The Moz Blog

Greetings True Believers! The new guy says 'Hi'...

Hey gang, Scott Willoughby here. As the latest addition to the SEOmoz team, Rand requested that I write a little introduction to let you all know who the new guy is lurking around the site.For those of you who've been astutely following the SEOmoz hiring saga over the last few months: I am indeed the silver-medalist from ...

Home Pages Disappearing from Google's UK Results

Team Fresh Egg has noticed a strange phenomenon, and it appears to be an ongoing issue from at least August 2006. It seems that home pages (and only home pages) of .com sites hosted in the UK are disappearing from Google's results when you do a site: search and filter the results to only show pages from the UK. I've played around with various sites, and while the home pages pop up under the normal...

LinkBucks - A Unique Way to Monetize Outbound Links

I have to say that I'm rarely impressed by new ideas in website monetization, but Linkbucks, as a concept, is fairly revolutionary. The idea is that Linkbucks will display ads on the websites and pages you link to - check out their site for more. ...

New Research in Form Creation

Via UXMatters, apparently, this is the best way to structure a form for usability: It includes: NOT using "bolded" labels Using labels on top o...

An American in London

Hello out there in Moz Land! Or, shall I say, "ello!" Now that I'm in Worthing with the legendary Ammon Johns and Co. (take that, SEO Fangirl!), I thought I'd take advantage of the free Internet access and update you all on the first part of my trip. Here's what I've been up to in the past five da...

Linkbait Success Rates & Digg's New, Tougher Algo

Last week, Neil Patel reported that Digg is making it harder to get Dugg. I can certainly vouch for that. An ex-client and friend of ours launched what was (at least in my opinion) a highly Digg-worthy article on the Ten Servers ...

What does the moz in SEOmoz mean?

I think I get asked this question on average 4X per week, more during conferences and after we've been in the press and less when I hide in the cupboard and make Brandon answer the phones. It's certainly a valid one, though and deserving of a definitive answer. Here's what the "moz" in SEOmoz means: We're building off the history of organizations like DMOZ, ...

Rand's Unofficial Guide to Speaking at SES

More than a few speakers have written to me asking about the SES conference series - how they should prepare, what they should bring, how the conference is organized for speakers, etc. There's an irony here that shouldn't be overlooked - when I was a first-time speaker (just a couple years ago), I had these same questions, and plenty of nervousness. I'm going to address this purely from an SES ...

The funny little thing called TRUST

Understanding and managing trust is an essential skill in search engine business. In terms of sociology, trust is the willing acceptance of one's power to affect another - allowing actions that otherwise would not be possible. Trust is a mighty tool when it comes to signing up new clients, achieving credentials and referrers or building a (social) network...

Landing Pages for SEO

What is a Landing Page?A Landing Page is a page that focuses information targeted towards a particular user – and according to Seth Godin, optimised specifically to encourage 1 of 5 actions: Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone...

When Search Marketing Firms Turn Clients Away

Thanks to a small team and a lot of publicity, SEOmoz turns away a significant amount of work - sending folks to specific references or our recommended list or, occassionally, recommending they hire in-house SEO help. We're lucky in that we get to picky about the folks we choose to work with - some of the reasons for turning away busi...

SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make (updated Jan. 2011)

This is going to be a tough and contentious issue and one that isn't easy for me to write about. Along with the obvious internal conflicts of interest in disclosing salary numbers, there's bound to be a lot of companies and individuals who will come away feeling that my numbers are wrong (or that their employers are cheating them). That said, it's a topic that needs to be addressed and if my ex...