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6/19/2009 "The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings." We can talk about the temperature of the sea and the possibility of winged pork some other time,...
6/11/2009 A couple weeks ago I went to Sweden to speak at IMC Stockholm. I had a really lovely time exploring the beautiful city as well as speaking at IMC and networking with marketers from all over the world. I thought I'd provide a recap of my trip and share some conference coverage with all of you who didn't attend the conference but are curious as to what it entailed. Enjoy! Pre-...
6/9/2009 Happy June, evvabody! Here's what happened last month in case you were bedridden with swine flu: Best Blog Posts in May 2009 If I Could Go Back In Time & Give Myself Some Advice, This Would Be It. If Rand could turn back tiiiiiime......
5/26/2009 Since I'm a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it's redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append "movie" to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).
5/21/2009 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.
5/16/2009 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.
5/13/2009 The weather's getting nicer, the days are getting longer and Rand's barely in the office. You know what that means: it's conference season! Since there are so many conferences right around the corner, I thought I'd list some upcoming events in case you're thinking of attending a show but aren't sure which one to book. SMX London in London, UK: May 18-19, 2009...
5/8/2009 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Compete has rolled out a bunch of changes, adding user generated tags, a new interface, dynamic graphs, and more. Pete Meyers has hired a new intern, Yoozer, and he's here to answer your toughest questions about usability.
5/7/2009 At the beginning of every month I'll be highlighting the best content from the previous month. I'll still be doing the weekly roundups (I owe you guys a big one tomorrow), but here's a monthly recap of the best blogs, YOUmoz entries, tools and more. Best Blog Posts in April 2009 Fear and Forg...
4/24/2009 A couple months ago my boyfriend (Manstery Guest) wrote an article called called 10 Fictional Diners We Want to Eat At and posted it on the food site he manages for the Village Voice. The article didn't quite make it on some of the major social news sites, but it d...
4/22/2009 Lately I've noticed a lot of questions in Q&A centering on purchasing expired domains. A lot of our members have expressed interest in buying old domains for a variety of prices (some are cheap, some are going for upwards of $50k) and want some advice on what to do with the domains once they've been purchased. I'm no domainer, nor am I an expert in such a business tactic, but I generally recommend one of three different options for an expired domain (and would love to hear more if you've got any).
4/17/2009 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Stephen Tallamy did an interview with the SEO team at Distilled. I love the Mod Squad-esque snapshots of each employee. They're so posh. Joost de Valk wrote up a new guide to Magento SEO. Since the platform keeps evolving, he'll keep it nice and up-to-date for all you nerds. Maybe I need to implement this strategy in order to shave my swim time down a bit...
4/7/2009 I still have my first ever email account, a Hotmail account that's older than most of the kids on Digg nowadays. Today I logged in to retrieve a lost password and saw that I had over 600 new emails. All of them are spam, newsletters, shopping deals, etc--I rarely get "legit" emails sent to that account since the vast majority of my contacts know to reach me at my Gmail or SEOmoz email address. So it was with great amusement that I saw an email from 1/29/09 titled "Link Exchange Request" from some dude named Scott (not our Scott, don't worry). I've shared the email below:
4/1/2009 Hiya folks! I'm pleased to announce some new features, functionality, and funtastic contests that we're rolling out in order to make you lousy masses happy (wait, did I just type what I was thinking?). I've listed them below: Top Ranked Users is Now Free of Rand's Bearded Mug Some of you may have noticed weird changes afoot on our ...
3/25/2009 We've given a face lift to an oldie but a goody: The Professional's Guide to Link Building has been updated and is available in web and document format. Written by link builder extraordinaire Eric Enge, the guide is a great resource for beginners who want to know why link building is important and how it impacts a site's rankings. Additionally, it covers various link building strategies and lists a ton of tools and resources to help you find links.
3/20/2009 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!
