The Moz Blog

Free Download: Link Building Report Template

After having recently lost a client largely due to my oafish reporting - I was sending them the raw logs of my link building activities without any explanation as to the thought process behind it - I decided to get serious about communicating better.

SEO Company Search Results - An Embarrassment to Google and the Other Engines

One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that offer this service. It was therefore to my dismay to see the following search r...

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 10/19/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: * Dwight Silverman criticizes Valleywag writer Paul Boutin, who said that blogs are becoming obsolete and that nowadays all blogs are a "tsunami of paid bilge." Never mind the fact that Paul works fulltime at the SiliValley gossip blog. What a butthole.

Google Results Not cAsE sEnSiTiVe? Are You Sure?

There's been some talk in the past year of Google results appearing to be case sensitive. The phenomena appeared first in the UK and as of late in US as well. No, I'm not talking about crop circles. I'm surprised that much of this has been brushed off as datacenters or, perhaps, the anchor text of inbound links, as was smartly suggested in a recent Q+A here on the 'moz.

Have a Commercial Website? Then Digg Won't Like You

I'm a fan of Digg and visit it every day to read various stories and check out what's new. Every so often I comment on stories and submit stuff. I get a "woo hoo!" feeling whenever one of my comments gets a bunch of diggs or when a submission hits the home page, which, combined with the site's content and news stories, keeps me coming back for more. Sure, lots of people bash Digg...

PissedConsumer.com: Link Farm Dominating Google SERPs

First off I would like to point out that I am a paid search specialist, not an experienced SEO. If this article contains technical mistakes, I apologize. I am a marketer by nature, not a techie. I am technically savvy enough, however, to spot an obvious link farm/spam scheme, such as the one run by the web site: www.piss...

Un-Raveled: How Ravelry Successfully Created a Dedicated Community

Reading the recent post on the nature of online communities got me thinking about my favourite online community, Ravelry. This is one of the largest niche communities I have ever come across, with it fast approaching 200,000 members all talking about....knitting!

Help! My Industry Is Boring And My Imagination Is Hurting

This is an older topic, but one which is still worth discussing: what is the best way to investigate linkbait, viral or other content-based link building efforts in "boring" industries? How best to find out what worked in the past? How best to find out what didn't work? We have a range of tools at our disposal when it comes to content-based link building research. You've h...

Screencast Tuesday: A Walk Through the Basics of Applying Linkscape for SEO

Our intrepid developer/sysadmin Mel Gray offered in an email thread today to help me build a screencast for Linkscape and I couldn't resist. In the video, I walk through a relatively live (hence some wait times and even some unexpected data) demo of using the tool to find out more about the folks ranking well for the search phrase &qu...

Learning a Little About Email Marketing

I don't know a whole lot about email marketing, but I enjoy studying the marketing emails I receive and identifying the ones that are more effective than others. I talked to Scott, who handles our email marketing campaigns, and he praises email marketing for being "dirt cheap and very effective." I can agree on the cheap part: we use Exact Target, whose suite of email marketing solutions start at $1,000 per year for one user and go up to an Enterprise account ($15,000 a year for five users). While there are expensive email marketing packages available, you can definitely find an affordable option to start out with and get your feet wet.

SEO: A Process of Episodic or Continuous Change?

When you are through changing, you are through. ~Bruce Barton Within the (organizational) change literature there is a distinction between change that is episodic and change that is continuous. Even though both types of change may seem fairly identical to the unknowing observer, there are structural differences between them. When examined up close, it becomes clear that episodic change is discontinuous and intermittent, while continuous change is evolving and incremental.

The Disconnect in PPC vs. SEO Spending

There's a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight: Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013. - Source: ...