Posted by jennita We just wrapped up the first day of our Pro Training Series 2009, and what a day it was! I think most people would agree with me when I say that the speaker line-up was absolutely amazing! Every single one of them brought their A-game and provided attendees with wickedly awesome information. I know, I know I'm a little biased eh? But I've seriously been in awe all day long watching some of the best presentations I've ever seen.

Posted by randfish I'm thrilled to announce that after months of hard work, SEOmoz's biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors is finally launching. Every two years, we survey 100 of the industry's top SEO minds. In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document is an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents and, at least in my opinion,

Posted by great scott! Straight from the Seattle Lunch 2.0 meetup at SEOmoz on August 14th comes this light-hearted look at raising venture capital. SEOmoz CEO, Rand Fishkin, shares his experiences with raising capital with an amusing )but strangely appropriate( comparison to the dating scene. SEOmoz emerged from our first round of VC funding with a profitable and growing business. Now seeking a B round, we get to see how things change with company size,

Posted by jennita Have you been thinking about submitting to YOUmoz lately, but you're not sure what the benefits are? Or perhaps you have a killer post in your head but are afraid to take the next step. Whatever the reason is that you've been holding back, I have 10 reasons why you should get yourself in gear and get that post written and submitted! Reach tens of thousands of SEOs Our subscribers for both the main blog and YOUmoz continue to climb.

Posted by Danny Dover It is a typical Tuesday afternoon in suburbia California. Jenny, a sixteen year old girl is taking a sick day from school. With a runny nose, she sits idly on her bed surfing Facebook. At the same time, 2,000 miles away in Seattle, a twenty-two year old ambitious college drop-out named Kevin is on Twitter complaining about his sore throat. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world,

Posted by RobOusbey Link building for small ecommerce sites can be amongst the toughest SEO challenges - but also the most common. I'd like to share a few bits of advice for anyone rising to the challenge - whether you're working in-house or as an agency. These are targetted at small companies, probably with limited internal resource or a small SEO agency contract,

Posted by jennita This past week at SES San Jose 2009 gave me the most mixed emotions of any conference I've attended yet. There were parts I loved and parts I was disappointed in. Add that with trying to complete regular work plus cover the conference for SEOmoz, believe me it was a bit crazy. Some of you may have also heard about the rough start I had to the conference... I booked the wrong flight home, had to find a hotel last minute,

Posted by randfish How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? If you're in SEO, you probably hear this question a lot. Sadly, there's no cut and dry answer, but there are sets of best practices we can draw from and sharpen to help get close. In this blog post, I'm going to share our top recommendations for achieving on-page, keyword-targeting "perfection," or, at least, close to it. Some of these are backed by data points,

Posted by great scott! This week we've got a special treat! Live from the halls of SES San Jose, our own Jen Lopez sits down with the one-and-only Matt Cutts to discuss NoFollow. As we all know, there was some controversy about Google's shifting views on nofollow earlier this year. So now that some time has passed and Big G has refined their position, what would Matt recommend to sites that have lots of nofollow tags already in place?

Posted by Sam Niccolls 'This week in Search' is a compilation of some of the most interesting, newsworthy, and useful stories in and around the world of search over the last 1-2 weeks. If you have articles on your own blog or think something is worth mentioning in next week's post, send me a direct message to me on Twitter )@samniccolls( or tweet it and include @seomoz #thisweek in your tweet.

Posted by jennita Every search conference is filled with sessions, keynotes, site reviews, clinics, and the like. If you're not at the conference you can follow the blogs and Twitter to get your daily dose of conference fare. These help keep you up-to-date on the sessions and general goings on. The unfortunate part of not being here is that you miss out on the social aspect of the conferences.

Posted by jennita The second day of SES San Jose is wrapping up, so it must be time for the Twitter roundup! There were a number of debates, someone was found sleeping in the first row drooling and another person claimed that most people at the session were probably already following him on Twitter. Fun times! :( Once again, I watched the stream throughout the day and pulled out tweets that had a call to action with useful information. Enjoy!

Posted by Dr. Pete We've heard a lot of speculation lately about the future of rankings the SERPs are clearly evolving, and what was once a simple list of 10 results has gradually become personalized, localized, and wikified. It begs the question: As the SERPs diversify, do rankings matter as much as they used to? Recently, I had an opportunity to collect some data on this question. Earlier this year,

Posted by jennita This week I'm at SES San Jose covering the conference for SEOmoz. I'm a one woman show so I'm putting my multi-tasking skills to the test! Obviously I can't make it to every session, or cover every track. Plus there are many others live blogging the event )Check out Bruce Clay's coverage and Search Engine Roundtable (. So, how can I make sure the SEOmoz community gains as much information as possible from this conference? Reuse other people's content,

Posted by randfish I've been doodling a lot lately )see, for example, the whiteboard illustrations I turned into a slide deck for a presentation this Wednesday( and thought it would be fun to share a set of infographics - some humorous, some serious - about the field of search engine optimization. If you're uninspired by these graphics, I invite you to submit your own; YOUmoz entries with visuals have a very high success rate.

Posted by willcritchlow We were talking last month about how much we use SEOmoz tools throughout our consulting process at Distilled. We use both labs tools and the polished finished products right from talking to prospects through to delivering complex consulting )as well as in answering Q&A!(. With the recent rapid growth of the power of the toolset, we realised that we needed to evaluate whether we are using all the tools we could be in all the right areas of our business.

Posted by great scott! Well, whadda ya know? Rand is talking about Twitter this week! Oft accused of under-utilizing his widely followed Twitter profile, Rand takes a moment this week to explain what you can do to increase the likelihood of getting yourself re-tweeted. As Twitter continues to grow and become an increasingly valid traffic driver, it's important to consider the best ways to improve the likelihood of your tweets going viral )twiral??( via extensive re-tweeting.

Posted by Danny Dover This is the first of hopefully many mini-guides I will be writing to give straightforward answers to commonly asked SEO questions. )Thanks Dr. Pete of User Effect for the idea!( Feel free to offer suggestions for future mini-guides in the comments. Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings. This is because the major search engines use metrics on both the domain level and the page level to determine rankings.

Posted by Sam Niccolls 'This week in Search' is a compilation of some of the most interesting, newsworthy, and useful stories in and around the world of search over the last 1-2 weeks. If you have articles on your own blog or think something is worth mentioning in next week's post, send me a direct message to me on Twitter )@samniccolls( or tweet it and include @seomoz #thisweek in your tweet.

Posted by jennita SEO as a line item in a project plan sounds preposterous right? Well Ive seen it happen, and needless to say it didnt work out so well. The act of optimizing a website to be search engine friendly is a combination of tasks that are fully integrated throughout the dev lifecycle. Not a single line in a project plan expecting to gather all items related to SEO into one task, to be done by one person. So what does the dev lifecycle look like,