Posted by Sam Niccolls This week's roll up mixes a little bit of awesome with a little bit of awesomely bad. But regardless of whether or not you threw a Windows 7 launch party at your house, from Talk Like a Pirate Day to actionable SEO tips, the search industry had no shortage of entertaining headlines over the last couple weeks of September. 69 Free Tools to Improve Your Website: The Grok, Brian Eisenberg, who rolled out a self branded site,

Posted by jennita We're getting close to the end of the year, which means halloween, holiday parties and spending time with the family... That is unless you're a mozzer! The fall season has hit us full swing and we're out and about speaking and attending conferences, providing training and traveling from Sweden to Mexico to Vegas baby! Check out where we'll be over the next few months and hopefully we'll see you there! SMX East - NYC - October 5-7 New York City in the Fall.

Posted by randfish If you've been around the SEO world a while, you've undoubtedly heard the old adage: Do what's right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings Along with its peer: SEO tactics that focus on engines, rather than users, are manipulative )black/gray hat( and will eventually be discounted or penalized In my opinion, both of these statements are utterly false and tragically misleading. When I first considered the issue, I thought that perhaps,

Posted by randfish It's been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it's time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that's both retro )it's been around a long time( and emerging )the popularity, at least to me, feels like it's on the rise( - the single-purpose homepage. First, a brief example: In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal - get your email address so they can show you how their product works.

Posted by willcritchlow I am in the middle of a crazy couple of months of seminars, conferences and other assorted presentations. If you're interested in seeing any of them, my speaking schedule is online. Last week I spent Wednesday at ad:tech in London where I spoke about advanced analytics and online reputation management . In my analytics presentation,

Posted by randfish There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices. Today )actually, it's late at night here in Oslo(, I wanted to tackle this debate and succinctly present reasons why I believe this methodology will remain powerful and effective in the long run.

Posted by MikeTek 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. Though it's certainly not the most hyped, an SEOmoz tool I took an immediate fascination with is the Top Pages tool )found in SEOmoz Labs - PRO only(. What it does is very simple yet powerful: you give it a domain,

Posted by great scott! This week Rand and I had a chance to head over to Microsoft headquarters and sit down with Eric, Rajesh, and Alessandro from Bing, everyone's favorite new search upstart. The guys were gracious enough to let us into their lair and share their insights on the search landscape and what we can expect from Bing in the future. Tune in and watch the video to learn what the Bing team has to say about: How Bing's marketshare growth will impact search.

Posted by randfish It's day two of SEM Konferansen in Oslo, Norway, and rather than try to share content from the conference )which I'll attempt to do in a more formal post next week(, I thought we'd return to some SEOmoz roots and do a photo mashup combined with my terrible sense of humor. Remember kids, no sleep + traveling to foreign countries = weird posts from Rand. Sunrise over Oslo; if you look closely,

Posted by jennita We receive many questions every day in our Q & A section . Every question is answered by a different mozzer and is handled personally. Often times we will run across a specific question being asked various times. Although the question is usually never exactly the same, the answer is often fairly similar. One question that has been popping up lately is whether it is really worth it, from an SEO standpoint to participate in Social Media.

Posted by Dr. Pete Working with small businesses and participating in SEO communities like the one here on SEOmoz, I get to see a lot of SEO mistakes and misconceptions first-hand. These misconceptions are as diverse as the people who practice SEO, but the funny thing is that they almost always fall into one major theme: someone fails to see the forest for the trees.

Posted by Tom_C Howdy Folks, Unlike most of the posts that I've put out recently which are more strategy based this post is a from-the-trenches-tip which I've recently come across that I thought I'd share. I'm going to talk all about using the Google Analytics API but I'll show you how anyone can do it, you don't need to be a developer! All you need is a Google Analyics account and Excel.... Introducing..... Excellent Analytics! Excellent Analytics? Am I just bragging now? No,

Posted by great scott! Yeah, yeah, you're a 21st Century digital boy )or girl(. You've got 900 Facebook friends, 1,200 twitter followers, and power accounts at digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon, but does anyone actually know you? This week Rand talks about the importance of in-person networking to people in the online marketing world. No matter how prolific you are online there is immeasurable value to getting out there and meeting your peers in-person.

Posted by Sam Niccolls In a week that saw a State Representative heckle an American President and a rapper steal the stage from a 19 year old girl, it was difficult to differentiate the U.S. Congress from British Parliament or the red carpet from a wrestling ring. And though Joe Wilson and Kanye West may have each disoriented millions,

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,