When you're a small fish in a sea of competitors, getting noticed by search engines is never easy. If you're a car dealer, local restaurant, real estate agent, lawyer, doctor, etc., you're not only competing with hundreds of other businesses just like yours, but when it comes to link-building, everyone is trying to pick the same low-hanging fruit.
LDA is remarkably well correlated to SERPs, but by substantially less than I thought or claimed. Expected correlation (as measured by expected spearman's correlation coefficient over our dataset) is 0.17 instead of 0.32. I found a mistake with the calculation that produced the 0.32 score.
The SEO industry, like many others, has private forums, chat threads and groups of connected individuals whose interactions happen largely behind closed doors. Today, I'd like to pull back a curtain and share a debate that occurred between a number of CEOs in the search marketing industry over the last few days that I think you'll find both fascinating, and hopefully, valuable, too. The...
User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn't including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content. Remember folks that even if you don't have "classical" user generated content t...
Lots of us keep hearing about how video is such a compelling medium and a great way to engage your customers. Not long ago Rand presented a Whiteboard Friday Video where he covers some of the basics around video SEO, like the trade offs between using a third party site, or hosting the video yourself. In the following post, I hope to add a little more to that topic and talk about some additional strategies that combine these ideas - starting with a 3 step process to help you get started with creating a video strategy for your website
I thought we'd try something a bit off-topic and fun today - Hunch's reader census widget. Go ahead and answer as many questions as you've got time for and we'll publish the results to learn more about the community we're all in: ...
I've been a big fan of Chris Dixon's excellent blog for a while now, so you can imagine that I was really excited to see him writing about SEO in a post last week. Chris kindly called out SEOmoz, which humbled me, but he also espoused some thinking in the comments that made me a bit concerned and was the catalyst for this po...
I've been connecting with a lot of site owners who are re-entering or ramping up their efforts in the blogosphere. I suspect this has something to do with the focus on content creation + linkbait in the SEO world's dialogue as well as the potential new traffic streams bloggers are feeling from the surge of linking via Twitter. Whatever the case, there's a few critical pieces that can help make ...
This post helps bloggers think about techniques to increase the number posts read by each of their visitors.
We bloggers talk a lot about finding our voice, that mystical quality that is uniquely us and yet somehow resonates with a wider audience. What happens, though, when your blog gets written by a group of authors? How does a company or community blog find its voice and not just devolve into a schizophrenic mess?
The inspiration for this post came when I was chatting with a recently graduated friend of mine who'd been looking for work online. Much like myself when I graduated with that all-purpose English Lit degree, she was looking for copywriting jobs online. Before I started at Distilled I did a bit of freelance writing so I knew exactly where she was coming from. Out of curiosity, I decided to have a poke around craigslist and gumtree- a couple of regular haunts of mine about 18 months ago. The very first thing I noticed was that the vast majority all of the writing jobs mentioned SEO, if not in their title then somewhere in their description. I don't remember it being like that all.
The beginning of this month (May 2nd, to be exact) marked my 3 year anniversary as a blogger. My first post on SEOmoz was a paragraph long and consisted of asking our readers if they know of any Spanish-language SEO blogs. It attracted 18 comments. Huzzah! Since then, I've published 241 more posts, with this one being #243. I thought I'd reflect back on my three years of blogging and share the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and the lessons I've learned along the way.
Although a lot of a blog's success comes from the ongoing effort you put into growing and nurturing it, there are a few things you can do to give it the best possible chance from day one. The checklist below varies from very simple actions through to big decisions and longer term strategies.
A couple months ago my boyfriend (Manstery Guest) wrote an article called called 10 Fictional Diners We Want to Eat At and posted it on the food site he manages for the Village Voice. The article didn't quite make it on some of the major social news sites, but it d...