3/12/2009 Earlier this week Rand and I spoke at the third annual Searchfest, put on by SEMpdx and a load of lovely sponsors. Loyal readers and R. Kelley fanboys (and girls) will remember that my first ever speaking engagement was at the first Searchfest two years ago. The organizers were gracious enough to overlook my profound suckitude and invited me back to speak about link building last year. This time around, they asked me to participate on the blogging panel with Stoney deGeyter and Heather Lloyd Martin. I wasn't sure what to cover since the panel details simply said "Blogging," so I talked about various blogging myths. It seemed to go over fairly well considering it was 9:00 am--I think my half naked pictures of David Hasselhoff helped.
2/18/2009 This year my trainer decided to branch off on her own and start a Seattle triathlon training company called TN Multisports. I set up her website and decided to try out Get Listed.org, David Mihm and Patrick Sexton's new site that helps local...
2/12/2009 My coworker Mike and I were pondering lunch options today and decided to order from the Honey Hole, one of Seattle's best sandwich places. Every day the place has a line out the door because it's a popular haven for hungry Seattleites who want a belly full of sandwichy goodness, so sometimes we elect to call our order in and pick it up.
2/4/2009 I was pinging people on Twitter about what to blog about, and Michael Vandemar suggested I take a look at his post about Google web search switching to AJAX. He and some other SEOs have recently noticed that Google search results URLs have been displaying the search query string after a ha...
1/27/2009 As you may know, one of my job duties here is to manage our user-generated blog. Every day I sift through the queue of blog entry submissions and publish posts about Internet marketing, business tactics, social media, web dev/design, etc. While I publish one or two worthy, relevant blog entries each day, I delete several spam submissions. I've seen spam entr...
12/10/2008 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.
12/4/2008 Before SES San Jose I interviewed Chris Winfield about the panel he was speaking on, social media, and other fun stuff. With SES Chicago just around the corner (December 8-12), I had the opportunity to interview another ...
12/2/2008 TYPES OF CLIENTELE - After having worked with a number of clients as well as listened to my colleages talk about companies and folks they've worked with, I thought I'd draft up a handy list identifying the various types of clients you may run into. I've found that this list is extremely official and scientific, so you should be able to refer to it and instantly identify a potential client. ;) Enjoy! ...
11/18/2008 Pubcon came and went last week in a red-eyed whirlwind (I can never wake up in Las Vegas without emptying a half bottle of Visine in each eye). I actually didn't attend any sessions except for the two panels I spoke on and the Five Microphones and a Blogger session, but I'll get to that later. First I want to talk about our booth we displayed.
11/7/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: * Are you going to Pubcon? Do you enjoy kicking ass? If you answered "yes" to those questions then you're in luck! Rae Hoffman is giving away a ticket to meet Shawn Tompkins and learn some MMA 101 while you're networking in Vegas next week. All you have to do is leave a comment over on Rae's blog about why you kick ass. If your comment is the best, you'll win the free ticket!
11/6/2008 Last year I bought Comcast's NBA League Pass, which gave me access to the entire season of NBA basketball games. My brother egged me on to order it so he could use my online login and watch streaming games at home in Michigan (his cable provider didn't offer League Pass). A couple weeks ago I received a letter from Comcast informing me that they've auto-renewed me for NBA League Pass this year and that if I don't want to renew I'd have to cancel. I asked my brother if he wanted it again this year and he said that he didn't really want to shell out the money for it, so I could go ahead and cancel it if I wasn't going to use it. ...
10/30/2008 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.
10/29/2008 Unnecessary clicks really put the "super" in "superfluous," yet we run into them all the time. Whether they're the fancy yet impractical creation by a site designer, a lazy workaround courtesy of an apathetic developer, or a misguided "I've been trying to architect this site for two months now and I can no longer see straight" decision by an SEO, these seemingly innocent clicks can have a negative impact on conversion rates or, simply put, they can irritate users. Below are a few examples of some clicks that cause me to grit my teeth and shake my fist.
10/24/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: * Dwight Silverman criticizes Valleywag writer Paul Boutin, who said that blogs are becoming obsolete and that nowadays all blogs are a "tsunami of paid bilge." Never mind the fact that Paul works fulltime at the SiliValley gossip blog. What a butthole.
