Posted by randfish 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,

Posted by randfish 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,

Posted by Danny Dover This is the second post in a series of SEO guides aimed at answering frequently asked SEO questions. )The first one explained How To Properly Move Domains .( If you have an idea for another guide, please let me know in the comments below. This structure of URLs is one element of a problem called internationalization.

Posted by RobOusbey A few friends have asked me recently about how they can get their personal or business websites ranking higher in Google. I've tended to explain SEO - and link building in particular - quite differently to how I'd talk about it to Internet Marketing pros such as yourself. In particular, there's one piece of advice that I've given so much recently, that I thought it's worth mentioning here.

Posted by randfish 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,

Posted by Sam Niccolls Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach. You've heard the saying, but for few industries does it ring more true than online marketing. Experts in SEO, PPC, Social Media and web analytics take on clients or use their knowledge to create software, but rarely are they found in the classroom. So even though we typically do not promote offers from other companies on the SEOmoz Blog,

Posted by great scott! You do all kinds of keyword research trying to find the highest-volume terms around your niche. You work and work to move one place at a time up the rankings for those competitive terms, and you still don't see the traffic increase you're hoping for. Why? You're ignoring the long tail! All of those strange and unique searches people do when looking for your specific products or content! While each of these terms may only have 1-10 searches per month,

Posted by Sam Niccolls The Nuremberg trials, World War II, Vietnam, John F. Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, and Project Mercury. What do all these events have in common? Each were reported by the late Walter Cronkite on his way to becoming "the most trusted man in America." And though your website may never become the "most trusted in America," successful link building can lead to historical events in your traffic logs.

Posted by randfish 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.

Posted by RefurbUPS 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. Before I begin, I would like to emphasize I had never before done SEO. I had no clue about the terminology used, and I was never part of the club most of you have been in for a while. I have a tendency to ramble,

Posted by audiore 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. Audiore is an in-house internet marketer for Bill4Time - a time billing company. Ok, fellow SEOmozzers, this is my very first YouMoz post and Im pretty nervous about it.

Posted by willcritchlow The time has come to register for the London PRO Training Series 2009: Tips, Tricks and Tactics . Building on the success of the recent Seattle event, we have gathered in London some of the best SEOs around and given them strict instructions to make their presentations as actionable and tips-focussed as possible. It's time to get your ticket for 19th-20th October. Unlike larger conferences, there is no expo hall,

Posted by Tom_C One thing that you'll hear over and over again in the SEO industry is "make sure that you embed SEO in your business". I know I've said it a lot at conferences and in client meetings but what does it actually mean? Well this post is chock full of tips to help you actually embed SEO in your business. Since I've not long come back from the Seattle SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar )which was totally awesome by the way!

Posted by great scott! Some call it old-school, but email marketing is still among the most effective channels out there. In this week's Whiteboard Friday Rand looks at some fundamental tactics of email marketing, including how to build and engage your list and how these strategies both compare and dovetail nicely with the SEO practices you already know so well. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Email Marketing and SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo . Do you like this post?

Posted by Sam Niccolls Henry Ford said that if he had asked his customers what they wanted before he built the Model T, they would have said they wanted a faster horse. The reality is few people are industry leaders. Most try to make faster horses. But had the need in 1907 been for web analytics and not transportation, Avinash Kaushik would have been a likely candidate to put America on wheels. So prompted by something Avinash said in a blog post earlier this week,

Posted by randfish 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 .

Posted by Dr. Pete Warning: This post contains tactics that may be considered black-hat. SEOmoz does not condone these practices. I have simply done something dumb to my own website to prevent you from doing something dumber to yours. If you believe the rumors, we all now live in something called the real-time web. The once steady trickle of user-generated content became a torrent, and search engines face the difficult task of drinking from a fire hose without drowning.

Posted by Whitespark 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. Whitespark is an Edmonton Search Engine Optimization and Web Design Company in Canada Having recently returned from the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar Series, I wanted to recap a few of the things I learned,

Posted by randfish 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 always recommend these, so it's worth at least a discussion.

Posted by great scott! It's a common dilemma: When the engines constantly cry 'content! content! content!' you can start to wonder, "just how am I supposed to keep generating all of this unique content?" A daunting challenge to be sure, especially for large sites with high-volume pipelines to fill. In this week's Whiteboard Friday Rand takes a look at the three major content classifications - editorial, machine-built,