The Moz Blog

Are We Forgetting the Basics?

Every day I read SEO forums which are full of so-called SEO experts, Now, I am not here to name and shame, I am just curious as to why people give other newbie SEO misleading information.

The Best Spam Submission Ever

As you may know, one of my job duties here is to manage our user-generated blog. Every day I sift through the queue of blog entry submissions and publish posts about Internet marketing, business tactics, social media, web dev/design, etc. While I publish one or two worthy, relevant blog entries each day, I delete several spam submissions. I've seen spam entr...

Linkbaiting Our Way to a Better World?

Link baiting has been around for a fair while now, and we all know the basic concept is essentially driven by self interest, i.e., increasing website traffic for financial or personal gain.

5 Ways Obama Should Change How You Communicate

After Obama's inauguration speech last week, a lot of attention was paid to his speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Listening to Obama and reading about how he and Favreau wrote the speech got me thinking about how we use language when writing for the web. I spent some time analysing Obama's oratory and reading about the subject.

10 Tips for When Startup Life Gives You Lemons...

There's no doubt about it - being a startup in any economic condition is rough, and in the current tumult, mind-bending challenges aren't out of the ordinary. However, I, like most other entrepreneurs I've encountered, am a staunch optimist and thus, even in the face of hardship, seek the silver lining. Tonight, I'd like to share a few of the diamonds in the dung pile that are closest to my heart.

Struggling Against Google's Greatest Advantage

Thousands of posts, news articles and analysis pieces have covered the central topic of battling Google's dominance in web search, but I've seen very few that have discussed what is, in my opinion, the most telling example of the search giant's dominance. The latest (made popular across Techmeme and many individual blogs) was this piece from C|Net's Don Reisinger:

Headsmacking Tip #11 - Refresh Legacy Content for a Rankings Boost

This week's headsmacking tip is extremely powerful and pretty darn simple to implement. The premise is straightforward - you've got old content that ranks in the top 20-30 results, but never achieves first page (or top 5) rankings. Frequently, we see a lot of sites making the mistake of trying to link build (both internally and externally) to the old content: ...

Linkscape Update 2 Now Live

Those of you who've been running Linkscape reports this weekend may have noticed our new, fresher data in the index. This is our second update (the first was on Dec. 8th of 2008) and it's brought with it a refresh of much of the crawl we originally launched with in October. This update is seriously good news for us, as it's taken far less time, energy and frustration than our first update, and it's good news for our members (and anyone who uses the free data) as much of the web's changes in Q4 2008 are now included in the index. We're working towards updates every 4-5 weeks, but it may be several more before we can get that level of freshness.

SEO for Video Content

This week we're talking about video optimization. Video has become one of the most powerful content formats in recent years--whether as a regular part of a blog (like good ol' Whiteboard Friday) or as a viral content strategy--but when you're using video as a strategy it pays to consider your goals. Are you looking for link generation? Keyword targeted content? Branding and recognition? All of the...

Lindsay Perkin Wassell Joins SEOmoz to Lead our Consulting Business; Adam Feldstein Arrives to Head Up Product Development

Intrepid surfers of SEOmoz may have already noticed the new additions to our team - Lindsay Perkin Wassell & Adam Feldstein. Many of you in the SEO field know Lindsay well from her role as Director of SEO at OnTargetJobs and frequent speaking and participation at industry conferences. Today, she's joining SEOmoz's team as the manager of our consulting operations. Adam is somewhat new to the world of SEO, though as Group Program Manager of MSN Autos for the last few years, he's certainly put some significant energy into the process. I'm thrilled to have both of these folks on board with us, and think an introduction is definitely deserved.

The Full List of Suppliers to Ask for Links

One small step in any linkbuilding process that has been written about many times before is to ensure that you (/ your client) has links from all appropriate businesses that they actually have a real relationship with. In the SEO world, it'd be unthinkable to enter into a partnership without a few links between your sites, but in many industries, this happens. Beyond partnerships, what about all your suppliers and customers? This has been written about many times before - along with techniques for getting links from those suppliers (such as offering testimonials). What is harder to find is an easy reference list for who all the suppliers you should approach are.

The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business

Virtually everyone who's engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that's relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an impact. Today I'd like to cover the different applications of SEO and talk about how to choose the right SEO objectives for your business.