Deborah Mitchell says, “Blogger conferences have been a great resource for me as an entrepreneur. In July, New York City was host to two huge blogger events, BlogHer and Blogger Bash, where more than 5,000 bloggers gathered to meet with brand representatives and attend sessions to hone their online skills. Sheryl Simonitis, vice president of marketing at Noodle, a destination education website, shared a few SEO tips that any entrepreneur can use. The startup allows parents and students to make better education decisions in an environment that is completely unbiased so that a child and parent... [...]

Eric Enge says, “How do the SERPs for commercial queries vary from the treatment of informational queries? Moz is about to publish its new Search Engine Ranking Factors, and was kind enough to provide me with access to their raw ranking data. Today I am going to share some of what I found. In addition, I am going to compare it against raw ranking data pulled by my company, Stone Temple Consulting (STC). What makes this so interesting is that the Moz data is based on commercial queries across 165,177 pages and the STC data is based on informational queries over 182,340 pages (for a total of... [...]

MOZ team says, “There’s no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn’t require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today’s SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective“. Why Effective, Modern SEO Requires Technical, Creative, and Strategic Thinking MOZ Blog  [...]

Erica McGillivray says, “The bird has landed, and by bird, I mean the MozCon 2015 Video Bundle! That’s right, 27 sessions and over 15 hours of knowledge from our top notch speakers right at your fingertips. Watch presentations about SEO, personalization, content strategy, local SEO, Facebook graph search, and more to level up your online marketing expertise. If these videos were already on your wish list, skip ahead: If you attended MozCon, the videos are included with your ticket. You should have an email in your inbox (sent to the address you registered for MozCon with) containing... [...]

Jack Simpson says, “Within the world of digital marketing, there are few areas with as many complicated and obscure terms as SEO. Here I’ll be presenting a dictionary of as many SEO terms as I feel are relevant and important to a digital marketers’ understanding of this most vital of skills. Algorithm If you are deep into the world of SEO you’ll hear this word a lot. Basically an algorithm (which I find impossible to spell without Word automatically correcting me) is a programme used by search engines to determine which pages are the most relevant to a certain search term. Google has... [...]

Tom Demers says, “There’s nothing quite like a sudden Google algorithm update to leave marketers feeling equal parts confused and concerned. It’s like they wait for you to get all of your ducks in a row and then unleash an update that changes everything. Sure, they’re pretty open about that fact that they’re doing this for everyone’s own good — each algorithm tweak brings us one step closer to more relevant search results, after all. However, there is still some secrecy behind exactly how Google evaluates a website and ultimately determines which... [...]

Gianluca Fiorelli says, “One of the hardest things to measure is content effectiveness, mostly because there exists great confusion about its changing nature and purpose. One common problem is thinking of “content” and “formats” as synonyms, which leads to frustration and, with the wrong scaling processes present, may also lead to Google disasters. What is the difference between content and formats? Content is any message a brand/person delivers to an audience; Formats are the specific ways a brand/person can deliver that message (e.g. data visualizations, written... [...]

Ian Lurie says, “In spite of all the advice, the strategic discussions and the conference talks, we Internet marketers are still algorithmic thinkers. That’s obvious when you think of SEO. Even when we talk about content, we’re algorithmic thinkers. Ask yourself: How many times has a client asked you, “How much content do we need?” How often do you still hear “How unique does this page need to be?” That’s 100% algorithmic thinking: Produce a certain amount of content, move up a certain number of spaces. But you and I know it’s complete bullshit“. Distance from Perfect MOZ... [...]

Brian Pittman says, “Google’s Panda 4.2 algorithm rollout, which began over the weekend, continues Google’s commitment to rewarding high-quality, user-focused content with higher rankings. Here are three easy tips for optimizing your PR content for better results: 1. Go long. Many PR pros got used to writing short content because press release services provided a surcharge if copy ran over 400 words. Google now scans short content and assumes it doesn’t contain much useful information. The result is that shorter content doesn’t rank as well. It’s now better to “go long,” says... [...]

Carlos Escalera says, “The spam in Google Analytics (GA) is becoming a serious issue. Due to a deluge of referral spam from social buttons, adult sites, and many, many other sources, people are starting to become overwhelmed by all the filters they are setting up to manage the useless data they are receiving. The good news is, there is no need to panic. In this post, I’m going to focus on the most common mistakes people make when fighting spam in GA, and explain an efficient way to prevent it. But first, let’s make sure we understand how spam works. A couple of months ago, Jared... [...]