The Moz Blog

If I Could Change One Thing About the SEO Industry, It Would Be...

My personal ending would be - to Improve the Industry's Professionalism. We're a young industry, which means opportunity, excitement and lots of fantastic entrepreneurs and personalities. Conversely, it also means a lot of unprofessional, immature behavior, even from those of us who should know better (and yes, I'm certainly including my own actions from time to time in that gr...

Update the Copyright Year on Your Website

First of all, Happy New Year! With the new year comes some annual maintenance that every webmaster should be conscious of. Here's a quick tip from my list of annual website maintenance.

Redirect 301 /jane.html

It was a bit difficult hitting the Compose Entry link in my account to write this, because this will be one of the last blog posts I write as an SEOmoz staff member. At the end of this month and after two and half fantastic years, I'm leaving SEOmoz and Seattle. It's amazingly hard to know how to word something like this: I want to get across so much and there's no way to word it at all cleverly. ...

10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing

I couldn't help but love Chris Yeh's Outline of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. It's a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing. Let's run through the list:

What the Heck Should We Call *.domain.com?

If you've been playing around with Linkscape a little, you've probably seen our attempts at creating a lot of new naming conventions for metrics and features that were previously the exclusive realm of web indexing researchers, information retrieval scientists and search engineers. Things like mozRank & mozTrust (mT) have seemed to work out fairly well so far, but our testers and members have struggled a bit more with mozRank (mR) vs. Domain mozRank (DmR) - one is for a page while the other applies to a domain - and been seriously confused about FQDs vs. PLDs. Let's address this issue.

The Big List of PPC Resources and Articles

This post needs very little introduction. I’ve scoured the web, my bookmarks and Twitter (thanks guys!) for all the very best articles about PPC that I can find. I’ve broken the links down into several categories to make it easier to read. Enjoy!

Headsmacking Tip #10 - Incentivize Links

A very short tip, but one that has been proving incredibly valuable to all of our clients of late. When you think about attracting links organically, the process goes something like this: 1. What content can I create that will naturally attract links? 2. What format should I put it in for maximum share-ability? 3. How can I promote it to reach the largest possible relevant audience?

Collecting Past Due Payments From Clients

May It Please the Mozzers, I want to briefly touch on some collections methods and issues today. The first step is to try and collect the money yourself with follow-up invoices, letters and an offer of a payment plan. In this stage you can often accomplish two important things: getting a personal guarantee from the business owner, and getting the...

8 Arguments to Convince Jaded SEO Clients That You Are Trustworthy

One of our sales people asked me recently, “What do I say to clients who don’t trust SEO’s?” For those potential clients who are jaded, who have been scammed by various companies claiming to do search engine optimization, it is difficult to talk to them about ‘improving their rankings’. They have heard that line many times before, often spoken with a thick, foreign accent.

Differential Diagnosis #2: A Double Mystery

I've been watching a lot more of the Dr. House show, and becoming a bit obsessed with some SEO mysteries of my own. Since our last outing into diagnosis went so well, I thought we'd try again. I haven't got either completely solved, but I feel pretty good about some hypotheses. Let's see how you...

You've Got 70 Minutes to Vote on this Post

This morning at SEOmoz, we're having a dev priorities meeting to decide which items in our queue of tools, upgrades and improvements will take priority for the next 45-60 days. For fun, I thought I'd open it up to our community and ask you - what would you most want to see from us in Q1 of 2009: ...

The Exact Science of Hindsight and How This Helps in SEO

Over the last few months I've found myself doing slightly less SEO, and in its place I've been thinking about how we can improve the SEO services we offer our clients. SEOs, I've found, tend to be quite a creative bunch, both in the type of work that gets done but also in the way that the work gets done. One of the joys of being in SEO is that the tasks that need to be done and the best way of doing these tasks is permanently evolving. The creative urges mean that often when asked to do two similar tasks a week apart, the tasks are done in a completely different way. From a job satisfaction and creativity point of view, this is fantastic; starting from scratch each time on a task means the creative juices can really flow. From a management and consistency point of view, re-inventing the wheel each time is a nightmare!