The Moz Blog

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...

H1s and H2s - the right tool for the job.

I'm pretty new to looking at SEO, having previously left it up to chance and the hope that search engine's would reward me for producing valid code. But I have found myself getting sucked deeper and deeper into it as time goes on.Why? Because I love the idea that good web content is holistic. Good writing, that is relevant and well structured delivered with a brevity of code that makes the...

An Exhaustive List of Search Engine Based Keyword Research Data

Rather than trying to make this post go through all the tactics and specifics of Rebecca's already comprehensive KW Research article, I figured I'd instead provide a solid list of every which way you can look at a keyword to get an idea of metrics, value and potential from the engines themselves (rather than services like AdWords, YSM, Wortracker or KW Discovery). This is more of an "exper...

My Departure from SEOmoz

As Rand mentioned in his recent post: Big Changes at SEOmoz, I'm leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. It's been nearly 4 and a half years, which is a millennium in tech-industry time, and I feel that SEOmoz is at a point where I'm comfortable leaving. Previously, I was the only developer, designer, and systems administrator and our entire infrastructure depended on me. With Jeff, and more recently Mel, I can now leave knowing that SEOmoz is in good hands.

The Varied Delights of Moderating YOUmoz

One of the daily tasks that either myself or Rebecca take care of is moderating YOUmoz submissions. Everyone who has ever submitted a YOUmoz entry will know the process: you compose your piece, hit submit, and wait around for an SEOmoz staff member to publish it. If a piece is original (that is, it doesn't show up in Google when we search for a snippet of its text), is coherent, on-topic and gener...

Big Changes Afoot at SEOmoz

This is a tough post to write. Not because I'm not excited and not because the news I want to share isn't positive, but simply because I feel like I've been keeping something from you for the past few weeks, and I hate doing that. Of course, it's nowhere near as tough as hiding my Super Bowl engagement from Mystery Guest...