Posted by randfish Last week, I gave a 45-minute presentation at eMetrics London on a variety of analytics for SEO topics. The presentation slide deck is embedded below: Metrics for SEO by Rand Fishkin )eMetrics London 2010( The presentation went into more depth in person, but topics included: Some basics: Measuring traffic against macro query growth Measuring against search market share Measuring against temporal trends Keyword selection based on traffic quantity,

Posted by great scott! Link building sucks. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. It can be slow, tedious, and exhausting. It's also one of the most crucial aspects of complete search engine optimization. So what do you do when faced with the intimidating challenge of building links? Once upon a time, you could've just submitted your site to a few hundred cheap directories )or a few thousand like so many of the $99 "SEO" shops offer(,

Posted by Lindsay The preparation of an SEO Site Audit is something that every SEO, whether in-house, agency-side, or independent consultant, has done. They range from a brief assessment of an hour or two followed by a quick email to mammoth document of more than 50 pages that can take a month or more to complete.

Posted by chenry Analytics is one of those things that hasnt always been at the top of my priority list until recently. Google Analytics has many features Ive never used before because I havent had the time to sit down and really investigate what they can do for me and my clients. A few months ago, in one of my late night GA adventures, I found a section on event tracking, a small love soon formed.

Posted by jennita Last week, a few of us from SEOmoz attended WebShares Seminar for Success for Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer training. All of us who attended have a decent grasp on GA but really wanted to get some advanced information and gain a better understanding of GAs potential. Plus, actually getting trained on something is always helpful, even if you feel you know it well! During the first day,

Posted by randfish 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.

Posted by randfish 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.g.

Posted by willcritchlow I recently wrote a post on hacking together a linkbuilding tool where I set myself a challenge of learning a bunch of new technologies in 2 hours in order to be able to build a basic linkbuilding tool. I learnt just enough YQL, xpath, Python and Google App Engine )NBED links( to do the job. Since then I've put this to use in at least one tool that's actually helping me and my team do our jobs better. Inspired by this )and encouraged by Kate Morris ,

Posted by great scott! May Day, Roodmas, Walpurgis Night, Beltane...regardless of the name, it's a time for dancing around the maypole, enjoying the bounties of Spring, recalling the battle for worker's rights, and lots of other fun things. But for many a search marketer, May 1st )ish( of this year will be remembered as the day the long tail died ) bye-bye Misses High ROI ...apologies to Don McLean (. Old-Timey Folks Gettin' Their Maypole On Okay, okay,

Posted by laura This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Congratulations on making it halfway through building this SEO Strategy document with me! Do you feel your value as an SEO rising? If youre jumping into the 8 Step SEO Strategy here in Step 4, or just need a recap,

Posted by Lindsay Last week Jen and I attended the Search & Social Summit here in my backyard of Tampa Bay. This isn't your typical conference recap post, though. I wanted to focus on the action items that still stand out for me a week later, the things will make a difference in what I do or how I do it. Perhaps you'll rethink the way you do a thing or two as well. Outsource, Seriously. Kevin Henrikson is a low key guy,

Posted by randfish 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.

Posted by willcritchlow Warning - this is a more personal post and one that isn't about hardcore SEO tactics. Despite this, I think that I have some useful lessons to share and I hope you find it useful. For thoughts on similar principles but more from an SEO project perspective rather than an individual efficiency angle, you could read project management for SEO . How I get things done as founder of an SEO agency After becoming a dad 6 weeks ago,

Posted by randfish 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.

Posted by great scott! It's true you can do a lot of work ona site to optimize your rankings, but eventually you'e going to need some links. While they make small changes all the time, the search algorithms are still based primarily on links. But here's what you may not consider when you're devising your link building strategy or working to acquire the links you need: links can accomplish very different things. Depending on your situation-your site, your link profile,

Posted by laura This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. If youve labored through building out categorized keyword lists in Step 2, youve done a lot of the grueling work for your SEO strategy. Give yourself a pat on the back )or more realistically, go get yourself a beer.

Posted by Dr. Pete Low-quality links are like one-night stands they're easy to find and may be fun for a while, but you can't expect to build anything lasting out of them. Real link-love takes a long-term view and a commitment that too many website owners seem unwilling to make. I want to tell you a story to try to convince you that building strong, natural links is worth the effort. This is a story from my own blog. I'm not trying to be egotistical,

Posted by randfish 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(. Big thanks to my co-authors, Eric Enge ,

Posted by Tom_C User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn't including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content. Remember folks that even if you don't have "classical" user generated content these tips are applicable if you put out a large amount of content,

Posted by great scott! Earlier this week Facebook announced its 'Open Graph' at F8. There was all sorts of hubbub )much of it the bye-product of well-orchestrated buzz( about Facebook finally making strides to kill Google's dominance of the web. So should you hangup your white hat, your black hat, your grey hat, and trade it all in for a blue hat? Much as we love Facebook, the answer, dear reader, is no: SEO is not dead.