The Moz Blog

Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage

Single-Purpose homepage designs are on the rise. This post covers the benefits and runs through examples of successful implementations along with a discussion of potential SEO impacts.

Online Reputation Tips - My Ad:Tech London 2009 Presentation

Last week I spent Wednesday at ad:tech in London where I spoke about advanced analytics and online reputation management. I thought the online reputation stuff would make a good Monday morning post. The audience was mainly brand and advertising people so I didn't assume too much knowledge of SEO or ORM, but instead ran through why you would want to monitor for your brand, how to determine if something is going to be a problem and some tips and tricks we've picked up along the way. I wanted to start with something topical so I used some examples from London Fashion Week (including brands and models) to demonstrate the impact of news events (interestingly, I found no significant correlation between spikes in search volume for the brands or models during fashion week).

Whiteboard Friday Interview: The Bing Team

This week Rand and I had a chance to head over to Microsoft headquarters and sit down with Eric, Rajesh, and Alessandro from Bing, everyone's favorite new search upstart. The guys were gracious enough to let us into their lair and share their insights on the search landscape and what we can expect from Bing in the future. Tune in and watch the video to learn what the Bing team has to s...

Oslo's SEM Konferansen in Fourteen Photos

It's day two of SEM Konferansen in Oslo, Norway, and rather than try to share content from the conference (which I'll attempt to do in a more formal post next week), I thought we'd return to some SEOmoz roots and do a photo mashup combined with my terrible sense of humor. Remember kids, no sleep + traveling to foreign countries = weird posts from Rand. ...

4 R's of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results

Effective SEO requires us to see the big picture, and I'm calling that picture the 4 R's: Robots, Ranking, Relevance, and Results. For each of the 4 R's, I'll provide some tips and tools for how to measure your progress in that area.

How to Export Google Analytics Data to Excel via the API

Howdy Folks, Unlike most of the posts that I've put out recently which are more strategy based this post is a from-the-trenches-tip which I've recently come across that I thought I'd share. I'm going to talk all about using the Google Analytics API but I'll show you how anyone can do it, you don't need to be a developer! All you need is a Google Analyics account and Excel.... ...

Whiteboard Friday - The Value of In-Person Networking for SEOs

Yeah, yeah, you're a 21st Century digital boy (or girl). You've got 900 Facebook friends, 1,200 twitter followers, and power accounts at digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon, but does anyone actually know you? This week Rand talks about the importance of in-person networking to people in the online marketing world. No matter how prolific you are online there is immeasurable value to...

Our Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads

Tonight I'm tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that's always a tough task. Thus, I'll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I'm happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments. Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practi...

Crawling & Indexing - It's Not as Simple as Just In or Out

Short post tonight as I'm just back from a short trip with Mystery Guest to celebrate our one year anniversary (which was awesome, BTW) and need to get caught up on lots of email. Let's start with a quick quiz - which of the following statements is true? A) My pages are in my XML sitemaps file, so they must be getting crawled B) My pages have been crawle...

SEO Guide: International Versions of Websites

This is the second post in a series of SEO Guides aimed at answering frequently asked SEO questions. (The first one was Properly move domains ) If you have an idea for another guide, please let me know if the comments below. Background: This is one element of a problem called internationalization. The internet evolved (or was intelligently designed for those no...

17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link

It's 9:30am and you've just started a pitch for a new SEO client. They're the curious type - wanting to know how search engines rank pages, why the changes you'll recommend will make an impact, where you learned to do SEO, and who you can list as good examples of your work. As you dive deeper into the requirements for the project, you arrive at the link building section. The client wants to kno...

A Developer's Adventure Into the World of SEO

Before I begin, I would like to emphasize I had never before done SEO. I had no clue about the terminology used, and I was never part of the club most of you have been in for a while. I have a tentancy to ramble, but I assure you it is all relevant to my tale of mystery, drama, and eventually, wonder. So please bear with me. I am not trying to bring new information to the table, rather I am try...