10/23/2008 I'm a fan of Digg and visit it every day to read various stories and check out what's new. Every so often I comment on stories and submit stuff. I get a "woo hoo!" feeling whenever one of my comments gets a bunch of diggs or when a submission hits the home page, which, combined with the site's content and news stories, keeps me coming back for more. Sure, lots of people bash Digg...
10/21/2008 I don't know a whole lot about email marketing, but I enjoy studying the marketing emails I receive and identifying the ones that are more effective than others. I talked to Scott, who handles our email marketing campaigns, and he praises email marketing for being "dirt cheap and very effective." I can agree on the cheap part: we use Exact Target, whose suite of email marketing solutions start at $1,000 per year for one user and go up to an Enterprise account ($15,000 a year for five users). While there are expensive email marketing packages available, you can definitely find an affordable option to start out with and get your feet wet.
10/17/2008 Since I've caught the awesome cold that's been running rampant through our office, I was unable to publish the roundup yesterday. As such, I'm publishing it today as a temporary "Pre-Weekend Roundup." Now you'll have something fun to read on your lazy Saturday morning! Aren't I thoughtful... Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: * TechRadar has a list of 20 websites that changed the world and revolutionized the way we lead our lives. The first ever website went online August 6, 1991, which was my 8th birthday. That's one hell of a birthday gift!
10/10/2008 My apologies for the missing roundup last week--I got a lot of panicked emails from folks who were afraid that Thursday Roundups were killed off along with our old site design. Not the case--blame the missing roundup on our last-minute scramble to get Linkscape all shiny and purdy for our launch. Never fear, however: this week the roundup is back in action (also, expect my triumphant retur...
9/3/2008 Sigh. After much badgering, cajoling, nudging, and subtle threatening from my coworkers, colleagues, friends, and Jane (yes, Jane gets her own category--she badgered me a lot), I finally joined the Twitter. Much like Jane did when she begrudgingly joined, I'll take you through the terrifying process of nervously dipping a toe i...
8/28/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Over on Graywolf's blog, Joe Hall talks about web 2.0 real estate innovators foreclosing some pain on old school real estate brands. Sites like Zillow and Trulia.com are having an open house of ass whooping, and Remax and Century 21 are invited! (If I think of any other real estate-related puns, I'll let you know.) The Google Webmaster Central blog answers your burning questions about 404s. I actually picture people being kept awake at night because they don't know how Google treats a 410 status code. That's sad.
8/22/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Royal Pingdom shares the best interview questions from Google and Microsoft (and they throw in a cheeky IKEA interview question, too). Warning: the questions are uber-geeky and pretty quantitative/logic-heavy. * Speaking of nerd alert, here's the linear algebra behind search engines. Geez, my head hurt just typing that. * The O'Reilly Radar asks if linking to yourself is the future of the web. The post has two good recommendations for self-linkers, so be sure to check 'em out.
8/20/2008 Ladies and gentlemen, another guide has seen the light of day! Hooray! Our newest debut is The Professional's Guide to Advanced Search Operators. Available in web and document format, this guide covers advanced searching and identifies various search operators that can help with competitive analysis, k...
8/15/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Soxialize came out with Tweet Pro, a service that allows you to quickly and easily find Twitter users who share your same interest by searching through posted messages and profiles using keywords you enter. * Richard Baxter teaches us how to create a new page template in Wordpress for social media targeting. Lately he's been providing some solid tips and posts on his blog, so check it out if you haven't already.
8/12/2008 One of my friends and colleagues, Chris Winfield, is presenting on how to ignite viral campaigns at SES San Jose later this month. If you're attending SES San Jose, I highly recommend hearing Chris's presentation. Not only is he a great speaker, he knows his stuff when it comes to social media marketing, link bait, and viral marketing. Also,...
8/7/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Gmail got 302 hijacked. Oh, the humanity! * Lisa Ditlefsen nerds it up by introducing SEO Wars. Rand is "Rand Link Walker." Need I say more? * Live Search Webmaster Center has been updated to offer crawl issue reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. Hooray for new features! * Searchlight Digital disputes a recent YOUmoz entry that displayed SERP clickthrough rates (the post is linked to in the YOUmoz roundup below) and releases their own ultimate guide to SERP clickthrough rates. * Want to know how magicians can control your mind?
