinion is that the site, much like everything Myspace produces, is medicore at best. The interface is clunky and has a simple voting system that isn...
4/17/2007 As promised the Crawl Test Tool has been released to the public. I wrote a blog entry about this about a month ago which highlighted some of the features of the tool, but in a nutshell this is what it does: This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website...
3/29/2007 We've added a new feature for premium members: SEO Tips and Tricks. It's nothing earth-shatteringly huge, just a simple list of SEO tips, tricks, and bits of industry knowledge that we don't make publicly available. The list will be updated fairly regularly and when a new tip is published you'll notice a New SEO Tip link in the left-hand navig...
3/28/2007 I needed a tool that quickly tells me what page of search results a URL ranks on for a specific keyword. It didn't need any advanced features or complicated options, just something where if I was visiting a page I could hit a button and instantly find out where it ranks for a keyword. I threw together a quick PHP script that does exactly this, including a browser button so I can ...
3/26/2007 I don't normally cross-post blog entries, but I figured this one was appropriate for the SEOmoz crowd. About two weeks ago I made a couple funny sketches of what social media websites would look like if they were all sitting around together. Social Media Websites in Illustrated Form. ...
3/9/2007 There's been a ton of buzz about Freebase lately: a newly launched collaborative database of cross-linked data. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and get all crazy excited about it, because to me it looks like another geek-centric technology that is exciting to the techies but useless to 99.9% of the population (...
3/8/2007 Footers are important. Usually, they are a repetition of the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered "the fine print," such as copyright information and privacy policies. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for buttons that show off standards compliance. While doing a ...
2/20/2007 Dearest Digg, I couldn't help but notice your site has a small technical issue. It's no biggie, but I think fixing it could save you some money. I'm all about saving people money, just the other day I handed out coupons for a free trial-sized bag of hydrogenized bean-lard-mulch. I know, I'm practically a saint. I noticed ...
2/15/2007 Explanations of 15 CSS properties that aren't used much in web development these days.
2/8/2007 It appears that the overture bid tool is finally gone (for real this time). The information from this tool is used in our own Keyword Difficulty Tool, so now I'm looking for an alternate source of similar data. Previously the overture bids accounted for around 12% of your keywor...
2/7/2007 Web design can be incredibly frustrating. You'd think that with all the infinite possibilities of what-goes-where it'd be pretty easy to land a design that works, yet somehow we've all been there: stuck working on a design that refuses to look right. These 8 tactics are what I use to get out of that sticky spot.
2/6/2007 13 command line tricks for use by web developers and other *nix enthusiasts
2/5/2007 This is a podcast highlighting all the new stuff we've added to SEOmoz with the launch of our new site. I tried to cover all the new features we added, including explaining MozPoints and the details of our premium membership. SEOmoz Version 3 - New Bells and Whistles ...
1/22/2007 SEOBlackHat recently wrote a post about global warming that calls it out as being "The greatest scientific fraud in the history of mankind." Even though the author says otherwise, the post is obviously linkbait for an SEO competition to ran...
12/8/2006 Hopefully I'm not contributing to the noise on SEOmoz by writing this post, but I think a quick entry on the subject is warranted. Very few people capitalize SEOmoz properly - and by capitalize I mean in terms of grammar (not money). We're the ones to blame, our name isn't exactly something anyone would know how to capitalize c...
12/6/2006 I'm posting on behalf of Rand who is currently busy at SES Chicago. Prior to today if you wanted a link from SEOmoz all you had to do was sign up for an account, edit the URL field in your profile, and add a blog comment. We left this in place simply because we didn't care if the strength of our outbound links was diluted. Although SEO was high on our list of consider...
10/4/2006 Following up yesterday's article, How to Convince a Client their Site Doesn't Need Music, I decided to write a similar one about splash pages. Splash pages are the pages that the user sees before they actually get to a website; typically, they're flash and offer some kind of introductory animation. The user clicks "Skip Intro&qu...
10/3/2006 I've lost count of how many clients have requested that music be playing in the background of their website. As a professional web developer with a few too many years of implementing ridiculous requests, I've acquired quite a knack for convincing a client that music is a bad idea. The...
9/30/2006 Everyone's favorite social bookmarking site: Del.icio.us, appears to be rendering different content to the search engines than to its users. Every page on del.icio.us appears to have a the following directive in place: <meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>This should t...
9/18/2006 Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you may have heard about Ruby on Rails. It's the latest greatest web development platform that has become immensely popula...
