The Moz Blog

My First SES - Recap Number Two

It's just so much fun to get up at 4:30am in order to get to the airport, and it's even better when an oversized limousine backs into your brand new Jeep outside Departures. What a wonderful start to my first SES conference! Luckily, no one was in our car when the dip-stick driver threw his massive car into reverse and busted up our bumper, so our insurance won't suffer. ...

Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates

Driving traffic from PPC (pay-per-click) or email campaigns to your home page is a mistake. You must deliver on the promise in your lead ad copy if you hope to convert traffic. Dumping people on a home page and forcing them to navigate their way to what they want is a strategy for failure.Ideally, you should be driving your traffic to a landing page that foc...

The end is near for SEO!

As the importance of Search Engine Optimisation gets home to the masses the amount of good high quality search engine optimised sites increases. The potential profit margins of a good SEO site heavily outweigh the margins of a successful PPC campaign. Eventually every man and his dog will have a good high quality, relevant search engine optimised website. Adding that to the fact that Goo...

The Value of Attending Conferences

Last week, Jane, Scott, Rebecca and myself (plus Mystery Guest) spent the week in New York attending the Search Engine Strategies conference. This is my 13th SES show, and at this point, I've seen virtually all of the sessions and 90% of the speakers twice. However, like many others, I continue to participate beyond simply speaking - walking the show floors, attending sessions (though I missed ...

My "Don't Fire Me Rand" Recap of SES New York

Now that I've had the weekend to recover from a week of too many drinks, too few sleep, too many new names and faces to remember, and just the right number of familiar faces to recognize, I thought I'd share with the mozdience what I was up to all week (partly because I love you and partly because Rand is making me, and I like my job and don't want to get fired). My partners in crime (Scott and Ja...

SEO For Journalists: Headlines & Body Copy (Part 2 of 5)

We’ve now seen how writing for online is different to writing for print, and the importance of choosing the right words to use. Next we’ll see how a good headline or intro can make all the difference to whether your article will be read or not. 1) Headlines on many editorial sites get turned into title tags (the blue bar at the top of your browser...

SEO For Journalists: Introduction & Keywords (Part 1 of 5)

Introduction When told that writing for the Web is different to writing for print publications, the understandable reaction of many journalists is that it shouldn’t make any difference; we’re writing for people, not machines, they say. But there is a need to write differently for the Web and the reasons for this are quite simple: the ...

Page Strength SEO Tool Search Plugin

Hey everyone, I've been learning all about Open Search technology lately and thought I'd whip up a cute Page Strength SEO Tool search plugin for Firefox/Internet Explorer before I'm onto another topic; for your information, it supports Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 as well as any compliant OS clients....

I Tie Up Mike McDonald & Interview Vanessa Fox... Again.

Twenty-Eight Minutes... More than a full TV show worth of content, in-jokes and Google tips from a conversation with Vanessa Fox from Google's Webmaster Central team....

9 Steps to Effective, Natural, Sparkly-White SEO Copy

Yes SEO copy does exist. It requires a tactically and strategically different approach to conventional marketing copy, and requires research, careful application, contextual referencing, and intuitive search query language utilization from the first draft. It’s not that easy, it is important, and it might make all the difference to your pages. 1. ...

5 Best Things & 5 Worst Things About Being An In-House SEO

I'm now less than a week from starting my new job as the SEO Director of a search marketing agency, and it got me thinking about what I've learnt from my time as part of an (initially very small) in-house SEO team. There have been a lot of pros & cons to my time her, and in true blog style, I thought I'd try to summarise these in a snappy little list.Bad Thing...

Keyword Research Techniques You Might Not Use, But Should

Use your server or analytics search logs to find what people are looking for once on your site.The keywords used to search within your site or narrowed with search filters (by price, brand etc.) are a gold mine of fresh terms and phrases that can be used within your content and links to attract those users. Track what your visitors search for on your site, see which filt...