If you’ve been using SEOmoz’s tools for a while, you’ve likely run across the same challenge we have — the data rocks, but you have to run a separate tool and report for each aspect of your SEO. That’s why, for the past year, we’ve been building a new platform to house all of the features and functionality of the SEOmoz toolset, and includes the ability to track metrics over time. We call it the SEOmoz "Web App…

I’ve had the chance to talk to lots of folks who are just starting out building new web businesses, many of them for the first time and a few with some experience under their belt. What worries me is that a lot of these new businesses are reversing the SEO order of operations; making it 100X more difficult to succeed than need be.

How Do You Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies?

Seriously…

How many presentations do you see that show traffic stats like these?

Or this:

Or this:

These charts aren’t wrong, per se. They’re not lying to you, but they are obscuring the truth, and they’re making it impossible to know what’s going right and wrong.

The problem isn’t that the numbers are inaccurate, it’s that no website is just ONE SITE…

Like many overly-connected web junkies, I find myself increasingly overwhelmed by information, resources and news. Sorting the signal from the noise is essential to staying sane, but missing an important development can be costly. To balance this conflict, I’ve recently re-arranged my daily reading habits (which I’ve written about several times before) and my Firefox sidebar (a critical feature that keeps me from switching to Chrome)…

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love…

Today, instead of playing in the uber-rare Seattle sunshine, I spent the day polishing off the PRO Training seminar schedule and it looks amazing. I’m excited to see these sessions myself (and I rarely sit through presentations). Check it out for yourself below; if you’re inclined and available, we’d love to see you.

Oh, and don’t worry, I’m not cruelly sharing when we’ve already sold out…

Another great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled "Startup Competitive Advantages the Work."

As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn’t help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we’re in – domination of the organic search results – can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it…

It’s that wonderful time of the month again! Linkscape, SEOmoz’s web index powering our mozbar, API, Open Site Explorer, the classic Linkscape tool and many features in Labs and elsewhere pushed out new data (over the weekend) from a web crawl that ended earlier this month. There’s lots of fresh info to explore on your sites, including new links and metrics, but I wanted to show off some spiffy new features, too…

One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is "What’s the best way to learn SEO?" There are many ways to answer, but in this post, I’m going to cover the responses I give most often and those I’ve seen have the most success. But, before I describe each of these, it pays to understand that not all learning methodologies are the same in style, substance or where they can take you…

Last week, Mixergy’s Andrew Warner interviewed me about the founding of SEOmoz and our trajectory to date. It was a very personal interview about the background of the company, but turned out to be a great experience. I’ve posted it below for those who might want to watch over the weekend and if you prefer, there’s also a full text transcript on the Mixergy blog post.

After the interview, I noticed the Mixergy chatroom had dozens of questions I wasn’t able to answer and I’ve been receiving a fair number of emails and tweets about it as well…

Jason Cohen recently authored a post on A/B testing that deserves both broader awareness and a deeper dive. Most of us in the online marketing world are aware of the power A/B tests can bring through improved click-through, sign-up and conversion rates. Getting a higher percentage of visitors to a page to take a desired action is powerful stuff.

The process by which we hypothesize, design, create and run testing, however, is fraught with peril…

As many of you who read this blog know, I’m a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research, produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space. But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it’s by request…

After last week’s Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur, I got several questions about whether paid/spammy links could be used as a weapon to potentially harm someone else’s rankings. In this post, I’ll walk through why this is rarely the case, how you can defend yourself from potential scenarios and why this isn’t a great tactic to employ against your competitors.

Can Paid Links Be Used as Weapons in the SERPs?

The short answer is "almost never…

Many of our keen members observed that late last week, Linkscape’s index updated (this is actually our 27th index update since starting the project in 2008). This means new link data in Open Site Explorer and Linkscape Classic, as well as new metric data via the mozbar and in our API.

