The Moz Blog

Everyone Should Hire 'Social Media Experts'

I caught a post this week from Peter Shankman entitled "I Will Never Hire a Social Media Expert and Neither Should You." It's not the first of its kind, nor was it the best argued, but it struck a nerve and has made a number of waves around the web. Needless to say, as someone who employs...

How to Build a Great Contest

A few weeks ago I launched my very first contest on one of my various french websites. My objective was to increase my Facebook fans, Twitter followers, newsletter signups and improve the notoriety of my website. The contest is now over and I've had time to analyze the results and I must say I am quite impressed! It took me quite some time to plan out my contest. I read all the blog...

Marketing Ethics: Persuasion vs. Manipulation

I step back from the black-hat/white-hat debate to look at the broader picture of marketing ethics. Bonus: 5 crudely drawn illustrations.

Raising the Bar on Data Sharing: Introducing Open Analytics

On the Internet, there is one thing that is as reliable as the gold in Fort Knox: a website's analytics. How many times do you read a great blog post with amazing infographics or just a post that was very well written and wondered how much traffic that site has received from it? At SEOmoz we strive to be transparent about everything we do, but even our traffic data is something that we don't often share

Using E-Commerce Keyword Research to Hook More Customers

To some, keyword research is keyword research...the type of website doesn't matter! To me however, ecommerce websites require a different approach to keyword research because ecommerce is in my opinion an entirely different beast. The following is a step-by-step process for how I do SEO keyword research for my ecommerce clients...

What Makes an Effective Link Builder

Good link builders are a special breed of SEOs. There are a lot of solid SEOs in the industry, but effectively building links is much different from keyword research, copywriting, and technical analysis. In the post I discussed what makes an effective link builder.

Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs

Faced with a new client, and having established a list of keywords they need to target, you want to evaluate the competition to find out what sites are dominating the SERPs for these keywords. However... being an SEO you're a busy guy (or gal), and you need it done right now. I've built a Google Docs tool to automagically do exactly that and this post will walk you through it. The ...

New in PRO: Subfolders + Root Domains; Linkscape Update + More

SEOmoz PRO has been taking some big leaps in improvement, albeit quietly. Many of you have likely noticed that OSE and the Web App are now faster with fewer errors (though we're still working out some kinks), but you might not have noticed one awesome change to how we support campaigns Subdomains, Subfolders & Root Domains Now Included! Since the web app lau...

5 Tactics to Improve Your Community Balance

With more than 100 million Americans contributing content online this year, websites are doing anything they can to attract users to contribute to their site. With the notable exception of search engines, all major websites are depending on the community to drive their growth. Imagine YouTube without user ...

Competitor Analysis for Linkbuilding: A Guide for People who Hate Linkbuilding

I hate linkbuilding. In my perfect world, linkbuilding is done scalably via widgets, with a big budget to promote a perfect product. This is pretty much never the case, so manual linkbuilding needs to be done In January, Michael Martinez posted a long rant about why competitor analysis for link building is a waste of time. My post is about how to get more out ...

5 Suggestions for Google Suggest

I love using Google's Suggested Search feature for spell check and to find answers to nifty questions like these: ...

More "Panda" Update Information Starting to Come Out

On Friday, Google posted an update on its Webmaster Central blog entitled "Providing More Guidance on Building High-Quality Sites". The piece expands on much of what Google has said about the Panda update since its original release on February 24th.