Posted by randfish As SMX Sydney wound to a close on the north bank of Sydney harbor, I stood with new friends and old, eating shrimp off the barbie )no, really(, drinking beer and staring at the incredible view of the Sydney Opera House & the Harbor Bridge. Was this the best conference I've ever attended? Quite possibly, yes )and that's saying a lot(.

Posted by randfish Today at SMX Sydney )which I'll have a more detailed post about this weekend(, Danny Sullivan and I sat together on a site review panel in the late afternoon. One of the sites we were asked to review was DiscoverTasmania.com . During our investigations, we stumbled across some remarkable cloaking from one of Australia's top travel websites - Flightcentre.com. We started by reviewing this page about Hobart,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Zero star links: My second-ever zero star link goes to Steve Rubel for audaciously claiming that many marketers pollute the web. His post comes off as being pure link bait with no substance to his argument. Pretty lame , if you ask me Three star links: Hey, it's a real-life Cookie Monster ! COOKEEEEEEE, OM NOM NOM NOM.

Posted by rebecca For today's Social Wednesday, I thought I'd share an interesting case study. My boyfriend works for Payscale, a salary and compensation information website )hey, he's my boyfriend, so I gotta throw them a good link(. One day while I was at work, Jason )aka Manstery Guest ( IM'd me and told me about this neat thing that the Marketing department had put together.

Posted by Danny Dover For as long as I can remember, the best way for me to learn has been to do. I have gone through countless checklists while trying to understand search engine optimization. The following is a compilation of the most useful checklists I have completed in order to learn SEO. My intent is that this list can be used by people who are inexperienced in SEO but want to learn more. )As a bonus I included handy dandy check boxes.

Posted by rebecca Yesterday I spoke at the Shop.org Online Marketing Workshop . I had previously spoken at a Shop.org summit in Las Vegas last September, and Larry Joseloff invited me and my fellow panelists back for another session. Our topic was "Keeping the Customers in Focus: Customer-Centric Search and Affiliate Marketing." Allan Dick from Vintage Tub and Bath moderated, Alan Rimm-Kaufman talked about keeping paid search ads consistent with user expectations,

Posted by identity Or so Google Imagebot might have us believe. As a fellow contributor, participant, follower, and fan, I'm going to take Imagebot's opinion with a large grain of salt - or a block of salt . Let me explain. Recently I was doing a little image research and came across some images that grabbed my interest, especially given the growth in blended search, although image infiltration with blended results still seems rather minor.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, I was working on trademarking some SEOmoz marks the other day, when I noticed that someone is trying to register "SEO" as a service mark. I was shocked. Apparently, the guy who's doing this has managaged to get all the way to the publication stage of the registration process. That means he has passed the preliminary review by the Trademark Office's )"TMO"( reviewing attorney. Currently,

Posted by randfish In case you haven't seen the litany of content around the search marketing world regarding SEO standards, here's a short re-cap. The issue arose )this time around( when Danny Sullivan made Is it Time for Search Marketing Standards? a panel at SMX West in February. You can see the SERoundtable coverage here . In late March, Jill Whalen wrote what I personally felt was a very good post about why We Don't Need SEO Standards!

Posted by rebecca Yesterday I had my roundup all written and when I hit "Publish" the blog editor decided to just instead refresh and wipe half my post. Sorry for the delay-here you go. Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Two star links: Though this article mentions some SEO rockstars )Dave Naylor, Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Eric Ward, Dave Dellanave, Jeremy Schoemaker(, it provides an unbalanced look at SEO , choosing to focus more on black hat.

Posted by great scott! This week Rand discusses some non-sale conversions you might find on your site-things like RSS feed subscribers, email newsletter sign ups, views of the pricing/services page, etc.-but you might not be tracking. While these actions might not result in direct sales, they can often indicate what's working and not working in your marketing strategy.

Posted by Jane Copland At any given time, our Q&A section usually features a question or two about image optimisation. People want to know why their images haven't been indexed or aren't appearing for their key terms, even after they have added keywords to every imaginable attribute. Appropriate anchor text, nearby-keywords and relevant surrounding content don't seem to have made a difference. The images don't show up. In their place,

Posted by randfish I wanted to try an experiment tonight and leverage a bit of the terrific community vibe and willingness to share we've got here at SEOmoz. In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional, or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad, or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how valuable we consider the techniques to be. Then,

Posted by rebecca In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus )check out their website for more information on the book(. Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI. Chapter 3, Managing for ROI, provides a list of considerations and suggestions on how to manage your website for optimal ROI. 1. Know What You Want What do you want your website to accomplish? To you,

Posted by randfish Ever since SEOmoz took venture capital investment last fall, I've been reading a lot of blogs and sites geared towards the startup world. Even though we've been around for 5 years )and Gillian and I have been doing web marketing for 10(, I still think of us very much like a startup - we've grown from 3 people 3 years ago to 14 people today and we're worrying about things like burn rate, productization, marketing, and launch schedules,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Welcome to Legal Monday! )It's still Monday, right?( My goal is to present a checklist of legal issues and trends surrounding affiliate marketing. I hope this will be interesting to both merchants and marketers. Affiliate marketing has unfortunately gained a bad reputation for being particularly high risk. While the industry is unlikely to ever be risk-free,

Posted by randfish High quality directory link building may seem dreary and time-consuming, but it's still one of the best methods to build credibility with the search engines )remember the importance of trust distance ?(. Today, while adding resources to our list of valuable directories , I stumbled across three webpages with valuable insight into the process of link building. Both are from universities,

Posted by Danny Dover Yesterday, I was arguing with my friend about the existence of one sight or sound that is universally funny. He argued that since different cultures find humor in different things, there couldn't possibly be one example of something that is funny to everyone. Unconvinced, I started searching for the holy grail of funny. Immediately, I went on YouTube and starting browsing my favorite videos. Eventually, I came to the monkey video below.

Posted by Ann Smarty The number of subscribers is the main metric of a blog's popularity ) I am pretty sure everyone knows that but I needed an introductory sentence :( (. Recently, I've been exploring and experimenting with some creative looking blog RSS buttons and came to an interesting conclusion: no matter how unique and prominent it looks, people still tend to prefer that standard little Feedburner button that humbly asks to subscribe.

Posted by great scott! This week Rand discusses Trust as a ranking factor: how it originated, what it may look like, and how you can use it when planning your link building campaigns. The closer you can get to major authority sites, the more trust your links are likely to have, and as we all know, trusted links are the most powerful links. Whiteboard Friday-Using Trust Rank to Guide Your Link Building from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo . Do you like this post?