The Moz Blog

Explaining the Winner of the SEOmoz Landing Page Contest (Part 2 of 2)

This blog post is going to take on a very simple format: first of all I’m going to present my landing page as a “good cop persuader” and refer to the work of Gerry Spence. Then, I’m going to present my landing page as more of a “bad cop salesman” and refer to the work of Dr Robert Cialdini.&nbs...

Google Dominating Hollywood as Well as the Search Demographic

The other night I was watching Knocked Up, and in the movie there are a few references to "Googling" something. For example, in one scene the older daughter is riding in a car and casually says "I Googled murder," while in another scene Leslie Mann's character asks Paul Rudd to "Google" their daughter's symptoms to determine whether she has the chicken pox or a rash. I also recently saw The Bourne Ultimatum, and in one scene Jason Bourne uses Google to search for an agent's name, and later on there is a car chase where the guys in one car are using Google Maps o...

My Personal Opinion - 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors

I think that sometimes we in the field of search marketing try to make the practice more difficult than it really is. True - there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank w...

Critical Background Information: The SEOmoz Landing Page Competition (One Week On)

We're now one full week on from the results of the SEOmoz "Landing Page Contest," and I've printed out all of your comments... sat down... read through them twice... I've highlighted, I've underlined, and I've thought very carefully.The result? I've decided I'm going to write a couple of posts for "YouMoz" (this is the first).Before I get started, I ...

Me vs. Web Developers: How Do We Get on the Same Page?

Since I have been working at "place company name here", specialising in search marketing I have been constantly in battle against the web developers. (still a newbie, I am mostly a web designer needing to learn about SEO, so i got a job in online marketing)For two years the website has been in development and since I joined the company 5 months ago, we are still unable to do th...

Price Discrimination in Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC is more complicated than it was a few years ago because the ad platforms – Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, and others – have become more adept at price discrimination. They are better at charging their customers - the advertisers - what the customers are willing to pay. Customers often resent price discrimination but businesses employ it to incr...

An Open Challenge: Applying Jim Collins' Good to Great - Asking the Tough Questions

Let me just preface this post by saying that I hate management books and business theory books and nearly everything that starts with the phrase "The Seven Habits of Highly..." That said, I got so many recommendations to read Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, that I couldn't resist. In particular, two p...

Advanced Web 2.0 at the Shop.org Summit

Earlier this week I was in Las Vegas to attend and speak at the Shop.org Summit. While I was there I attended the "Web 2.0: Advanced Level" session. After some severe sound issues (think microphones cutting out and constant screechingly loud feedback) and my astonishment at how much wifi costs in the convention ce...

3 Minute Guide to Taxes for SEMs/SEOs

If you’re a newly self-employed SEM/SEO, you’ve certainly got several things on your plate right now: link building for your clients, promoting your own website and blog, worrying that your paid links are now going to get you blacklisted by Google, etc. Well, if you haven’t thought of it yet, there’s one more thing for you to worry about: Taxes. Now that...

Bizarre Factors Search Engines Might Use to Rank the Results

I admit it - I struggle to understand patent applications (one of the big reasons that Si is part of our staff). However, Bill Slawski doesn't and it's made our collective lives in the SEO world (and the mozplex) considerably easier. Take, for example his two incredibly fascinating posts collecting patent applications and speculating on how the engines m...

Spotting Opportunities to go Viral…

Recently this well known guy wrote this post. Its kinda like a very friendly outlook to what else you can use Google for. I must admit, in the past I have typed in telephone numbers into Google, if I received a dropped (missed) call and if they looked suspicious – saved me a few quid because some of them turned o...

What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones

Two weeks ago, Google took some severe action against a great number of general topic web directories. A post on Sphinn blamed me (which is hilariously awesome): All of these directories no longer rank for their trade mark names, Rand Fishkin...