Posted by RobOusbey There are a variety of tools and techniques recommended for SEO keyword research, from the free to the expensive, from the well-known to those that are almost kept a secret. However, there's one source of keyword ideas which is often overlooked: the customers )and potential customers( served on a daily basis. Let's get sidetracked for a moment: I've lost track of the number of people at agencies who have been asked the question "If you're so good at SEO,

Posted by great scott! Anyone who's been in internet marketing long knows the feeling: you go to check your rankings one day and something's different. Your pulse quickens, a cold sweat spreads across your brow, your eyes widen...they're gone. Your precious rankings are gone! Where did they go? What happened? Penalties. They can bring the strongest of us to tears. But sometimes we can be too quick to blame a penalty on sudden changes in our rankings.

Posted by randfish I'm very excited to announce that we have just put the finishing touches on our second, biennial SEO Industry Survey! We ran our first industry survey in 2008, and learned and shared a lot about the SEO community. This survey follows up on a lot of questions we asked last time, but includes a greater focus on other areas of organic search marketing as well.

Posted by randfish I've been an SEO for a long while - nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven't been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar - that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know it's flawed in a multitude of ways, but so many people in our field )and in the broader webmaster/marketing community( still talk about "PR 4 websites" and how "I have a PR6 but he's still outranking me.

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. Step 2 isnt groundbreaking stuff, but its approached in a slightly different manner in order to use and abuse further in our strategy document.

Posted by Dr. Pete We all know that links are good for SEO and good links are even better, but what does a good link profile really look like? Its easy for even an average website to have hundreds of back-links, and sorting through them to get a sense of the overall quality is often more art than science. Its also easy to get caught up in the outliers. Will 1 great link or 1 spammy link tip the balance? Probably not,

Posted by willcritchlow Rand recently asked you all for feedback about improving the blog. The two areas that you asked us to write about more were linkbuilding and tools . In a shameless populist move, I thought I'd write a post about tools for automating )bits of( linkbuilding . Recently, I keep coming across ways that we are actually living in the future. I don't mean the jet-pack-wearing-holidaying-in-space-hover-car future, more the holy cow,

Posted by jennita Who is the one person )or group of people( that you can't live without? Your developer. [Don't tell that to your spouse though.. eh?] As an SEO your life revolves around making changes to your site/application and getting all the pieces to fall into place. If you live in a perfect world, you have the ability to change all your on-page optimization including URL, Title tag, meta description, set up redirects, etc.

Posted by great scott! You see an amazing story somewhere in the vastness of the web and you think to yourself: "Man, that would be perfect for my readers! It'd get great traffic and my customers/advertisers would love it!" Now, how do you syndicate that content on your site )fairly and legally( without running into the traditional problems of duplicate content, link-back requirements, etc...all things that can really hamper the likelihood of SEO traffic for the content?

Posted by randfish I've long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There's a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO. SEO, however, is incredibly difficult to understand and to explain.

Posted by Nick Gerner The good news is, we have an index update for you! And it's a couple of days sooner than previously announced. The bad news is, things were, as you might have noticed, a little rocky this morning. We had more traffic to the API than ever before, and, through the magic of being a scrappy startup, we all jumped into action. Fortunately, through the magic of Amazon Web Services ,

Posted by chenry How does a person become successfully in the world of SEO? I wish I could tell you all the secrets but if I knew them, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti, sipping mai tais, instead of writing this post. About a year ago I ran across a video of Richard St. John giving a quick 3 minute presentation at TED about the 8 secrets of success and started to wonder if those same 8 secrets where true within the SEO industry. Take 3 minutes,

Posted by Tom_C I'm no business guru. I've never run or owned a business. But from what I've overheard from smart people who do run businesses, developing a Unique Selling Proposition )USP( is crucial to succeeding. It's the essence of being remarkable which is what Seth Godin talks about a lot . It's one of the first questions that I ask clients when they come on board - "What's your USP? Tell me why you're better than your competitors".

Posted by gillian We all know that theres gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. Avinash Kaushik affirmed recently at SMX Toronto , that the long tail provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail. The problem is that the long tail is hard to track and analyze. For example,

Posted by great scott! Is it better to practically force your users to make the desired conversion action, or is it better to give them a choice? How about a choice between two desired conversion actions? How about giving them choice, but making the more preferred one easier as well as anchoring it in social proof that makes it still more compelling? It's a powerful way to increase conversion rates and funnel users on your sites,

Posted by randfish I'm feeling a bit guilty. Over the past 10 weeks, I've been on the road almost constantly, and possibly neglecting the blog a bit more than usual. To atone, I'm hoping to gather some feedback from you - our readers and members - about what you'd like to see more/less of in the weeks and months to come. While we've certainly been inspired by our traffic and readership growth this year... In 2009, we averaged ~14K visits/day.

Posted by randfish One of the most common complaints I've heard from webmasters and SEOs in the past 18 months has been around Google's inaction on spam reports. While the web spam team has been aggressive about asking webmasters to contribute via their spam report form )though they prefer the version in Webmaster Tools as this helps verify the identity of the reporter(, they've )seemingly( been much more hands-off in penalizing sites that are engaging in these practices.

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. Until recently I headed up technical marketing for Yahoo Media, where our competition was in verticals like news , sports , movies , games , and finance to name a few. In terms of online competitiveness, this is nothing to sneeze at.

Posted by randfish Web services that connect job seekers with paid employment have become powerful tools in the arsenals of those that know how to leverage them. Unfortunately, the services themselves and the concepts of how to apply them have often been overshadowed by fear, uncertainty and lack of knowledge about how to apply. No more. In this post,

Posted by Kate Morris civil war n. A state of hostility or conflict between elements within an organization. Alright, so search marketing isn't really an "organization" but there is a certain hostility within its ranks. It's the war of the acronyms and funding. For years there have been articles, studies, and conference panels surrounding the debate of paid search versus organic search. That rivalry is rather ancient now considering the new kids on the block: CRO, SMO,