The Moz Blog

Whiteboard Friday - State of the Industry

Scott's somewhere in eastern Europe right now, so that means I'm fully at the helm of this week's Whiteboard Friday. In a break from the usual fare, this week Rand takes a step back and examines the search industry as a whole. He looks at how its made up, who does what & what questions you should ask yourself to see where you fit in. ...

Make Your Millions with Facebook Applications

Rand, how on earth do you expect me to complete any solid keyword research when you assign me a task that involves Facebook? Luckily, you asked me to review the most successful (and most useful, as they're not necessarily the same thing) Facebook applications. I'm one of those people who have shied away from adding applications to my Facebook account because I remember when Facebook was like a ren...

Get Creative With Your 404 Error Pages

One of the recommendations we often make to our clients is to ensure proper structure of 404 pages. We generally urge that at least one or more of the following be included on a site's 404 page:

Just When You Think Search Misconceptions Can't Get Any Worse...

A while back I talked about the frustrations of explaining my line of work to my relatives, but I'm starting to think that maybe ignorance truly is bliss. I recently heard two examples of non-search people's perceptions about how the search engines work, and it is frustrating to think that some people believe that this is actually how the search industry operates.

A Half Dozen Viral Campaign Launching Tactics to Try When Digg's Homepage Rejects You

I find myself in Montreal, Quebec this week, spending time with my old friend, Guillaume Bouchard of NVI and some new friends frmo an organization called Alliance numériQC (French only, sorry Anglophones). Guillaume and I got to chatting over dinner about the new version of Digg and the more prominent version of the social li...

The SEOmoz Premium Member Discount Store is Now Open for Business

We're officially announcing our newest benefit to Premium Members: the SEOmoz Premium Member Discount Store (note that only Premium Members will be able to access the page). We've partnered with several SEO and SEM companies to provide Premium Members with discounts and deals on various products and services (here's where I channel my i...

Are You a Newbie, a Novice, a Master or a Dark Lord of SEO - Take our Quiz & Find Out

So, you think you know your SEO inside and out, eh? Well, now's your chance to show your stuff. SEOmoz is proud to announce the SEO Expert Quiz. 75 action-packed questions designed to test your mettle, covering all corners of the SEO universe from beginner knowledge to sneaky tricks only true Dark Lords of the SERPs will know. Once completed, you'll have the chan...

The Analytics Project is Complete - Tons of Cool Data & an Interview with Eric Enge

Way back in November of last year, I suggested a linkbait idea to the wide community on a comparison of the major analytics vendors. Despite an incredible amount of work and effort required to put it together, Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting prevailed and produced the incredibly valuable, must read research report...

Mentally Check Out with the SES San Jose Comic Strip

Now that I've got about a week's worth of antibiotics pumping through my system (only one more week to go!), I was able to focus my valuable SEO skills on creating a litany of stupid speech bubbles and images of Dave Naylor saying "fookin." I think I may be underpaid. Anyway, thanks for being patient while my body became a culture of snot and goo. Here's the ...

Whiteboard Friday - Where in the World is...?

This week, Rand talks about a topic that has been very prominent in the Q&A lately: geolocation. He talks about what the engines look for when trying to locate where your site is located, and offers some advice on how to optimize your site for your location. ...

Where are Search Engines Most Likely To Innovate?

Since Read/Write Web is covering 10 future web trends today, I though it would be a perfect time to present my own theories on how search engines might be innovating their technologies. Query Intent Detection It seems that all of the major engines have eschewed disambiguati...

When Data Repositories Open Up, So Do Possibilities for Viral Content

Gary Price of ResourceShelf dropped me a line last week with some links to very cool content repositories on the web that have recently opened up or expanded. Browsing through a few of these got me thinking that the sheer amount of information available from non-profits, organizations and government entities could make for some very powerful viral mate...