The Moz Blog

Comparing SEO & Social Media as Marketing Channels

You may have seen the recent string of posts about SEO vs. Social Media, starting with this effective, but poorly argued controversy-bait, which was excoriated by Elysia Brooker and ...

301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use?

There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the use of rel=canonical and we've certainly seen a decent amount of Q&A from SEOmoz members on the subject. Dr. Pete of course blogged about his rel-canonical experiment which had somewhat interesting results and Lindsay wrote a great guide to rel=canonical. Additionally, there seem to be a few common problems that are along the following lines

Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs

I've gotten to spend some time recently with folks who run small, personal blogs (including my wife, friend Kim, and a travel blogging dinner meetup SEOmoz sponsored in Seattle this week), and many of them have asked me whether SEO, in particular link building, is an activity they can take on to help ...

Using Canonical Tag to Get More Than One Anchor Text Value

Some weeks ago my coworker Leandro Riolino published in our blog an experiment he was working with. The idea of the experiment was to try link to a page A from a page B with 3 different anchor texts providing value of all those anchor texts.

Calculating and Improving Your Twitter Click-through-Rate

As marketers, many of us leverage Twitter as a direct traffic tool - sharing URLs via the service to encourage clicks and visits to help increase awareness, branding and possibly drive some direct actions (singups, sales, subscriptions, etc). But, from what I've seen and experienced, not many of us spend time thinking about how or taking action to improve the CTR we get from the links we t...

Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing

The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site...

How to Get Your Community to Build Links For You

Building links is regarded as one of the most challenging and time consuming parts of SEO. If you run a community focused web site, you should allocate some of your link building hours to implement features on your site that will encourage link your users to do link building for you. A little investment into these features can result in a scalable way to continually build links....

SEOmoz PubCon Happy Hour 2010

It's November! Which here at the mozPlex means a few things: It's sunny and beautiful in Seattle [wait.. uhm what??], we're all getting ready for Thanksgiving and most importantly... PubCon is next week! As usual we're sending a big crew down to Vegas to speak, learn, network and of course party. Party Details When: Wednesday...

Google's Unspoken Failures Are Limiting Your Potential

As people in relationships spend time with each other they start to leverage each others natural strengths to efficiently store information about the world around them. "Honey, what is the name of my Aunt's employer?" "Babe, what do you call that thing that heats bread?" They rely on each other to store information that is mutually beneficial. Some believe this p...

2010 Industry Survey Results, Infographic & Surprising Trends

Earlier this year we asked the community to take the SEO Industry Survey. We had originally hoped to get at least 3,000 responses and were completely blown away when over 10,000 people ended up taking the survey! Of course, it never hurts to wave an iPad in front of a search marketers nose.With this survey we wanted to fin...

Search and Social Media FAILs by California Gubernatorial Candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown

The race for governor positions across the US is on, and in California it has been a hotly debated race between Republican ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Democratic mediocre-record-producing Jerry Brown. I'm going to vote for a California governor this Tuesday, and while I was doing my research on the candidates, I can't help but to notice how they're doing in search & social. So I poked around in some data, and here's what I've found about what people want to know about our California candidates and how well they're addressing their audiences through search & social channels online. PEOPLE L...

Imitation is Better than Innovation: How to Imitate in SEO

Imitation is underappreciated in today’s business world (and, as we'll later see, in SEO). For example, did you know that: - Coca Cola imitated RC Cola in replicating its diet cola product - Visa and Mastercard imitated the credit card concept from Diners Club - McDonalds took the fast food chain concept from White Castle T...