Posted by randfish It should come as no surprise that having a widget or sidebar element on a news, blog or articles website is great for traffic and page views. Online outlets have been using them to boost readership, email-a-friend features and page views per session counts for years. But, did you know that they're also great for SEO? Let's take a look at some examples, and investigate the myriad of benefits "most popular" sections provide: Slate.

Posted by randfish It's almost here. This is the project I've been dreaming of launching since 2003 and after 12 months of research and development and an extremely large investment )especially for a small company like SEOmoz(, we're nearly at the finish line. On October 6th, SEOmoz will introduce a lot of substantial changes to our website, including: A New Design , courtesy of our extremely talented new designer, Matt Heilman. A New PRO UI ,

Posted by randfish Google's got a blog post out today )and SELand covers it ( about how they now recommend that webmasters and site owners DO NOT rewrite their ugly dynamic URLs to be clean and static. What's the reasoning behind this? We've come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites.

Posted by randfish After a long trip out of town, I'm back in Seattle and reading the tech news roundups tonight, so I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts and start some hopefully productive discussions as well. Knol is losing out to Wikipedia according to Farhad Manjoo of Slate . First, a big sigh of relief. Second, bewilderment at why Google didn't do it right )BTW - if they had wanted to do it right, might I suggest following in Yelp's footsteps with intelligent,

Posted by randfish A year ago I wrote about Jim Collins' book - Good to Great - on the blog and invited companies and organizations to ask themselves how they stacked up to the qualities that make a company "great." Today, after a long and at times, challenging, process, SEOmoz is moving one step further in striving for that goal by formally announcing our guiding principles.

Posted by randfish The news this week is pretty dire. On the heels of the US Government's bailout of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG Financial, stock markets in the US, Russia, Japan and elsewhere are suffering tremendous losses. The NYTimes paints a linkbait-worthy, interactive picture of the financial industry's collapse. If you're anything like me, this news brings on some anxiety and fear - neither of which are good for startup businesses or those seeking to grow. Thus,

Posted by randfish In the world of SEO, every link matters, and every link that can be earned, should be - it's the principle of "optimization." Yet, to this day, even many companies and sites that are focused on growing their search traffic don't think about optimizing the links they've earned. Case-in-point: The web forum software company, VBulletin . Have a look at these search results - allintitle:powered by vbulletin -site:vbulletin.com .

Posted by randfish The "build great content" advice is clearly overused , but for good reason - great content attracts great links and the invaluable attention of the Linkerati . The only problem is... what makes great content? And more specifically, where can you get these content ideas? Well, I can't solve all these issues, but I figured a short post highlighting a few of my favorite )and more unique( content techniques would be valuable.

Posted by randfish In November of last year, I updated my Firefox Sidebar to contain all the sites and tools on the web I regularly need. Today, I've done that again and, in the process, re-compiled and re-ordered my list of search-related blogs according to my personal preferences. Since I'm heading out of town for 2 weeks starting Tuesday )getting married, then a short vacation(, this should give anyone who's in need of more to read a solid solution.

Posted by randfish Tonight, I received an email with a familiar question, asking why the top companies providing SEO consulting and development services rarely ever provide guarantees )and virtually never use it as a marketing tactic(. Since the subject has been popping up of late , and since we're just emerging from the summer lull, I thought it was as worthy a time as any to address persistent concerns.

Posted by randfish Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don't make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin'-scratchers just keep on itchin'.

Posted by randfish Scott's out of town this week, hiking in Alaska, so I'm posting in his place. This week on Whiteboard Friday, I wanted to address the thorny and troublesome issue of pagination. I've talked about pagination problems in the past on SEOmoz, but it's one of those subjects that deserves some additional attention. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Solving Pagination Problems from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo .

Posted by randfish In just a few weeks, the SEOmoz blog will be celebrating its 4th birthday )the tools and some of the content has been around since 2003, but we think of October 2004 as the formal inception date(. In that time, we've come a long way and attracted many of the best and brightest from the search community to participate and communicate through the Blog & YOUmoz. Up until now, though, we've never had any formal rules governing that participation. To be honest,

Posted by randfish Sunday night. Rays of sunshine are pouring in heat through the skies above Los Angeles, penetrating the plane's interior despite the drawn windowshades. Mystery Guest is next to me, reading a book we picked up on the Santa Monica pier today, and a Macromedia Flash document is calling to me from the desktop tray, but I'm in the writing mood, so it'll have to wait a little longer.

Posted by randfish This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, )perceived( high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization,

Posted by randfish As I said, blogging is light this week, but I couldn't help but notice this thread at Metafilter . How can we fight against such entrenched, misinformation and stereotypes? SEO people remind me of "weight weenies" in the bicycle world. Instead of focusing on training and riding and getting faster through practice, weight weenies obsess over how many grams lighter their new water bottle cage is,

Posted by randfish No intro, just right to the content: #10 - Jane's been on vacation for two weeks and we've gotten a bit behind with Q+A . #9 - It's the two slowest weeks of the working year )apart from Xmas(, and the dev team is buckling down ) as per Seth's advice ( to shoot for our October Launch. #8 - You shouldn't be reading SEOmoz, you should be watching the Olympics! Between Phelps, Bolt, Luskin & Johnson,

Posted by randfish This tip is probably one of the simplest ways to gain links through conservation. A lot of SEO advice talks about double-checking links that point to 404 pages, as these are lost potential. If a link points to a page that doesn't resolve, it's generally accepted wisdom that the engines won't give any benefit to the domain or any particular page. Certainly,

Posted by randfish Yahoo!, through both Site Explorer and their advanced link search operators, provides the most robust link data currently available on the web. Despite this offering, and in spite of some excellent blog posts and resources on this subject ) 1 , 2 , 3 (, it seems that not everyone doing SEO professionally is familiar with how to use Yahoo!'s data to the fullest extent. Even worse, we might not all be aware of how critical it is to measure,

Posted by randfish Some people just "get" the web. I don't know how to explain this phenomenon effectively or convey a reasonable set of criteria upon which a person could be judged, but there's no doubt about it. I think back to the first time I heard Greg Boser or Jessie Stricchiola speak at a conference, the first few blog posts I read at MindValleyLabs , the SEOmoz comments I read from Shor ,