The Moz Blog

Whiteboard Friday - Twitter as an SEO Research Tool

Sure, you use Twitter as a social media tool, but have you ever considered it as an SEO research tool? No? Well watch and learn this week to find out how you can harness it in a whole new way. Now that social signals (particularly Twitter) are becoming more important in the engines, they can help you pinpoint when a keyword is going to trip the 'Query Deserves Freshness' switch. If ...

Introducing New Features for Open Site Explorer

Today I am proud to announce the launch of the second version of Open Site Explorer. Since SEOmoz has officially moved out of consulting, we are now able to put our full resources into building fantastic SEO so...

Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1

SMX West 2010 kicked off with quite a bang (or was that a yell?). Since Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer was the keynote, people arrived early to ensure good seats. The music playing before it started was amazing, it helped to create an excitement in the room that I really had never felt before a keynote before. I had attempted to save a seat for someone up front, but there was just too much demand and had to give it up. That's the sort of thing that happens at a great concert, not a conference keynote.

One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings in Google Local

This post is short and easy to follow, just like the tactic it recommends. Most everyone who optimizes for Google Local (aka Google Maps) is familar with David Mihm's excellent and oft-referenced Local Search Ranking Factorts. In that document, and in many places where local results are analyzed, it's clear that getting your business/website into more listings that Google indexes is a v...

Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience

We've been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week's Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about h...

Managing SEO Campaigns in Declining Industries

A site's organic traffic may drop because it is performing poorly compared to it's industry competitors, or the whole industry may be suffering from a slow down of consumer demand in that niche. In this post I recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I'll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic. For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Whiteboard Friday - 5 Things You're Not Doing (But Should Be)

This week, we've got a couple of newcomers to Whiteboard Studios! Our very own Jen Lopez and Danny Dover (whom you should know well thanks to Jen's Meet the Mozzers post) are pinch-hitting for our globe-trotting CEO. Let's all give them a big welcome. We did a PRO Site Review Webinar last week and noticed a few SEO issues tha...

How to Get the Most Out of Your SEO

Tomorrow, at 8.30am PST (11.30am EST / 4.30pm GMT), I am going to be joined on the next Distilled conference call by Richard Baxter as we discuss "how to get the most from your SEO".

SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to YCombinator

Last week, while in London, I received an email from Paul Graham, whom I've long admired, possibly even idolized a bit. He asked if I was available to come speak at a YCombinator SEO event in Mountain View. Tonight, I presented at that evented and thought I'd share my experiences, recommendations and yes, my presentation. Not everything that...

Whiteboard Friday - The Renewed Value of Branding

This week we take a look at how shifts in the engines over the last year have made it more important than ever to really pay attention to brand-based marketing. A year or so ago, the engines started giving more weight to established brands, but things have become more interesting: With enhanced attention to personalized search, click patterns, and brand preferences emerging through ...

Using Bit.ly URL Shortening For Traffic Analysis

If you’ve not used it before, bit.ly is a URL shortening service which is popular with Twitter. Due to the 140 character limit in tweets, characters are a premium so services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, etc provide an easy way to shorten lengthy URLs.So, you’re probably wondering what relevance this has to SEO? Well after using bit.ly for a while, I’ve com...

First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics

It's time for a quick mid-week geek-out - I wanted to collect together a bunch of resources I have written on first touch tracking in Google Analytics including (for the first time that I'm aware of), the technical implementation details: