The Moz Blog

5 Datasets You Can Buy and Use for SEO (and a few for free!)

Having access to data and large data sets is something any SEO worth his salt craves. Sure, managing a massive dataset or database can be a bit of a hassle, but having good information is key and there are a handful of uses for other people's/sites' data sets that are readily available for purchase online. Big budget linkbuilding isn't the only way to spend your SEO budget these days! Le...

Complete Guide to Rel Canonical - How To and Why (Not)

There are a lot of great posts and resources about the rel canonical tag, but they can be hard to identify with a simple search. Even if you break through the clutter and find something truly useful, the current information can be hard to separate from the old. The web has been missing a current top-to-bottom resource on the rel canonical tag. In this post, I’ll do my best to cover it all...

How I Built an Online Community From 0 to 1500+ Members

One of the best ways to develop users’ engagement is through online community of target audience. Users’ engagement leads to repeated visits. Repeated visits lead to brand retention. Brand retention leads to brand loyalty and brand loyalty leads to more sales and leads. So if you want to increase your sales, leads or brand loyalty then you need to engage with your target audience. A...

The PRO SEO London Face-Off: Rand vs. Will (2010)

This week in London, Distilled's Will Critchlow and I held our 4th "presentation-off" battle against one another as the final session of the PRO SEO Training Seminar. We both put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into our decks and I think it shows. Enjoy: ...

Find the Question to your Yahoo Answers!

Have you considered using Yahoo Answers to try and drive some traffic to your website / blog? Yahoo Answers has become a very popular network for knowledge thirsty question askers and knowledge soaked answer-meisters, and they are all potential visitors for your site. This article aims to provide a detailed look at some tips / tricks for becoming the glowing Yahoo Answers guru you've always wan...

The 25 Absolute Most Difficult Keywords To Rank For - An SEO Nightmare

Ask any SEO and they will tell you just how important it is to do keyword research. Not only do you need to find keywords that are related to your niche but you need to figure out which ones are actually obtainable for your site. Everyone talks about the “low hanging fruit” and maximizing the long tail keywords. What about the juggernaut keywords? Which keywords are arguab...

How To: Allow Google to Crawl your AJAX Content

SEOs have faced a dilemma in the past: AJAX is great for users, but not so good for search engine spiders. In this post, I'll show how you can use Google's 'Crawlable Ajax' proposal to allow Google to properly crawl your AJAX-enhanced website - and show examples of sites that are already using this.

2 Actionable SEO Metrics You're Probably Missing

Everyone loves metrics! Even more so, everyone loves taking action! After all, that's why we have Action Man, international man... of action. This week, Rand helps you become an action man or woman yourself - that's right, we're talking about you! In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses two metrics that you may not be using.

The Definitive Guide to Awesome Web Content

What is it we SEOs do? Most of our answers probably boil down to this; we help webpages rank higher at search engines by improving each of the three cornerstones of SEO. The first aspect; technical problems - like indexable content, meta robots tags and URL structures - has been cracked by SEOmoz’s awesome web app. Suddenly we can get a complete dashboard of errors to go and sort - easy.

Are Exact Match Domains Too Powerful? Is Their Time Limited?

Last night at the SEOmoz meetup in Avi Wilensky's incredible office space, a frequent topic of discussion both during the presentations/Q+A and in smal...

Catastrophic Canonicalization

The Canonical Tag is a powerful tool in the SEO arsenal, used wisely, but used improperly, just one line of code can destroy a site's search traffic. An experiment showing just how bad the damage can be.

Traffic "Bait" and Ad Clicks: Perfect Market's Study Isn't Telling the Whole Story

Yesterday, Perfect Market, a company that "helps publishers create value from their online content with little effort and no risk1" released a study that's been getting quite a bit of attention. The study analy...