How to Learn SEO

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. At Distilled, we define our purpose as "discovering, implementing and sharing the ways great companies succeed online". It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that (a) I think a lot about how to learn SEO effectively and (b) we try to build learning into pretty much everything we do."How should I learn more about X?" is one of the most common questions I get asked both internally at Distilled and from the community and "How should I learn more about SEO? is probably the most common...

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Rand and Dharmesh Told Us "No", But We Did It Anyway

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. The Inbound Jobs story with Five Tips on Getting Buy-in from Thought Leaders.In April, Ben and I attended LinkLove in Boston. It was a great experience for a number of reasons, and the best part was connecting with other awesome SEO’s. As a designer/developer team, we asked these thought leaders what we could create for them that would make their lives better. Tom Critchlow planted a seed with us that would eventually become the job board now found on Inbound.org.Tom helped us see that there was an urgent...

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Stop Saving Your Best for Last

If I started with “I have a confession to make…”, that would be cliché, so I have TWO confessions to make:This post has nothing to do with SEO. It’s about creative work. I guess it applies to content marketing. Ok, maybe it’s a little bit about SEO. If you’d rather eat a sandwich, I understand.I am a serial, high-functioning under-achiever. In other words, at the risk of sounding like an ass, my half-assed efforts usually return 7/8-assed results. I learned too early to game those ass-fractions – during final exams in college, for example, I’d calculate exactly what I needed to get an A in the class. If it was only going to take a 67% on the...

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400% Higher Throughput Mozscape API Now in Beta, And Seeking Testers

If you've used or considered using the Mozscape API to retrieve link metrics data, we've got something unique to share - a brand new beta of a much faster, more robust API. This beta version currently has just a few testers (and we're seeking more), but thus far, we're seeing remarkable results.Carin, who manages the big data team here at Moz, helped share the story with me last week:The current API is not able to support everyone's use case! Some people need to make a lot of calls in a really short period of time - our API currently can't support more than 10 requests/second (even for paid users). Others have a large list of URLs they want to update metrics on every new index release - our current API doesn't support batching very well and will timeout with batch sizes larger than...

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Two Mozscape Updates in August! And More Info on Why PA/DA Fluctuate

Just 14 short days ago, I wrote about the August Mozscape index update. Today, as part of our efforts to create shorter deltas between indices, I'm excited to announce that we have our fastest ever time between updates. There's new data right now in the Mozscape API (for which we're still seeking beta testers on the new version), in Open Site Explorer, through the Mozbar, and in your PRO web app.This current index has the following metrics:60,852,245,271 (60 billion) URLs657,072,652 (657 million) Subdomains153,355,227 (153 million) Root Domains610,557,978,730 (610 billion) LinksFollowed vs. Nofollowed 2.26% of all links found were nofollowed...

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Agile Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! In today's video, we'll explore the nifty, nefarious world on Agile Marketing, which I talked about at MozCon a few weeks ago. We'll take a look at four key principles of Agile Marketing and talk about how you can use them to hack your organization to deliver more value to your customers more often by breaking down barriers and removing impediments to your progress.The strengths of Agile are that it focuses on bringing customers into our marketing and development efforts; it focuses on interaction with your colleagues by building cross-functional teams; it pushes us to always stay in motion by prioritizing delivery to our users and customers above all other concerns; and it follows a strong, iterative "Build-Measure-Learn" cycle, just like Eric Ries talks about in...

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Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!

At SEOmoz, we know that learning complex software applications can be time consuming and challenging, kind of like playing chess with a Wookie. Having well-written and comprehensive onboarding materials can help to decrease the learning curve, thus preventing droid dismemberment. Excellent documentation, videos, and "getting started" guides are a key differentiator between software that is successful and software that slowly fizzles away.We've gone to great lengths to bring knowledge to the SEO and inbound communities with our daily blog articles and handy Beginner's Guide to SEO. However, getting up to speed with our PRO application has been...

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Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Last Friday, I did a Whiteboard Friday called "Smarter Internal Linking." If you have not yet watched it (I do show some graphs and stuff, so you'll probably need to watch and not just listen), I'd recommend doing so first before reading the rest of this post.The goal of this post is to clear up a few misconceptions that I saw in the comments, and to show you exactly what I mean about sitewides that could be problematic both now and in the near future for over-optimization algorithms and filters.One question...

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Smarter Internal Linking - Whiteboard Friday

Hey there SEOmoz readers! This week we are talking about what I like to call "Smarter Internal Linking". Rand mentioned internal linking a few months ago before Penguin even hit, back when we were still calling it the "over-optimization penalty". A few months later, we can see the potential effects that Penguin has had and the factors causing them.So how can we be smarter in our internal linking? How can we target our important pages so that they are able to rank well for competitive terms, yet not be in danger of being slapped by algorithm updates? This is exactly what we are talking about in this video, including a few pro-tips I've picked up doing SEO in the competitive travel industry, especially in regards to microsites and ccTLDs.Howdy, SEOmoz fans. My name is John Doherty. I'm from...

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To Catch a Spammer: Uncovering Negative SEO

Google recently updated its claims regarding the ability of other webmasters to affect your rankings via negative SEO. While questions about the efficacy of negative SEO continue to exist, it does not seem to be slowing down the growth of what is arguably the most contemptible part of the search industry.On July 9th, a good friend of mine reached out to me with a problem. As a very risk-averse webmaster, he constantly plunges into the numbers, especially anchor text diversity, in order to make sure his site is as penalty-proof as possible. The latest updated data in SEOmoz's MozScape revealed a massive shift towards anchor text over optimization...

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How to Influence People With Social Media

By Michael StelznerPublished July 20, 2012 In this video I interview Mark Schaefer, author of the Return on Influence and The Tao of Twitter.  Mark is also an MBA teacher at Rutgers University.Mark shares how social media influence impacts businesses today. You’ll learn how businesses are using social scoring platforms to engage with their audiences, and how to improve your influence.Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:How to create influence through your contentWhen brands consult your Klout scoresHow businesses leverage word-of-mouth influencers What...

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Announcing MozCast - The Google Weather Report

If you follow me on Twitter at all (and, if so, may God have mercy on your soul), you may have seen me saying things like this over the past couple of months……and you may have found yourself wondering “Where does he get all that wonderful data?” Like all of the best things in life – cookies, babies, belly button lint – the answer is that I made it myself. Luckily for you, I’m in a sharing mood.So today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Mozcast.com – the Google weather report. You can visit it right now, and it looks something like this:The first thing you'll notice (besides Roger's smiling face), is yesterday's weather. The hotter and stormier...

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Outranking Google

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. “Know your enemy, know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster...”The Art of War,  Sun TzuI wouldn’t say Google is the “enemy”, but all too often they’re far being from a friend. Understanding Google and understanding yourself will set you up to avoid catastrophe.Here on SEOmoz, we love reading about tactics. Smart, repeatable, step-by-step processes you can implement and see results from right away. Everything else is a frustration, right? So, if you'll kindly bear with me......

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