The Moz Blog

How a Good Title and Description Can Make or Break Your Social Media Submission

For today's Social Wednesday, I thought I'd share an interesting case study. My boyfriend works for Payscale, a salary and compensation information website (hey, he's my boyfriend, so I gotta throw them a good link). One day while I was at work, Jason (aka Manstery Guest) IM'd me and told me about this neat...

Retailer Expectations at Online Marketing Conferences

Yesterday I spoke at the Shop.org Online Marketing Workshop. I had previously spoken at a Shop.org summit in Las Vegas last September, and Larry Joseloff invited me and my fellow panelists back for another session. Our topic was "Keeping the Customers in Focus: Customer-Centric Search and Affiliate Marketing." Allan Dick from...

Pulling a Fast One: A Clever Internet Marketer Is Trying to Trademark "SEO"

May It Please the Mozzers, I was working on trademarking some SEOmoz marks the other day, when I noticed that someone is trying to register the trademark "SEO." I was shocked. Apparently, the guy who's doing this has managaged to get all the way to the publication stage of the registration process. That means he has met a preliminary review by a trademark attorney. Now the...

(Day After) Thursday Roundup for the Week of 3/30/08

Yesterday I had my roundup all written and when I hit "Publish" the blog editor decided to just instead refresh and wipe half my post. Sorry for the delay--here you go. Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Whiteboard Friday - Tracking Non-Traditional Conversions

This week Rand discusses some non-sale conversions you might find on your site--things like RSS feed subscribers, email newsletter sign ups, views of the pricing/services page, etc.--but you might not be tracking. While these actions might not result in direct sales, they can often indicate what's working and not working in your marketing strategy. Start paying attention to these no...

What Do You Expect To "Get" Out Of Image Search Traffic?

At any given time, our Q&A section usually features a question or two about image optimisation. People want to know why their images haven't been indexed or aren't appearing for their key terms, even after they have added keywords to every imaginable attribute. Appropriate anchor text, nearby-keywords and relevant surrounding content doesn't seem to have made a difference. The images don't sho...

Who Has the Best Link Building Techniques?

I wanted to try an experiment tonight and leverage a bit of the terrific community vibe and willingness to share we've got here at SEOmoz. In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how ...

Web Design for ROI: Chapter 3, Managing for ROI

In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI. ...

I'm Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn't Include Any Mention of SEO

Ever since SEOmoz took venture capital investment last fall, I've been reading a lot of blogs and sites geared towards the startup world. Even though we've been around for 5 years (and Gillian and I have been doing web marketing for 10), I still think of us very much like a startup - we've grown from 3 people 3 years ago to 14 people today and we're worrying about things like burn rate, product...

Removing ?PHPSESSID from a URL

You’ve worked hard to prevent any duplicate content on your website. No copy-paste on your copy, no two url’s returning the exact same webpage due to incorrect usage of mod_rewrite and so on. But then, a couple days after the big launch, Google starts getting cluttered with dozens of references to your website, which harms your rankings. All due to an incorrect and insecure alternat...

Managing Risk: Legal Issues for Merchants and Affiliate Marketers

My goal is to present a checklist of legal issues and trends surrounding affiliate marketing. I hope this will be interesting to both merchants and marketers. Affiliate marketing has unfortunately gained a bad reputation for being particularly high risk. While the industry is unlikely to ever be risk-free, it is possible to manage your risk by (1) investigating your prospective marketing partner; (2) using and maintaining a tight legal contract that allocates the risk and provides for the appropriate indemnifications, and (3) keeping informed about the current technology, marketing strategies, and regulatory climate. Without further ado, let's take a look at risk identification and management for merchants and affiliate marketers.

Ask Yourself... Do You Feel Lucky (about getting those links)? Well Do You?

High quality directory link building may seem dreary and time-consuming, but it's still one of the best methods to build credibility with the search engines (remember the importance of trust distance?). Today, while adding resources to our list of valuable directories, I stumbled across two webpages with valuable insight into the process of link building. Both are from universities, providing ...