8/5/2008 I'm pleased to announce that after quite a lull in guide publications, we've got 5 great guides on their way. Today we're launching one of them, The Professional's Guide to Blogging. Available in web and document format, the blogging guide provides an in-depth look at what blogging is and how a new blogger can create, ...
8/1/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Giles Bowkett examines what it's like to be "Internet famous." I'm not exactly sure, but I think it involves cheezburgers. SEO Black Hat is offering seats to this year's SEOktoberfest. Want to party in Munich and pick the brains of some of the best super affiliates and black hats around? If so, contact Black Hat and let him know you want in. It's a pricey ticket (5,000 Euros, or roughly a firstborn American child), but he's giving away one free seat if you blog about the event and send a trackback. Hmm, guess that means that this roundup mention is my raffle ticket. Hrm. I don't know how much affiliat/black hat stuff I can wrap my head around, but a trip to Munich sure sounds nice! ;)
7/31/2008 For the four of you who aren't aware, The Dark Knight is a pretty big deal for a multitude of reasons: It was the first movie to film large chunks of the film with IMAX cameras. It debuted on the largest number of screens in cinematic history (4,366). It also debuted on the...
7/25/2008 Three star links: * Great news for Internet marketers and e-commerce: more shoppers are purchasing goods via the Internet because of the high gas costs. * The New Atlantis exposes the "myth of multitasking." Well, there goes my built-in excuse to Rand whenever he asks me why I'm browsing Etsy instead of doing site reviews. Crap. * Interesting opinions here: Paul Graham discusses pooled-risk company management, and 37signals disagrees with him, saying you don't need to sell your company in order to have financial freedom.
7/18/2008 VanessaH, an SEOmoz member who does SEO work for PlumberSurplus.com, recently contacted me about an interesting link bait campaign her company is attempting. Basically, the SEOs over at Plumber Surplus are trying to build more links to the site and hopefully bump the Page Rank up from a 5 to a 6. They...
7/17/2008 Three star links: * 10e20 brings us "The Ultimate Guide to Decoding Digg Speak." It's both amusing and surprisingly thorough. Pretty handy if you're an SMM noob and need to know what "those crazy kids" are talking about. * Now we know why your socks keep disappearing when you wash them...they make a good snake sweater! * Here's an interesting article about how the "Google generation" thinks differently. Generation Google appears to prefer multi-tasking, networking, multiple media sources,and images and video over text, while "digital immigrants" prefer the opposite. Interesting stuff.
7/10/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * The best SEO training money can buy (hey, we do have to wade through a lot of shit in order to achieve top rankings...). * Apparently Yelp is shutting down accounts it thinks are "trading glowing reviews with other business owners." It's a tricky situation for Yelp since they obviously want to keep the quality and sincerity of reviews up, but they don't want to mistakenly witch hunt innocent people. * Finally, a video of search engine spiders crawling the web.
7/3/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: One star link: * Hacker News started a thread asking why hackers hate SEO. Most of the answers are frustrating, though some folks chime in to defend our industry.
7/1/2008 Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna (who lent me a hat and gloves when we went to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day), recently created Boudica, a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not super...
6/26/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: * Want to learn how to do 100 pushups? This site gives you a nice training program that's bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time. * This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves "What can science learn from Google?" Oh geez... * Google announces the launch of Ad Planner, which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on. And next week Google will announce ShowrStalkr, in which they spy on you while you're showering and inform you of any areas you've neglected to soap up. * Hey, check out how trendy SEOmoz is! Suck it, Cutts!
6/25/2008 I was chatting with SEO Hack and Syzlak (the Statler and Waldorf of SEO) when the topic of movie websites came up. When movie studios have a new film coming out, they typically launch a separate, unique website for that film. I played devil's advocate and asked Syzlak why don't studios launch movies on their own domain via a subdirectory (e.g., paramount.com/movietitle). He responded by saying, "if the studio links out to a movie then that domain will rank well, but the studio itself might not pull as high a rank if it had each movie as a microsite or subdomain, etc." Makes sense. Think about it: a movie theater is trying to promote each individual film, not necessarily the studio behind that film. Thus, it's logical to brand the new movie by putting it on a separate website.