Index 27 Statistics

For those who are interested, you can follow the Linkscape index update calendar on our API Wiki (as you can see, this update was about a week early)…

I’ve been having a similar conversation with a number of folks from the world of search that’s interesting enough as to deserve some transparency and discussion. It centers around the idea of the web’s link graph and how it operates to power the rankings of relevant results in the major search engines. If we follow this brief timeline, you’ll see what I’m getting at:

• 1993 – 2000: The beginning of the web is marked by an influx of researchers, academics, hobbyists and enthusiasts…

This past week during the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, I presented some correlation data alongside Janet Driscoll-Miller, Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing & Matt Cutts of Google. Matt in particular was quite vocal in expressing a desire to see additional data points from our research, primarily around the prominence/visibility of particular elements in the results. This post is intended to help make that available…

Earlier this year, Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media asked me if SEOmoz could put together some data comparing ranking elements of Google against those of Bing to help illustrate the potential biases SEOs might face when optimizing for the two engines. Today at SMX Advanced in Seattle, I presented the following data, compiled by our own Ben Hendrickson with help from the entire SEOmoz engineering team (particularly Phil & Chas on the Linkscape side)…

Conversion rate optmization – the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site – has been a hot topic this year. There’s both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read Robert Cialdini’s seminal work – Influence: Science & Practice…

Sometimes, the page you’re trying to rank – the one that visitors will find relevant and useful to their query – isn’t the page the engines have chosen to place first. When this happens, it can be a frustrating experience trying to determine what course of action to take. In this blog post, I’ll walk through some of the root causes of this problem, as well as five potential solutions.

When the wrong page from your site appears prominently in the search results, it can spark a maddening conflict of emotion – yes, it’s great to be ranking well and capturing that traffic, but it sucks to be delivering a sub-optimal experience to searchers who visit, then leave unfulfilled…

As some of you likely noticed, Linkscape’s index updated today with fresh data crawled over the past 30 days. Rather than simply provide the usual index update statistics, we thought it would be fun to do some whiteboard diagrams of how we make a Linkscape update happen here at the mozplex. We also felt guilty because our camera ate tonight’s WB Friday (but Scott’s working hard to get it up for tomorrow morning)…

In 1997, Google’s founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:

• Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
• All votes are, initially, considered equal
• Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
• More important pages cast more important votes
• The votes a page can cast are a function of that page’s importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts

That algorithm, of course, was PageRank, and it changed the course of web search, providing tremendous value to Google’s early efforts around quality and relevancy in results…

…

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 topic is the concept that content quality is highly correlated or predictive of high rankings in the search engines…

Somehow, my flight from Seattle landed just before the newest Icelandic ash cloud began shutting down airports across UK airspace. As a result, I was able to present at SMX London this morning. The presentation is included below.

This slide deck focuses on things that are probably in the search engines’ ranking algorithm today (e.g. the reasonable surfer model), might be in today and probably will be more in the future (e…

A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

SEO is a field where reputation is a huge part of your ability to perform well. Because the search engines don’t publish comprehensive guidelines (or even guidelines that cover 1/10th of the material necessary for good SEO work), businesses rely on the savvy of individual consultants, contractors and employees…

It’s an exciting day at SEOmoz – Linkscape’s index has updated with fresh data crawled in the past 30 days. This update also gives us a chance to show off lots of interesting data points around the web’s usage of search-specific tags and directives. Let’s dive in!

The Canonical URL Tag Grows in Popularity

Rel Canonical is here to stay. Websites have been growing in their adoption of the tag since it’s announcement and this index has the highest number and percentage of URLs employing it to date…

I spoke this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco to a room full of curious marketers & site owners. After the session, there was a lot of requests for the slide deck and thus I’ve shared it below.

This presentation opportunity comes courtesy of O’Reilly, who published The Art of SEO late last year (somehow, I’ve neglected to mention it on SEOmoz until now)…

Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I’m finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.

Some of these are obvious and well known, others are obscure and brand new…

I’m very excited to announce that we have just put the finishing touches on our second, biennial SEO Industry Survey!  We ran our first industry survey in 2008, and learned and shared a lot about the SEO community. This survey follows up on a lot of questions we asked last time, but includes a greater focus on other areas of organic search marketing as well.

With this survey we hope to find out and share with the world:

• Who are the people in the SEO community?
• How do they learn about SEO and sharpen their skills?
• How are companies embracing search marketing?
• Which tools and tactics do people in the industry use to support their SEO and social media efforts?

The survey only takes about 10 minutes, and we will again share the results once we’ve had time to work through the data…

I’ve been an SEO for a long while – nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven’t been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar – that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know it’s flawed in a multitude of ways, but so many people in our field (and in the broader webmaster/marketing community) still talk about "PR 4 websites" and how "I have a PR6 but he’s still outranking me…