Christopher Ratcliff says, “I’ve recently been making a point of plunging myself deeper and deeper into the murky depths of SEO.  It’s a fascinating place that can be filled with deeply satisfying victories, bafflingly contradictory advice, black and white hat gunslingers and requires dogged determination, nerves of steel and a strong sense of routine discipline. While writing various beginner’s guides to SEO and paid search over the last year, I realised that I still had many more questions to ask, in particular how these two disciplines relate to each other. And what’s the... [...]

Ian McKee says, “As you probably know by now, SEO and PR are getting more closely related. But there is one aspect that both have always had in common, and that is that both have long been labelled a supposed ‘dark art’.  PR and SEO; mysterious art forms that deal in the unknown, experts fixing things unseen, like wizards behind the curtain. It has suited both industries, to be known this way. “Oh, yeah, we just need to curbudgle your whojamaflip. It’s absolutely essential, or you’ll get befluddled. You don’t want to get befluddled. Yes it’s an extra thirty grand.” The importance... [...]

Yael Grauer say, “Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) terms have you confused? Are you lost in a sea of inexplicable acronyms? Fear not! With the assistance of our SEO manager Chipper Nicodemus, we`ve hooked you up with a glossary of the most oft-used words and their definitions. 301 redirect A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect of one webpage to another, passing along a majority of thelink “juice” or ranking with it. 301 stands for the HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) status code. ALT text ALT text is a description of an image in your site`s HTML code. Spiders or bots (which... [...]

Sam Kusinitz says, “You likely know Rand Fishkin as the cofounder of Moz. In addition to his pivotal role in starting and growing SEOmoz from an SEO consulting agency to the SaaS company that we all know today as just “Moz,” Fishkin has also co-authored The Art of SEO and appeared on the 40 Under 40 List and 30 Best Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30. Rand Fishkin recently hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on inbound.org — the community for marketers to connect and share — in order to create the space for inbound marketers, SEO professionals, and anyone else... [...]

Eric Devaney says, “Ugh. Off-page SEO. How the heck are we supposed to do that stuff? Remember back in the day, when you could work out those sweet link exchange deals with your buddies? “Hey man, I have a site, and you have a site … how about I link to your site a bajillion times, and you link to my site a bajillion times?!” Boom. Off-page SEO = Done. Of course, such practices never really fit with Google’s mission of organizing the world’s information and making it accessible/useful. When a Boston-based seafood restaurant website has thousands of backlinks from a Tokyo-based... [...]

Isia McKetta says, “Write it and they will come. That’s the drum we’ve been beating for a long time now. We optimize our pages and our content to please search engines and cross our fingers and hope that customers will convert. We can do better. But to do it, we have to think beyond Google. Yes, you still need to check all your standard SEO boxes to make your site crawl friendly. Then it’s time to stop catering to the bots and start catering to the users instead. That means we have to—no, we get to—think bigger when we think of SEO. As Rand said in his Whiteboard Fridaylast... [...]

Kristina Kledzik says, “As a human being currently using the internet, you have opinions about online user experience. The problem is, everyone’s experience is going to be different based on their expectations. So although you, as a Moz blog reader and probably an internet connoisseur, may have some very good ideas about making your company’s or client’s site easier to use for the majority of visitors, there’s a good chance that your boss or client will disagree with you. If you’re like me and aren’t a user experience expert, it’s going to be hard... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “We all know that keywords and links alone no longer cut it as a holistic SEO strategy. But there’s still plenty outside our field who try to “boil SEO down” to a naively simplistic practice – one that isn’t representative of what SEOs need to do to succeed. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand champions the art and science of SEO and offers insight into how very broad the field really is“. Does SEO Boil Down to Site Crawlability and Content Quality? MOZ Blog  [...]

Greg Gifford says, “If you work in the SEO industry, you need to understand how to do Local SEO. Seriously.. I’m not kidding here… If you’re sitting there thinking “Um, no… not really” – then you’re exactly the person I’m writing this post for. If you haven’t already, I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point in your SEO career, you’re going to do some SEO for a business that has a physical storefront. BOOM – that means Local SEO. Sure, you’ve still got to do all the traditional SEO things that you do every... [...]

Casey Meraz says, “Did you know that having consistent and correct citations is mandatory for any successful local SEO Campaign? If you’ve read the 2013 Moz Local Ranking Factors survey or you’ve been in the local SEO game for a while, it’s no secret how important citations are to ranking locally in Google. In fact, citations and external location signals are the 3rd most important ranking factor according to the Moz local search ranking factors survey. This is why it’s essential that you have your correct NAP listed across the major citation sources“. Advanced... [...]