6/19/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Two star links: I'm getting tired of this "Google is evil! Wait, no they're not! But it was their motto and now it's not!...
6/17/2008 Folks, something just happened, and it was exceptionally tragic. Outrageous. Unheard of. Unbearable. To prevent this same travesty from happening to you, I thought I'd share my experience and give some handy marketing advice while I'm at it (this being SEM Tuesday and all). Okay, let me back up. I was sitting at my desk, minding my own beeswax and deleting 45 spammy YOUmoz entries (...
6/13/2008 My apologies for the missing roundup last week--it was SMX Advanced, and we were pretty busy with conference happenings. I've combined news and whatnot from last week into this week's roundup, so please forgive the extra bloatedness of this week's post (there's no such thing as Alka-Seltzer for blogs, is there?). Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: ...
6/7/2008 It's hard having a conference in your own backyard. Everything feels so much more stressful--you have to drive back and forth from the conference to your place and back out for dinner and networking events, you have underlying priorities that are hard to miss (I missed the kickoff networking event at the Sculpture Park due to an open water swim clinic), you have spouses or family members you have ...
6/2/2008 My first triathlon was this past Saturday (it was a sprint), and it didn't go so well. I figured there would be some way to use the experience as a lesson learned about SEO, so I thought about it for a bit and concluded that there is a lesson indeed, and it is about paid links. Obviously, it's a loose tie-in, but whatever, I'm good at...
5/28/2008 As you fully know, this week we launched the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards. Like last year and the year before, the awards were met with praise and kudos (good job, Jane and crew), and the page was submitted to Digg in hopes of making the home page. Jane and Rand sent out some tweets and commented on the blog post, urging various colleagues and users to digg t...
5/15/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Two star links: * The Industry Standard provides us with the 25 top B to Z-list blogs. Why am I giving the link 2-star status? Because the stupid site spaces the list out over multiple pages. ARGHHHHH. Take your page views and ad impressions and shove 'em up your arse.
5/15/2008 talk about good and bad newsletters...
5/9/2008 I've been shout-neutered, folks, and it ain't cool. Let me explain. Yesterday I submitted a story to Digg. I didn't expect it to get on the home page, but I had an "Oh well, what the hell" mentality about it. My plan was to do the usual--shout it once and call it a day. After I submit a link to Digg, I typically shout the story to my friends in about three waves. You can o...
5/8/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: We've got star link Yahtzee today--a link for every star! Woo hoo, time to celebrate! Zero star link: * Mel showed me this, for lack of better words (and please excuse my French) fucked up WikiAnswers response to the question "How many people did Joseph Stalin kill?" Anyone care to improve the answer so that it's not batshit crazy and is instead at least passably objective? Anyone?
5/6/2008 Recently I attended the eCommerce Summit, and while I was there I attended the "Using Press Releases to Drive Sales" session. The sole speaker was Joe Beaulaurier, marketing manager of PRWeb. Sure, his session was a bit salesy (then again, so were a lot of the session at the eCommerce Summit, but it is ecommerce, after all), but he did make so...
5/1/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Two star links: * Regarding TechCrunch's "Is Keyword Search About to Hit its Breaking Point?" article, well, I'll quote what Rand said: "[S]uch a load of crap. Users have to change, not engines."
4/30/2008 Last week on The Office, corporate weenie Ryan visited the Scranton branch and told them that they needed to make up extra sales that their website should have brought in. He had been fervently pushing the website onto the staff, telling them that version 2.0 of the site will be even bigger and better, and that embracing new technology like online sales will skyrocket paper purchases and make thei...
4/29/2008 Chapter 4 of Web Design for ROI is all about landing pages, and it's the best and most valuable chapter thus far. The chapter starts off with this little gem of a quote: Enter the custom landing page. It's a web site's stand-in for ambassador, concierge, and superstar salesperson rolled into one. It's been carefully crafted to meet, ...