8/21/2006 I'd like to preface this entry by saying SEOmoz does not practice or endorse blackhat SEO techniques. This is not intended to be an instructional blackhat SEO article or a list of websites you should all go take advantage of. The goal of this post is, rather, to "out" a significant weakness that can be exploited by savvy users. While reading EGOL's ...
8/17/2006 While attending an SES session last week I decided to put together some linkbait. The session itself wasn't particularly interesting and inspiration had struck so I figured I'd make better use of my time and write some kind of guide or howto article. The result was the 5 HTML elements you probably never use blog entry. My original plan ...
8/15/2006 This is a list of HTML elements I've found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate. ...
8/3/2006 Just a quick update folks - I've created a media="print" CSS file that creates printer friendly versions of all SEOmoz's pages. You should now be able to print out the stuff on our site without any major graphical issues. Printed pages won't look perfect (there's a lot of spacing issues), but it's still a huge improvement. I removed the header, footer, logo, and secondary navigation. I a...
7/21/2006 As a professional web designer I've noticed a consistent trend in the majority of the projects I've worked on: The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.Group intelligence is multiplicative when id...
7/17/2006 It's been a week since we launched the Page Strength SEO tool and I'd like to give an update on how things went and what lies ahead. First off, I'd like to apologize for the downtime on thursday morning. The tool launched last monday and received a fair amount of traffic that lasted through wednesday. Thursda...
6/15/2006 Last.fm's signup page is one of the best I've ever seen. It's elegant, user-friendly, and does a fantastic job of keeping the user aware of what's going on. Rather than splitting the signup process into several steps across multiple pages or combining them all into one massive form, it splits it into three steps but keeps everything on one...
5/16/2006 This past weekend a bunch of us SEOmozzers participated in a 5k (3 mile) benefit run around greenlake. I'd just like to publicly say GOOD JOB to everyone that put the effort in and ran the distance. Although not highly competitive, it was for a good cause and I think we all queued up some rad karma points. Also, kudos to Kat for initiating the idea. Here's a few photos:...
5/10/2006 SEOmoz has recently been interviewing applicants for a web developer position. Prior to conducting the interview, I wrote up a list of technical questions I wanted to ask. After interviewing, I decided to build upon this list and put together a larger one that everyone could use - both for interviewers and interviewees....
4/24/2006 Using image replacements in a CSS driven site is becoming a very common practice. SEOmoz uses it all over the place - if you view the source of our homepage you'll see: <div id="what_is_seomoz"> <h1><span>What is SEOmoz?</span></h1> <p> SEOmoz i...
4/4/2006 If you're thinking about putting together a pure CSS driven site and need inspiration, I've compiled a short list of my favorite CSS showcases. I use these sites not only to inspire visual ideas, but also to learn more creative and practical ways to use CSS. I often find myself digging through source code of sites in the showcases discovering good (and bad) CSS ...
3/1/2006 As promised, here's a quick run-down of the new features on SEOmoz. Search - This will search the entire site. It needs some fine tuning, but it's effective for the time being. Threaded blog comments - You can now reply to individual comments rather than just the blog entry itself. Th...
2/23/2006 I need recommendations for a site search engine that does the following: Spiders your site's content to X levels deep Build a database of page titles, urls, and content Provide a searchable front-end that is easily customizable to match an existing site I could write my own. It'd just be a simple spider program that spid...
1/31/2006 The saga of redirecting all requests to http://www.seomoz.org/index.php to point to http://www.seomoz.org/ has finally come to an end. We now practice what we preach. For those who are not familiar, it's important to have all duplicate content point to a single, "canonical" edition of the content. Requests to index.php and requests to www.seomoz.org/ have the same content even though they have ...
1/20/2006 The re-design of SEOmoz has proven itself to be a very difficult and time consuming task, as you can see I'm still working on the header. Rand suggested I write a blog entry so you can all see how things are coming along and share in my turmoil. :) Some of the designs turned out okay, others are just plain horrible. I've found my best work comes by accident, so I often just ...
1/16/2006 In the midst of re-designing SEOmoz I decided I really needed a change of pace. I've only lightly used AJAX, so I decided to build an AJAX powered tool that looks up the geographic location of an IP address. It seemed simple enough to build and I figured it'd ...
12/13/2005 Internet Relay Chat (aka IRC) is an older form of communication on the internet. It's an online discussion system where you join "channels," which are basically chat rooms. I frequent several technical channels but recently have been spending some time in one centered around SEO. The topics of discus...