WARNING: Get ready to read with this one. There aren’t a ton of fun graphics or quick bullet points, but I do promise that if you read through, you’ll feel much more knowledgable about the topic, and likely get more value from organizing, speaking or attending an event.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve attended nearly 100 conferences on search, online marketing, startups and technology…

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue – the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent…

This week, despite still being seriously under the weather (see this week’s sad WB Friday), I flew down to SMX West to speak on the Link Building Strategies panel. Although I’d wanted to put more work in and deliver a better presentation, I received some very kind words afterward and requests from folks to share the deck via the blog. Before I embed the actual deck, though, I need to provide some context (as this isn’t a wholly self-explanatory presentation)…

This post is short and easy to follow, just like the tactic it recommends. Most everyone who optimizes for Google Local (aka Google Maps) is familar with David Mihm’s excellent and oft-referenced Local Search Ranking Factors. In that document, and in many places where local results are analyzed, it’s clear that getting your business/website into more listings, in a consistent fashion is a very good thing…

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility…

Last week, while in London, I received an email from Paul Graham, whom I’ve long admired, possibly even idolized a bit. He asked if I was available to come speak at a YCombinator SEO event in Mountain View. Tonight, I presented at that evented and thought I’d share my experiences, recommendations and yes, my presentation. Not everything that was discussed is public, in fact, much of it is "classified" at YC’s request…

Last week I spent a day with small business owners in Glasgow (pronounced glaz-go), Scotland teaching the basics of online marketing and SEO. It was a remarkable experience to be faced with such a different crowd than what I’m used to. As a comparison, the week prior, I’d been in Mountain View presenting to the Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable, comprised of heads of SEO and marketing directors from Fortune 500 companies – all very savvy operators…

Warning: This post isn’t about SEO or online marketing. The focus is on our growth as a startup and our adoption of company values and how we represent those internally and externally. Since transparency remains one of our guiding principles, we felt it only appropriate to share our work in this area – hopefully you can take something away that will provide value in your startup, entrepreneurial endeavors or career path…

We all work hard at the SEO process – analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others…

Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007’s Pontiac advertisement:

At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more…

I ran across this survey data eMarketer released last week and my heart sank:

This first chart looks innocent enough. It’s when you look at the next one (from the same report) that things get ugly:

As a CEO, an SEO, a web marketer and a participant in social media, this drives me absolutely crazy. The very last item on the list is "conversions, ROI, etc…

Today I have two very big announcements. First, SEOmoz is exiting the consulting business to focus exclusively on our software model. And, second, we have an expanded partnership with Distilled (new US site: Distilled LLC), who’ll be taking over many of our consulting clients and opening offices here in Seattle. I’m going to talk briefly about both of these below, then add detail on why we’re so bullish about the SEO software market…

How many pages has Google indexed?

This question and the problems surrounding it run rampant through the SEO world. It usually arises when someone starts doing searches like this:

Google claims to have 93,800 pages indexed on the root domain, seomoz.org. That sounds pretty good, but when I ran that search query last week, the number was closer to 75,000 and when I run it again from Google…

For the past 15 months, we’ve been working hard to improve Linkscape, our index of the WWW. Today, we’re releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape’s index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free:

The new tool, Open Site Explorer, makes gathering, sorting and exporting link data easier than ever…

At some point during your University’s SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson (which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists), a handy refresher might be in order…

Prelude: I’ve long promised blog readers a detailed accounting of my experiences raising capital over the course of last summer and into the fall. My apologies for the long delay, and to those seeking more SEO-focused content. This entry is lengthy, detailed and designed to share as much as possible, so hopefully you’ve got a good 20 minutes to read it We’ll be back to SEO tips & tricks tomorrow…

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:

Powered by Hunch.com

I’ll be returning to regularly scheduled programming tonight with my long-delayed blog post about our experience raising venture capital…

Lately I’ve been surprised to hear concerns from a number of SEOs that using the canonical URL tag on the canonical version of the page can somehow cause problems. When I’ve talked to folks about it, there seems to be confusion that only duplicates should use the rel="canonical" specification and the original must remain rel="canonical"-free. This isn’t the case.

Let’s look at a few diagrams to help explain:

This is the standard way rel=canonical is employed…

What a year! From traveling to software development, saying goodbye to old friends and growing the team with new ones, we’ve had a tremendously exciting 12 months at SEOmoz. To celebrate, next week, on Wednesday, January 6th 2010, we’ll be hosting an informal meetup at the Elysian Brewery on Capitol Hill in Seattle, WA. Everyone from the Seattle technology, startup and SEO community is welcome to attend, and we’ll be hosting a special guest, Distilled’s Will Critchlow (who’s chosen the worst possible time, weather-wise, to visit our fair city)…

Historically, I’ve been fairly narrow in what I read in the blogosphere and tech arena (almost all SEO-centric stuff). You can see my Firefox sidebar list here, which  hasn’t changed much since 2008 with the exception of the blogs and news sections. But, over the past 6 months, I’ve been broadening out considerably and found that it adds a great deal to the conversations I’m able to participate in and contribute to, especially as SEOmoz itself has expanded from the SEO world to the larger technology and startup world…

Earlier this month, Google launched personalized results by default for all users. SEOs should have already read Danny Sullivan’s analysis of the shift (which is quite excellent) and I also suggest checking out David Harry’s Guide on the topic. Sadly, despite some good advice, it appears that a lot of folks are still worried that this is somehow the "end of SEO" or demands a "completely new look at SEO practices…

First off, apologies for my absence from the blog these past few days. It’s been an incredibly busy time, trying to wrap things up before I leave for San Diego over the holidays. So much for a December lull… In this post, I’m going to try tackling a lot of the recent trends we’ve been observing from the engines and talk about my personal perception of what’s to come over the next 12 months…

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 post. Here’s how it went:

RAND: Chris – I think the biggest thing you’ve forgotten to mention is that 70%+ of the weighting/ranking used by all of the engines depends on links…

Yesterday night I stayed up way too late authoring a post on Google’s Indexation Cap. Today, despite getting up way too early, I wanted to follow up and answer some of the questions from the comments, Twitter and my email. I think SEOs who read the post rightly asked for more direction in solving this problem – a fair request. Below, I’ve done my best to tackle these problems visually, as I believe we all think about site architecture and crawling issues in a visual structure…

Thanks so much for all your votes and feedback on our PRO Webinar Series over the holiday weekend. We received 285 responses and we’re taking your suggestions very seriously and conducting the webinar as you’ve requested

Here are the stats from the questionairre/form (you can still fill it out if you’d like to give more input):

Will you be able to attend the PRO Webinar on Dec…

Over the past 2 years, SEOmoz has worked with quite a number of websites whose primary goal (or primary problem) in SEO has been indexation – getting more of their pages included in Google’s index so they have the opportunity to rank well. These are, obviously, long tail focused sites that earn the vast majority of their visits from queries that bring in 5 or fewer searches each day. In this post, I’m going to tackle the question of how Google determines the quantity of pages to index on a site and how sites can go about improving these metric…

First off, I hope everyone among our US (and expat) readers had a great holiday weekend, filled with tryptophan and football (I know mine was). Second, I’m very excited to announce that SEOmoz PRO is launching our first ever webinar on Thursday Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London/UK). We’ve heard from a number of our members that they’d like to do some live reviewing of strategies and recommendations and get questions tackled in this format…

The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail - gives some stats:

…

I’m a big Google fan – my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I’ve even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this…

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 for greater SEO value from blogging and feeds in general (and most of these haven’t been covered in my previous posts on blog optimization)…