Posted by randfish Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it's hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web . However, I was a bit surprised that we didn't see anything like 2007's Pontiac advertisement : At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today,

Posted by RobOusbey Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I'd like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag's attributes.

Posted by mgalecki 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. A SHORT INTRODUCTION... We all know that the search engine robots more frequently visit popular pages, i.e. those that have the largest number of incoming links, both internal and external ones.

Posted by great scott! Will Critchlow of Distilled )now the preferred consulting partner of SEOmoz ( is back in Whiteboard studios to help Rand discuss how to Choose an SEO consultant-or any consultant for that matter. Whether you're a consultant yourself, you frequently work with consultants, or you're thinking of outsourcing some work for the very first time, you'll find this week's video worthwhile. Knowing beforehand how the engagement needs to be structured,

Posted by Sam Niccolls The New York Times, CNN, and Yahoo News each get more traffic than Google News, but in a given month Google News sends almost a billion clicks to publishers worldwide, which makes it an incredibly compelling syndication platform for sites with newsworthy content. But how do you get articles indexed and ranking in Google News? And how can you get your article snippets to appear in the SERPs for Google web search, embedded within the organic listings?

Posted by randfish I ran across this survey data eMarketer released last week and my heart sank: This first chart looks innocent enough. It's when you look at the next one )from the same report( that things get ugly: As a CEO, an SEO, a web marketer and a participant in social media, this drives me absolutely crazy. The very last item on the list is "conversions, ROI, etc." If your pulse isn't pounding, you might need to cut back on the pharmaceuticals.

Posted by MichaelC It's a well-known fact in the SEO world that Google shows enormous favoritism in its rankings to domain names that contain one or more of the keywords being searched for. If your domain name is a close match to the search keywords all glued together, it's as easy as fishing with dynamite to get on page 1 of the SERPs for that search phrase. While some )like me( might argue )like, against Rand( that it's a flaw in the algorithm,

Posted by randfish Today I have two very big announcements. First, SEOmoz is exiting the consulting business to focus exclusively on our software model. And, second, we have an expanded partnership with Distilled )new US site: Distilled LLC (, who'll be taking over many of our consulting clients and opening offices here in Seattle. I'm going to talk briefly about both of these below, then add detail on why we're so bullish about the SEO software market.

Posted by great scott! This week we're pleased to welcome Marshall Simmonds , CEO of Define Search Strategies and Chief Strategist for the New York Times, to Whiteboard Studios. Whether or not to use topic pages-and how to use them effectively-is a topic of some debate in the SEO world. Well, who better to ask about it than the guy in charge of SEO strategy for the NYT and About.com, two of the topic page-iest sites on the web? If you're using a topic page strategy,

Posted by Nick Gerner The launch of Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we've ever had before. In that same vein, today we're announcing our new and improved SEOmoz Free API . Any registered )it's free( SEOmoz member can visit our API Portal and get an API key that gives you access to: Data for any URL in our index including Domain and Page Authority mozRank total link count external,

Posted by Dr. Pete This post started as a reaction to accusations in the SEO industry that Top X lists, awards, etc. are only going to people's friends. As I was writing it over what ended up being 2 weeks, I realized just how broad this issue really is, from personal to professional to political. I hope you'll indulge me as I try to do justice to a topic that goes well beyond SEO. We all know how it feels to be on the outside looking in.

Posted by great scott! Last week we unveiled our newest toy, Open Site Explorer , to the world and the response was phenomenal. Now we want to take some time and really show everyone just what this powerful link analysis tool is capable of and answer your questions, so we're hosting not one, but two FREE Webinars this week! Wednesday, January 27th at 2:00PM )PST( , and Thursday, January 28th at 10:00AM )PST( . In each live webinar,

Posted by randfish How many pages has Google indexed? This question and the problems surrounding it run rampant through the SEO world. It usually arises when someone starts doing searches like this: Google claims to have 93,800 pages indexed on the root domain, seomoz.org. That sounds pretty good, but when I ran that search query last week, the number was closer to 75,000 and when I run it again from Google.co.uk 60 seconds later,

Posted by Danny Dover This post is part of an ongoing series where my co-workers and I are working to build a freely available resource center of up-to-date SEO best practices. As we write this content, we are submitting them for peer review so that everyone on the Internet can benefit from collective intelligence. You can read more about the SEO Knowledge Center here. This weeks proposed SEO best practice deals with duplicate content.

Posted by RobOusbey This week, I'd like to make suggestions for a ' reading list ' to help SEOs, and others who work online, particularly with website strategies. But this list isn't going to be blogs, post and online articles, oh no. These suggestions are entirely offline. We're going into dead tree mode with eleven books and two magazines. