The Moz Blog

Headsmacking Tip #4: Use Keyword Variations with Matching Intent Together

For this week's tip, I thought we'd quickly run through an issue that, early in my SEO career, frequently confused me (and seems to trip up lots of sites today, too). The concept is simple - given a page that's ranking well for Keyword "A" some folks make the mistake of targeting close variations of "A" on separate pages without good justification. Here's a quick exa...

Roundup Thursday for the Week of 7/27/08

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Giles Bowkett examines what it's like to be "Internet famous." I'm not exactly sure, but I think it involves cheezburgers. SEO Black Hat is offering seats to this year's SEOktoberfest. Want to party in Munich and pick the brains of some of the best super affiliates and black hats around? If so, contact Black Hat and let him know you want in. It's a pricey ticket (5,000 Euros, or roughly a firstborn American child), but he's giving away one free seat if you blog about the event and send a trackback. Hmm, guess that means that this roundup mention is my raffle ticket. Hrm. I don't know how much affiliat/black hat stuff I can wrap my head around, but a trip to Munich sure sounds nice! ;)

XML Sitemaps: Guidelines on Their Use

Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. ...

Whiteboard Friday - Why Linkbuilding and Landing Pages Don't Mix

Anybody who has ever put together a killer piece of linkbait has thought about it: how could I get this kind of attention to my landing pages? It's an obvious dilemma. You get a ton of traffic, a ton of links, all of the ranking boost that follows, how could you not want that juice directed toward your conversion-centric pages? Well, there are reasons why the two tend to be mutually ex...

I Have A Question: The Best Of Q&A

There is a very large group of vocal, active members on SEOmoz whom we hardly ever see on the blog. Most of them rarely write YOUmoz posts and comment infrequently. However, they spend a lot of time in the same area of the site where I spend the majority of my time: SEO Q&A....

Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from The Dark Knight

For the four of you who aren't aware, The Dark Knight is a pretty big deal for a multitude of reasons: It was the first movie to film large chunks of the film with IMAX cameras. It debuted on the largest number of screens in cinematic history (4,366). It also debuted on the...

Comparing Search Engine Performance: How does Cuil Stack Up to Google, Yahoo!, Live & Ask

This week marked the arrival of Cuil on the search engine scene. Being a huge fan of search technology and how search engines work in general, I've been spending some time playing around with the new service and thought it would be valuable to expose my data on how the classic market leaders - Google, Yahoo!, Live & Ask compare to the newcomer. When judging the value and performance...

Tracking Your "Viral" Video Campaign

This one is for anyone who has ever had the pleasure of doing a viral video marketing campaign.As we are all aware there are so many hurdles to getting either a client or an in house CEO to sign off quality "viral" video content. Two of the most difficult of these hurdles are "can you guarantee results e.g. numbers of views etc...." and "how do we track this&quot...

Why You Should Give Yourself the "Opportunity to Cure" in Your SEO Consulting Contracts

May It Please the Mozzers, Last week, many of you requested more posts on common contract clauses. Your wish is my command: Today, I'm very briefly going to review "opportunity to cure" provisions. This provision is valuable for any one providing a good or service. ...

Information Architecture - A Site Review is Nothing Without It

Will and I have a recurring argument about what should and shouldn't be in a site review. My argument has been, and remains that before you can do a proper site review you need to do keyword research, in order to validate that the site architecture is correct. I have been doing a fair few site reviews recently and one thing has stuck out. Yes, almost every site I've ever loo...

Exposing Gray/Black Hat Information - What Should SEOmoz Do?

For a long time, I've held the personal belief that to be a the best search marketer you can be requires knowledge of a vast information set. From web crawling and algorithmic...

Whiteboard Friday - Users vs. Experts

Mozzers and Mozzerettes! Today, for your Whiteboard Friday enjoyment, a battle of two heavyweights in the online information aggregation arena. In the blue corner, the reigning champion, User Generated Opinion!! And in the red corner, a long-standing brawler who some (such as Rand) view as the future of this niche, Aggregated Expert Opinion!! Let's get ready to Ruuuuuuuumble!...