The Moz Blog
The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.
The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned When Pursuing a Finance Major
Not many people know that I actually attended the University of Washington in Seattle and worked, briefly, towards a degree in finance, thinking that I might join the ranks of Wall Street. It was a long time ago (in web years), and I dropped out of the program two classes away from graduation to pursue the company that would become SEOmoz full time (in 2001). Before I did, though, I met a ...
New Guide Release: The Professional's Guide to Blogging
I'm pleased to announce that after quite a lull in guide publications, we've got 5 great guides on their way. Today we're launching one of them, The Professional's Guide to Blogging. Available in web and document format, the blogging guide provides an in-depth look at what blogging is and how a new blogger can create, ...
Nailing the Coffin Shut on the "Don't Link to External Sites" Philosophy
Rare is the month that goes by when the spectre of the none-too-solid argument for hoarding link PageRank and link juice doesn't rear its ugly head. And since I've just spent the last 5 hours on Q+A duty (as our beloved Q+A manager Jane is on vacation), and in need of a short punchy post, I'll make this brief. Arguments for never linking out to other sites: If th...
Manage Risk By Including an Indemnification Clause in Your SEO Consulting Contracts
May It Please the Mozzers, Continuing my mini-series on SEO contract clauses, today's Legal Monday focuses on indemnification clauses. These kinds of provisions are standard in many consulting contracts. They can be extremely valuable or extremely dangerous in your contract. Therefore it is very important to understand and use them intelligently. Inde...
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...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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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...