Posted by great scott! Not but a few short days ago I had the distinct pleasure of being included on a list of 51 of the world's top Search Marketers. Alas, for this great honor I did not receive an award statue or a shiny plaque, not even an ornate certificate. What I received was an email. A horribly executed email that would result in one of the most amusing email threads I've ever read, from some of the smartest minds in our industry.

Posted by randfish There are lots of standardized definitions of SEO )see define query (, but few that exist to define or distill the qualities that make a person a professional SEO. The way I see it, there are three ways a professional can be categorized and assigned - technical, self-constructed and peer validated. Technical: An SEO is one who practices search engine optimization.

Posted by willcritchlow I recently read Nudge ) Amazon US & Amazon UK (, a book that got quite a bit of press coverage here in the UK after inspiring some political decisions on both sides of the floor. Its core premise is that human decisions are not taken on pure economic terms )though economic factors do play a large part as presented in books such as Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist ( )*(.

Posted by randfish You may have noticed recently that there's a trend of folks who leave search engines crafting their own startups. It made me wonder - how are these individuals doing with the SEO on their own sites? Have they engaged a secret formula that the rest of us don't know to achieve incredible results? Or are they languishing in poor accessibility and SEO tactics gone awry? Since many of these individuals are friends and colleagues of mine,

Posted by great scott! Thanks to a suggestion from @links4legends we're strapping on our jetpacks for a bit of SEO prognostication this week. Rand offers up his take on what the future will bring for search marketers. Will classic, content-based SEO still rule the SERPs? Will the social graph drastically alter how results are personalized? What about query volume and traffic data: will they become major signals in the algorithms?

Posted by Sam Niccolls The following is a compilation of some of the most newsworthy, as well as the most useful stories in and around the world of search over the last 1-2 weeks. LifeStyle Lift's Fake Reviews : Andrew Shotland wrote a great post about LIfeStyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company in need of a serious brand facelift themselves after being exposed for ordering employees to write fake reviews. Ethics aside,

Posted by jennita When was the last time you had a heated discussion with your developer? Or better yet, when was the last time they rolled their eyes at you when you asked them to make some sort of change to the website? My guess is that it probably hasn't been all that long. Or has it? A higher probability is actually that you work with some wicked smart developers who blow your mind away with their sheer awesomeness! Recently,

Posted by Dr. Pete We bloggers talk a lot about finding our voice, that mystical quality that is uniquely us and yet somehow resonates with a wider audience. What happens, though, when your blog gets written by a group of authors? How does a company or community blog find its voice and not just devolve into a schizophrenic mess? Id like to tell you that there's some secret recipe, but honestly,

Posted by Lucy Langdon The inspiration for this post came when I was chatting with a recently graduated friend of mine who'd been looking for work online. Much like myself when I graduated with that all-purpose English Lit degree, she was looking for copywriting jobs online. Before I started at Distilled I did a bit of freelance writing so I knew exactly where she was coming from. Out of curiosity,

Posted by randfish Some keyword research is surface-level, fire and forget type stuff. If you just need to see relative volume levels, then a basic keyword research tool is all you need. If, however, you want to really dive deep and get the full skinny on your keywords, I'd recommend having each of these data points. #1 - Relative Search Volume from 3 Sources There are three sources on the web that I've found to work best for comparative numbers research.

Posted by chenry 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. Personally I hate SPAM with a passion and Im sure many of you will agree that you hate it also. Some time ago, I had a client ask me if there was a way for us to eliminate the SPAM that was generated from his web form.

Posted by great scott! What's the right search strategy for your niche? That's the question we're looking at in this week's Whiteboard Friday. Determining which tactics are going to be most effective for your particular situation is critical for search marketers. PPC, SEO, Social, Viral? Sure they all have their advantages, but depending on the marketplace you're in, some strategies may be much more viable - in both cost and effectiveness - than others. Not surprisingly,

Posted by Sam Niccolls In 1970 porn was a 10 million dollar industry. Today, the porn industry pulls in close to a billion dollars. According to Alexa , four of the hundred most trafficked sites on the web are porn sites. Additionally, Google has a monthly volume of over 100 million porn related searches and that number is only increasing . Needless to say, the saying holds true on the web: sex sells. But the results in the x rated SERPs are not all what you might think.

Posted by randfish In the last 10 months, we've taken a number of dramatic steps to improve the link information available to webmasters & SEOs. Today, I'm pleased to announce even more progress in that direction, as well and cover the impressive store of data now accessible.

Posted by Lucy Langdon When I talk about 'niche blogs', I mean blogs that are regularly updated and focus mainly, but not exclusively, on a certain subject area like, for example, crocheting or tea. More often than not, a blog with a specialty will be of a much higher quality than your average 'rambling and musings of x' site. However, with a zillion new blogs published per hour, it's getting increasingly difficult to ferret these quality blogs out,

Posted by great scott! This week on Whiteboard Friday we're looking at visualization. Not the Tony Robbins, Zig Ziggler, positive thinking kind, but rather how to make your web content attractive to users. People on the web consume tons of information everyday, so their time is limited. A surefire way to turn people off is with a long page of text with nothing to break it up. Even if the content is stellar,

Posted by roadies 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. Dear @UnitedAirlines , As you are well aware, @DaveCarroll has released a well-produced music video about lousy customer service that he experienced. The video is thought-out, witty, satarical,

Posted by Danny Dover Personal branding is the art of showcasing your experiences, accomplishments and perspectives. Like many of you, I knew the importance of this but had always put building a personal branding website on the back burner because I didn't think it was very important and because I felt uncomfortable talking about my accomplishments in such an obvious and self-serving fashion. Recently, my view completely changed.

Posted by jennita Every now and then great conversations happen via Twitter - by conversations I mean when multiple people Tweet and "@" each other regarding the same topic. During the day when so many people are online, there is a lot of "noise" which can make it pretty difficult to keep up. However, if you've ever had the joy of being a part of one of the #nightcrew search marketing Twitter conversations, then you know some of the gems I'm talking about.

Posted by Tom_C While brainstorming potential blog post topics I decided that keyphrase research doesn't get enough love here and I merrily agreed to write a post on the topic. Little did I know that this would result in a morning of maths. Monday morning to be precise. Monday maths morning. I might make that a recurring theme. This post is going to be all about the adcenter Ad Intelligence plugin for Microsoft Excel . For those that don't know what it is,