4/17/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: The links are a bit scant this week due to being super busy and Rand being out of town. Special thanks to David Lindop for providing me with some nice roundup link suggestions. Thanks, David!
4/16/2008 This was brought to my attention a few weeks ago, but I've only now been able to look into it. This site that rates schools across the nation is a useful resource for parents--it even won an award for "Best Family & Parenting Site." Looking at the "Glendale Schools" page, at the footer I see a link that says "Glendale Real Estate." ...
4/9/2008 For today's Social Wednesday, I thought I'd share an interesting case study. My boyfriend works for Payscale, a salary and compensation information website (hey, he's my boyfriend, so I gotta throw them a good link). One day while I was at work, Jason (aka Manstery Guest) IM'd me and told me about this neat...
4/9/2008 Yesterday I spoke at the Shop.org Online Marketing Workshop. I had previously spoken at a Shop.org summit in Las Vegas last September, and Larry Joseloff invited me and my fellow panelists back for another session. Our topic was "Keeping the Customers in Focus: Customer-Centric Search and Affiliate Marketing." Allan Dick from...
4/4/2008 Yesterday I had my roundup all written and when I hit "Publish" the blog editor decided to just instead refresh and wipe half my post. Sorry for the delay--here you go. Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:
4/1/2008 In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI. ...
3/27/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Four star links: Five star links: ...
3/25/2008 Today I sat in on a webinar taught by David Szetela, the founder of Clix Marketing. He gave some great tips about common PPC and paid search mistakes, and I thought I'd share them below. Don't mix search and content campaigns. David recommends turning off the content network and not mixing search and content...
3/21/2008 Sorry this roundup is delayed. I had the damn thing about 60% completed earlier today, but then Mel brought in a pig full of beer, which we proceeded to drink during lunch. A couple of glasses later, I returned to my desk and inadvertently hit whichever combination of keys on my keyboard is the equivalent to the "Back" button on my browser, thus losing my post. After work, I went to the ...
3/18/2008 Jeff, our CTO and lead developer-with-a-beard, had recently expressed to me his desire to speak at conferences and events. Fantastic! ...except for one problem. There are no developer-centric tracks at any SEO conferences. SES? Zip. SMX? Zilch. Pubcon has had a smattering of developer-related sessions that were, according to Jeff, weak sauce. SXSW is the only conference to offer developer sessions...
3/4/2008 Every time Rand receives a marketing book, he puts in on my desk. I don't know if it's a gesture of "Here, you read stuff..." or if it's a more direct "Read this or you're fired" (which is clearly how Rand operates, for those of you who know him well), but I've got a stack of books at home that are one giant "Read these" list. During my flights to and from Sa...
3/4/2008 With SMX West behind us, I thought it would be interesting to reflect back on something that we hadn't ever done at any other conference: operate a booth. I have to say that attending a conference when you have a booth is an entirely different experience than attending without one. Below I'll provide my input, Rand's thoughts, and some helpful tips from a cranky Irishman who's had plenty of experi...
3/3/2008 Next Monday, March 10th, is Searchfest 2008, a day conference organized by SEMpdx, Portland's SEM community. I've created an event for Searchfest, so if you plan on going, sign up!...
2/29/2008 This morning I went running, hopped in the shower, and ran to the conference, hair still wet, because I didn't want to miss the Generation Google panel. I was excited to hear more about Harrison Gevirtz, a sixteen year old affiliate marketer, and Chloe Spencer, Stephan Spencer's daughter and a blogger who makes a good chunk of dough from AdSense earnings. Joining the...
2/27/2008 Yesterday I attended sessions, met some new folks, and attended Search Bowl. Below is a brief recap and my opinions of Day 1 of SMX West. Recent Legal News About Search Clarke Walton went over search ad trademark policies. Google has the easiest trademark policies to understand. They allow trademarks ...
2/21/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Four star links: Five star links: YOUmoz entries: Best of YOUmoz: New events added to the Events Calendar: No new events added. However, ...
2/15/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! Okay, I apologize for the above link,...
