The Moz Blog

Take the 2010 SEO Industry Survey; Your Peers Need You!

I am very excited to announce that we have just put the finishing touches on our second SEO Industry Survey! We ran our first industry survey in 2008, and learned and shared a lot about the SEO community. This survey follows up on a lot of questions we asked last time, but includes a greater focus on other areas of organic...

The Science of Ranking Correlations: How Does PageRank Perform?

I've been an SEO for a long while - nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven't been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar - that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know its flawed in lots of ways, but so many people in our field (and in the broader webmaster/marketing community) still talk about...

Life Interrupted By Social Media?

Feverishly tweeting at all hours of the day? Check your Facebook page before you go to bed and first thing when you wake up? Addicted to social media? You're not alone. A recent Retrevo Gadgetology Report asked avid social media users questions like when, where, and how much they spend on social networking sites...and the information may just surprise you. ...

Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy

Step 2 isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it’s approached in a slightly different manner in order to use and abuse further in our strategy document. It’s your regular keyword research broken out into categories for segmentation and prioritization, and we’ll use that for prioritizing and determining gaps and opportunities in Step 3 and for competitive research in Step ...

Link Profiling with Open Site Explorer

Links are good for SEO and good links are even better, but what does a "good" link profile really look like? I explore a way to graph link profiles with OSE and Excel.

Whiteboard Friday - Leveraging Syndicated Content Effectively

You see an amazing story somewhere in the vastness of the web and you think to yourself: "Man, that would be perfect for my readers! It'd get great traffic and my customers/advertisers would love it!" Now, how do you syndicate that content on your site (fairly and legally) without running into the traditional problems of duplicate content, link-back requirements, etc...a...

Cooking Up Great SEO: An Analogy in Photos

I've long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There's a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO. SEO...

Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

We all know that there’s gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. It provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail!

The Best Way to Find Undervalued Websites

Warren Buffett, myself and many other very successful people are buying undervalued businesses every day. For someone who does not have a strong education in acquisitions or has stumbled into the industry it is very hard to figure where to start or where to find these businesses.Many things could make a business undervalued, but as we are talking about websites and I will ke...

The 8-Step SEO Strategy

Enjoy this SEO Strategy Plan. Step 1: Define your target audience & their interests --This is the first step in most marketing campaigns, define your target audience. Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to.

Leveraging Mechanical Turk, oDesk, ELance & Craigslist for SEO

Web services that connect job seekers with paid employment have become powerful tools in the arsenals of those that know how to leverage them. Unfortunately, the services themselves and the concepts of how to apply them have often been overshadowed by fear, uncertainty and lack of knowledge about how to apply. No more. In this post, I'm going to walk you through how to use these web ser...

CRO and SEO: SEM Civil War

civil war n. A state of hostility or conflict between elements within an organization. Alright, so search marketing isn't really an "organization" but there is a certain hostility within its ranks. It's the war of the acronyms and funding. For years there have been articles, studies, and conference panels surrounding the debate of paid search versus organic search. That rivalry is rather ancient now considering the new kids on the block: CRO, SMO, and LPO. Who will win the war? Simple. If any one side wins the war in your organization, you are the loser.