SEM News and Free SEO Search Tool Website » randfish

7 Cutting Edge Web Design Trends (that Can Actually Improve SEO)

randfish — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:26:22 +0000

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…

It’s Gonna Be Good: August PRO Training Seminar Finalized

randfish — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:24:41 +0000

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…

How to Make SEO an Unfair Competitive Advantage for Your Business

randfish — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:56:51 +0000

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…

July 2010 Linkscape Update – A Pie Graph of the Web, New API Calls + More

randfish — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:58:22 +0000

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…

6 Ways to Learn SEO

randfish — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:28:19 +0000

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…

The History of SEOmoz (1981-2010) + Open Q&A

randfish — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:16:55 +0000

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…

Don’t Fall Into the Trap of A/B Testing Minutiae

randfish — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:45:08 +0000

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…

6 Ways PRO Can Add Value in 15 Minutes

randfish — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:32:36 +0000

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…

What if My Competitors Point Spammy Links to My Site?

randfish — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:43 +0000

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…

Linkscape Index Update: New Partnerships & API Data

randfish — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:29:42 +0000

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)…

The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web

randfish — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:17:10 +0000

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…

Bing vs. Google: Prominence of Ranking Elements

randfish — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:08:55 +0000

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…

Google vs. Bing: Correlation Analysis of Ranking Elements

randfish — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:57:11 +0000

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)…

An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence & Persuasion

randfish — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:08:00 +0000

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…

Wrong Page Ranking in the Results? 6 Common Causes & 5 Solutions

randfish — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:14:22 +0000

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…

May 2010 Linkscape Update (and Whiteboard Explanations of How We Do It)

randfish — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:35:32 +0000

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)…

All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines’ Valuation of Links

randfish — Thu, 27 May 2010 01:52:22 +0000

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…

How to Measure & Improve SEO: eMetrics London 2010 Presentation

randfish — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:22:23 +0000

…

Debating the Value (and Meaning) of "Great Content" for SEO

randfish — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:22:10 +0000

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…

SMX London: Ranking Factors in 2010

randfish — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:30:23 +0000

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…