The Moz Blog

Benchmarking Your Website: Metrics to Review Before an SEO Engagement Begins

Many SEO projects begin with a site review or audit, identifying potential weaknesses and opportunities. However, a great number of these analyses leave out a healthy dose of collecting metrics - a critical factor in helping to benchmark future progress and see how far you've come (and what effect your SEO changes have had). Thus, I figured it would be valuable to review, in full, the pre-...

Whiteboard Friday - Machine Learning

This week one of our mad geniuses in residence, Ben Hendrickson, steps in front of the camera to discuss something a little different: Machine Learning. Ben is one of the folks that designed and built the technology behind Linkscape, so he's certainly studied this topic thoroughly. Here he'll talk about how and why advancements, findings...

Which Social Media Platforms Work Best For Your SEO Efforts?

The SEO world, particularly the blogosphere and forum chatter, is overwhelmed with talk of how to leverage social media sites for SEO value. Tonight, I'm curious - which types of social media platforms do you actually get the most direct SEO benefit from? Think classic SEO - higher rankings and more search traffic. Which slice of social media sites help you achieve this goal?...

Pubcon Recap: Booths, Beginners, and Bashes

Pubcon came and went last week in a red-eyed whirlwind (I can never wake up in Las Vegas without emptying a half bottle of Visine in each eye). I actually didn't attend any sessions except for the two panels I spoke on and the Five Microphones and a Blogger session, but I'll get to that later. First I want to talk about our booth we displayed.

8 Ways to Buy Links Without "Buying Links"

This post is sourced from my presentation at Pubcon on the Linkfluence: How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk panel. Since it received such positive feedback and a lot of requests for sharing, I thought I'd do so in a more reference-able way here on the blog. If you'd like to download the slide deck, you can find it ...

Washington State Sues SEO Company Visible.net

May It Please the Mozzers, The Washington State Attorney General announced in a press release yesterday that it was suing a Redmond-based SEO company, Visible.net. According to the Complaint, Visible also does business under the name WebMarketingSource.com, Caputures.com, and Captures.com (that's not a typo). The AG...

Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II

Following up on last week's Whiteboard Friday, this week Rand discusses what PageRank means to YOU. How can you use it to your benefit? What can the metric tell you about your site, your pages, and your links to help you target keywords and improve your rankings? PageRank doesn't show the complete picture, and it's an imprecise metric (there are more precise metrics, such as mozRank...shamel...

Differential Diagnosis: A Broken Website Ranking Atop Google

As I was stumbling around the web today, building some slides out for my Pubcon sessions next week, I came across some search results I couldn't help but blog about. Have a peek: ...

How Paging Improves or Worsens Your Website

Having read Duncan's post about Information Architecture, I thought I would write a short follow-up about an important means of navigation and IA: the paging navigator. Providing a well thought out paging navigator can immensely increase the value of your website for both search engines and users. What follows is a selection of different popular paging navigators and a short evaluation.

Whiteboard Friday - What's PageRank Got to do With It?

This week Rand discusses Google's PageRank metric: what it is, what it isn't, and how much it actually has to do with how sites rank. A lot of people (especially clients) tend to misunderstand what PageRank implies; either over or under valuing the metric. This video will help you get a better idea of how to consider PR in your SEO efforts. ...

SMX London 2008 Recap

This week saw a few momentous events, of which I'll name two: the election and SMX London. The election seems to have been covered in a few other places, so I'm going to focus on SMX. It was a pretty awesome venue and a lot of fun. Here's a picture of me, Jay, Rob and Wiep sitting on the link building panel being dwarfed by Lyndon's lemon-coloured presentation.

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 11/2/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: * Are you going to Pubcon? Do you enjoy kicking ass? If you answered "yes" to those questions then you're in luck! Rae Hoffman is giving away a ticket to meet Shawn Tompkins and learn some MMA 101 while you're networking in Vegas next week. All you have to do is leave a comment over on Rae's blog about why you kick ass. If your comment is the best, you'll win the free ticket!