Posted by Aaron Wheeler This week we are thrilled to have a special guest joining us for Whiteboard Friday: Duane Forrester, a top-of-the-line SEO who went over to the other side of the fence and now works at Bing's Webmaster Project as their Senior Project Manager. Duane's the one you'll see throughout their blog , and if you have a feature request or any questions about Bing's Webmaster tools, he's your man. Duane joins Rand to discuss a multitude of search topics,

Posted by jennita Today we're taking a different angle than we normally do on the blog. As you know, recently New Zealand and Christchurch specifically was seriously affected by an earthquake on February 22nd. After Rand sent out an email last week for those chosen to participate in the 2011 Ranking Factors,

Posted by randfish By now, everyone in the SEO world is aware of the algorithmic update Google launched last Wednesday, February 23rd. Several posts on the topic are worth reading, including Danny Sullivan's take , Aaron Wall's assesment , SearchMetrics' analysis and Sistrix's data-driven post . Here at SEOmoz, we've been analyzing the shift with help from our friends at Distilled , staff research scientist Dr.

Posted by richardbaxterseo For todays blog post, Im going to write about my favourite topic of all, site architecture for SEO. This write up is based on my recent presentation at SES London 2011 , and rather than just posting the slide deck I thought it might be fun to write up a few of the slides with a commentary for each. To help me recall all of the points I made, Ill imagine myself stood at a podium with my speaker lanyard round my neck while Im writing.

Posted by Miranda.Rensch Hello you Mozzy bunch! My name is Miranda. I'm a Program Manager here at SEOmoz. I work on defining new features and improvements to the SEOmoz PRO Web App, SEO Tools, and our website. You may have seen me commenting and participating in pie-eating contests here and there, but I'm excited to say that this is my very first SEO Blog post! Since I started at SEOmoz five months ago, I've been working on a Questions and Answers forum for our PRO members.

Posted by MikeCP Choosing an eCommerce platform can be a terribly frustrating experience because of the options and packages available, the misinformation, the pushy sales reps, the time and money investment, and so on. I want to talk about this decision because of this experience, but I don't plan on making any platform recommendations. No, no. That's really up to you and the resources available to you.

Posted by randfish One of the people I admire and respect most in the technology, startup world is Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson . A little more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Fred in his New York offices, just as SEOmoz was ending a failed fund raising attempt . The writer I'd come to know and love through his blog and tweets shone through - he's affable, humble, smart and considerate.

Posted by Aaron Wheeler Linkbuilding: can't do it alone, can't not do it! While some people may prefer to avoid interaction with people they don't see every day, others flourish when communicating with strangers. The field of SEO is flush with both of these personality types, though to an outsider it could seem like SEO is an inherently non-social career. It's not! In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Tom Critchlow, head of search marketing at Distilled,

Posted by Dr. Pete It's an old story Boy meets Girl, Girl promises top rankings, rankings finally arrive, and Boy suddenly realizes he has no traffic. Wait, that's not quite it. Replace "Girl" with "SEO company" and "Boy" with "client" - yeah, there we go. In SEO, nothing is quite as frustrating as pouring time and money into your chosen keyword and finally breaking into the Top 10, only find that you still have no visitors.

Posted by willcritchlow You've got all the links you need, right? No matter how advanced an SEO you are, there are few people who can make that claim )in-house at Wikipedia, maybe?(. For the rest of us, there's more to learn. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working with our speakers to plan the sessions for the advanced link building conferences we are running in New Orleans and London. Keep reading for the full line up of speakers and sessions.

Posted by randfish Your online identity is going further, faster and with more impact than ever before, yet many of us miss out on the seemingly obvious SEO power of our personal and company biographies. It may be a headsmacker, but it's a good one - use your bio! Personal/professional bios appear most frequently in four types of online sources: Your Company/Personal Website - for example, I have a bio on SEOmoz and here on my personal blog Events,

Posted by randfish In 2010, SEOmoz's software business grew from 4,000 - 7,000 subscribers and $3.1mm - $5.7mm in revenue )more transparency on details coming soon(. Our customers have been loving our products )our web app now supports nearly 30K campaigns( and our data )over 250 companies use our API (, but we're nowhere near satisfied. )*note: consulting revenue, which ended in 2009,

Posted by Geoff Kenyon When Google made their page speed is now a ranking factor announcement, it wasnt a significant new ranking factor, but it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions. To better understand how fast the web is )as of February 2011(,

Posted by Aaron Wheeler A little over a couple weeks ago, Search Engine Land broke the story that Bing uses clickstream data from Google searches as a ranking factor in its results. The article was entitled, "Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results," and as you can imagine, there was a lot of response from the SEO community. After the flames cooled down and the information in the article was discussed further, SELand wrote up a counter piece ,

Posted by Lindsay If you're a Search Marketer working at an agency, in-house or are out-of-work entirely, you've probably considered going independent at least once. A bad day at the office can inspire daydreams of earning more money and working from home in your pajamas. There are clear advantages to becoming your own boss but the grass isn't always greener, as they say. Remember the 2010 SEO Industry Survey ? More than 10,

Posted by jennita Disclaimer : This post has absolutely nothing to do with SEO or even online marketing. You've been warned. Please keep reading to see the awesomeness that is your new profile. *happy dance* :( Before I jump into the new profiles and what's so great about them. Let's take a look back, a look at the profiles of yesteryear. Back in the day when the profile functionality was created, Twitter didn't even exist yet )I know... WHAT?! There was a life before Twitter?

Posted by jennita Let me tell you a tale of an unexpected case study on the value of a tweet on a page's ranking and traffic. This tale will mostly be told using graphics, as the images tell the story better than I can. Let's begin... Last Monday while I was checking the morning tweets, I noticed a ton of tweets about our Beginner's Guide to SEO . It didn't take long to realize that Smashing Magazine had tweeted about it and the retweets were seriously rolling in. )And yes,

Posted by randfish Every 3-4 years, there's a big shift or addition to the key metrics Google )and, to a lesser extent MSN/Bing and Yahoo!( uses to order competitive search results. 1996-1999: On-page keyword usage + meta data 1999 - 2002: PageRank + On-page 2002 - 2005: Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page 2005 - 2009: Domain authority + Diversity of linking domains + Topic modeling + Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page In 2010 and 2011,

Posted by Paddy_Moogan There are various industries online where traffic and revenue from affiliate programs is a huge part of the overall revenue stream. If you work in one of these industries )gambling for example( then you may have the opportunity of optimising the affiliate program to get more value from an SEO point of view. In this post I'm going to outline some of the techniques you can use along with the advantages and potential risks of both.

Posted by Aaron Wheeler There are a lot of hep cats out there in the offline world, but they can be a bit quiet about sharing what they like with other people. Fortunately, there are huge flocks of rad birds online! Tweeting birds, actually. The kind that like to tweet all day about how many worm-selling websites they have ranking in the SERPs and enjoy retweeting the silly videos their bird friends sing about. It turns out that after a while,