2/8/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Four star links: Five star links: YOUmoz entries: Best of YOUmoz: New events added to the Events Calendar: New ...
2/6/2008 After our dismal experiment with trying to track impressions, Rand's course of action was to have me dive in headfirst and manage our PPC campaign for our Premium memberships. I half-assed the campaigns in August '07 and retooled them in November, when we redesigned our landing page and added a few targeted pages. The clickt...
2/1/2008 For those of you unfamiliar with the hissy fit going on over at Digg the past couple weeks, I point you to Tamar Weinberg's handy recap. In a nut shell, Kevin Rose (Digg founder who really needs to be featured on this site) announced some algorithm changes o...
1/29/2008 We have previously mentioned a few times on our blog that we were working on an SEO survey, and I'm pleased to say that today we're ready to launch it. Behold, the SEO Industry Survey in all its green-hued glory! ...
1/25/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Four star links: Five star links: YOUmoz entries: Updating Site = Lost Rankings? Agco asks the moz community if upda...
1/23/2008 For SEM Tuesday I'm cheating a little and talking about forms and usability; however, if you have a sign up form or some sort of registration on your landing pages, this is sound advice that ties in well. In an attempt to be hardcore in 2008, I decided, at Christine's insistence, to sign up for the New Balance Half I...
1/18/2008 Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: David LaFerney (aka DrDave) wrote a post about on page SEO for WordPress. It's a nice, simple, handy guide on what fact...
1/16/2008 http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-internet-the-ultimate-focus-group...
1/11/2008 For our first roundup of the new year, I've decided to change the format a bit and present the links first. I've also included notable YOUmoz entries from the last week, so hopefully you folks will enjoy the weekly YOUmoz roundup in addition to the other stuff. Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: ...
1/10/2008 Yesterday Sarah, Christine, and I went to Ignition (the VC company who gave us funding) to attend an SEO seminar taught by Vanessa Fox (who recently got scooped up by Ignition). The room was packed full of folks from various Seattle startups and tech companies, and after we all stuffed our faces with pizza and beverages, the learnin' began. Va...
12/29/2007 I hate MySpace, but then again, so does most everyone else. It's not news or anything, but it's just after Christmas and posting is light lately, so I thought I'd get this out of the way before the new year hits and Rand's bugging me to put up actual, relevant posts. Anyway, I created an account a few years ago, and within the last year I've been letting my account awkwardly hang o...
12/21/2007 As a special pre-holiday treat, we decided to share our more long tail search terms from last month (November 2007). Enjoy!
12/20/2007 It's Thursday, so you know what that means: another installment of Roundup Thursday! This week, I'm implementing a more formal layout that will be executed in every recap post from here on out. Hope you enjoy it! That being said... New Additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace: Featured job postings: ...
12/11/2007 It's that time again, folks--post conference "Overheard in ________" time (aka Kevin Gleeson's favorite post). This being my first Pubcon experience, I had plenty of quotes rolling around in my head but tried to extract the least inappropriate ones (hey, some things just need to stay [and die] in the barren Vegas desert). That being said, enjoy the best quotes I was able to remember:
12/10/2007 I've recently been tasked with managing our PPC campaign and working with Jeff on tweaking our landing pages in order to increase our Premium Membership conversions. This week at PubCon I attended as many conversions, PPC, and landing page-related sessions as I could to see if there were any tips or tactics I could pick up. I'd classify myself as someone who knows more than the basics about PPC an...
12/7/2007 Last night SEOmoz hosted the much-anticipated Search Spam party (much anticipated by Rand and Gillian, anyway, who have been skipping around the office like giddy little school girls the past couple weeks). Held in the room opposite the Google Meet the Engineers mixer (how very ...
11/14/2007 Hello, devoted Mozbers out there (Moz + Members). We're currently in the process of redesigning our business cards, and we want some amusing, fun, not at all corporate or stuffy-sounding job titles. Rand, Gillian, and the programmers are all pretty set with their creative titles, but Scott, Jane, Sarah, the future admin, and I all need your help. We need suggestions for awesomely bodacious and rad...