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)…

Last week at Pubcon Las Vegas, I presented on Linkfluence: How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Effort with fellow panelists Roger Montti (Martinibuster), Aaron Wall (SEOBook) and Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl). I was a bit of an odd choice for this discussion, as I’d only recently announced SEOmoz’s Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads, but Pubcon’s organizers decided it would be interesting to have a divergent point-of-view…

Tonight’s post comes via the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas and is likely of interest to many in the webmaster and search communities. Today, during the Interactive Site Review Session, Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, along with Vanessa Fox of NinebyBlue and Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft took thorough dives into a number of sites. The session was well coverd on Twitter, and in live form by Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable…

We all know about the Linkerati by now – how to identify them, how they’re segmented and why they’re the secret to SEO. Yet, time and again, I see link builders and companies pass up amazing opportunities to earn links and attention from those who have the best ability to help your content/brand spread virally.

I’ll lay out two scenarios below to help illustrate this point:

Scenario 1: Emailing a Prominent Blogger/Writer/Journalist/Site Owner/Social Media Personality/Etc…

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations…

Every day, SEOs are challenged in their jobs to solve problems big and small – some are technically complex, others are merely time consuming, repetitive and tedious. At SEOmoz, we love to build, use and recommend tools to help solve these issues. Tools and automation aren’t always the right answer, but for many of the challenges we face, they’re a welcome ally in the battle for effectiveness and efficiency…

Selling is hard work. It sucks time and energy from both seller and buyer. Both engage begrudgingly in the act to fulfill a need. If you’ve been reading SEOmoz for a while, you can probably feel my personal allergy to "sales" as a process and to "selling," even when that’s what I’m supposed to do. It causes discomfort to be on the pushing or receiving side of sales and over the last two decades, we, as a generation have been drifting further and further away from it…

(NOTE: This post is written by Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin as a follow up to Ben’s presentation at the Distilled/SEOmoz training seminar in London this week)

Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we’d share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you’ll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading…

The search engine optimization process can sometimes be mistaken for a singular, sprint-to-the-finish project, when in fact, it’s more like a marathon. Searchers rarely ever convert on the first click and thus, SEO campaigns that merely target a few popular keywords and call the task finished may be fooling themselves. I made this handy chart to help illustrate the issue:

In my example, the hotel could miss out on dramatic opportunities for optimizing the path of discovery, investigation, brand research and conversion rate optimization by simply targeting "dubrovnik hotels" and ignoring the rest of the process…

What motivates a link? Sometimes it’s referencing or because you’ve produced something interesting and valuable. Sometimes it’s because they’ve licensed or adopted content/widgets/badges from your site. But, in most cases where an editorial link is given, I find that the underlying motivation is because that link provides some benefit to the linking site. This brings us to the fourteenth tip in our headsmacking series and possibly the tactic that will provide you with the lowest hanging link building fruit yet…

I’m in the middle of a wild 6-week stint. First Oslo for a week, then home for 4 days, then SMX East and a week in New York City. Tonight, I’m back in Seattle, but only for a few days – our SEOmoz/Distilled London seminar is just a scant 168 hours away. And, of course, on my return, I couldn’t help but be compelled to do another set of SEO graphics (first series here) after seeing this great collection of Infographics & Data Visualization Blogs…

If you’ve been around the SEO world a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard the old adage:

Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings

Along with its peer:

SEO tactics that focus on engines, rather than users, are manipulative (black/gray hat) and will eventually be discounted or penalized

In my opinion, both of these statements are utterly false and tragically misleading…

It’s been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it’s time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) - the single-purpose homepage.

First, a brief example:

In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal – get your email address so they can show you how their product works…

There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today (actually, it’s late at night here in Oslo), I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run…

It’s day two of SEM Konferansen in Oslo, Norway, and rather than try to share content from the conference (which I’ll attempt to do in a more formal post next week), I thought we’d return to some SEOmoz roots and do a photo mashup combined with my terrible sense of humor. Remember kids, no sleep + traveling to foreign countries = weird posts from Rand.

Sunrise over Oslo; if you look closely, you can see all the trolls turning back to stone (that’s why blog comments in Norway are so high quality during the day)…

Tonight I’m tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that’s always a tough task. Thus, I’ll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I’m happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments.

Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practice of buying links. A good number of folks have pointed out that, years ago, I endorsed several text/paid link brokers – companies that aggregate link ad inventory and sell it to those seeking to boost their rankings…

Short post tonight as I’m just back from a short trip with Mystery Guest to celebrate our one year anniversary (which was awesome, BTW) and need to get caught up on lots of email.

Let’s start with a quick quiz – which of the following statements is true?

• A) My pages are in my XML sitemaps file, so they must be getting crawled
• B) My pages have been crawled, so they must be in the index
• C) My pages are in the index, so they must be able to show for queries
• D) None of the above

If you guessed A, B or C, congratulations, you’re part of a large contingent of folks doing SEO who are (rightfully!) a little confused about how the engines might be doing this…

The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google’s search results, and it’s worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.

The new results types include:

Growth of Rich Text Snippets

Perhaps the most obvious and well-covered, rich text snippets enable certain sites to provide Google with extra "structured" information about their pages and receive data callouts in several formats inside Google’s results…

It’s 9:30am and you’ve just started a pitch for a new SEO client. They’re the curious type – wanting to know how search engines rank pages, why the changes you’ll recommend will make an impact, where you learned to do SEO, and who you can list as good examples of your work. As you dive deeper into the requirements for the project, you arrive at the link building section. The client wants to know why link building matters so much…

Linkscape has always been a project with a lot of promise. Building a crawl of the WWW that can expose link data in interesting ways, calculating metrics in the ways search engines do and surfacing potential SEO opportunities are all a part of that, but it’s a lot of work and time to get all the potential functionalities into real-life tools. Last week, Linkscape took a giant leap forward in usefulness with Nick’s new Competitive Link Finder…

Over the years, I’ve heard a number of recommendations for SEO given out that I simply don’t understand or find logically flawed. I thought it might be interesting to share some of these and hear more perspectives. It could be that I just don’t comprehend the reasoning or haven’t thought things through, but I personally don’t recommend these, so it’s worth at least a discussion.

#1 – Succesful SEO Copywriting = Keywords & Content Structure

Here’s an example of two pages upon which different kinds of SEO has been performed:

I struggle with the fact that 90%+ of the SEO copywriting advice I see on the web or hear at conferences relates to the use of keywords and the content structure (I’m guilty of this myself sometimes, but have been trying to break that habit)…

I’m thrilled to announce that after months of hard work, SEOmoz’s biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors is finally launching. Every two years, we survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds. In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document is an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents and, at least in my opinion, should be read by anyone serious about practicing search engine optimization…

How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page?

If you’re in SEO, you probably hear this question a lot. Sadly, there’s no cut and dry answer, but there are sets of best practices we can draw from and sharpen to help get close. In this blog post, I’m going to share our top recommendations for achieving on-page, keyword-targeting "perfection," or, at least, close to it. Some of these are backed by data points, correlation studies and extensive testing while others are simply gut-feelings based on experience…

I’ve been doodling a lot lately (see, for example, the whiteboard illustrations I turned into a slide deck for a presentation this Wednesday) and thought it would be fun to share a set of infographics – some humorous, some serious – about the field of search engine optimization. If you’re uninspired by these graphics, I invite you to submit your own; YOUmoz entries with visuals have a very high success rate…