How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimize Page? If you're in SEO, you probably hear this question a lot. Sadly, there's no cut and dry answer, but there are sets of best practices we can draw from and sharpen to help get close. In this blog post, I'm going to share our top recommendations for achieving on-page, keyword-targeting "perfection," or, at least, close to it. Some...
We've all been bored to tears (or driven to madness) by the PageRank Sculping debate that's arisen since Google's June announcement. But, behind the scenes, a lot of smart SEOs have been working on ways to provide the same benefits that were thought to be conferred by PR sculpt...
At this week's SMX, Rand made a comment about two big brands that ranked at #2 and #3 for their industry's generic keyword behind an exact match domain. Referring to SERPs Click-Through-Rate data, he suggested that you could calculate how much more traffic the larger brand could receive from the keyword by moving from position 2 to position 1.
A very simple return to the headsmacking series this week (as it's late here in London and I've been up my usual 40+ hours traveling). We've been noticing that a number of websites seeking to block bot access to pages on their domain have been employing robots.txt to do so. While this is certainly a fine practice, the questions we've been getting show that there's a few misunderstanding...
Placing the NoFollow link attribute on your website is a very important SEO factor for on-page optimization. Getting backlink juice to websites isn't that easy for everyone, so we need to make sure the juice flow is flowing properly.
Many companies and professionals in the SEO sphere (SEOmoz included) often make "best practices" recommendations to clients that include items like: Switch from underscores to hyphens to separate words in the URLs Employ the H1 tag for page headlines Use H2s and H3s for subheadlines Use the keyword you're targ...
This week's headsmacking tip is extremely powerful and pretty darn simple to implement. The premise is straightforward - you've got old content that ranks in the top 20-30 results, but never achieves first page (or top 5) rankings. Frequently, we see a lot of sites making the mistake of trying to link build (both internally and externally) to the old content: ...
We've recently gotten to do (and see results of) some testing around internal links & anchor text and have come to some interesting, if not 100% proven, conclusions. As a disclaimer, SEO testing, whether done in a controlled environment or on live sites, is both challenging to quantify and subject to fair critiques both practically and academically. That said, I feel fairly confident in stating the following findings.
Is it possible that in all the years we've been writing at SEOmoz, there's never been a solid walkthrough on the basics of content optimization? Let's fix that up. First off, by content, I don't mean keyword usage or keyword optimization. I'm talking about how the presentation and architecture of the text, image and multimedia content on a page can be optimized for search engines.
It's very late on Christmas Eve, and I can hear our hosts, my cousin-in-law, and his girlfriend snoring in the next room. Their new dog is curled up on the couch, grumbling and huffing through his wet nose, one eye barely open. Mystery Guest crashed out an hour ago after we finished watching the new Muppets Christmas Special (I love Statler and Waldorf). Here in Ocean Beach, CA, the streets are quiet, the rain's stopped and it's just the sounds of surf and the occasional drunken reveler wandering home from the bars on Newport Ave, filled with Christmas cheer.
We have been doing some research into how to rank in Google mobile web search. Google is the dominant player in mobile search in the US (source: Nielsen Mobile) - our test site hasn't yet been indexed in the other search engines so I'll have to report back later on how it does there:
The Problem: You run a website that allows for user-generated content like job listings, rental properties, classified ads, personals or even UGC products (think eBay or Etsy). Thoughtless users, thinking only of themselves and the time they're going to save, wreck your SEO by posting the same content they've put up on ten of your competitor's sites. This creates duplicate cont...
So I recently turned 25 and figured that officially makes me old enough to write a 'how things were' post...
For this week's tip, I thought we'd quickly run through an issue that, early in my SEO career, frequently confused me (and seems to trip up lots of sites today, too). The concept is simple - given a page that's ranking well for Keyword "A" some folks make the mistake of targeting close variations of "A" on separate pages without good justification. Here's a quick exa...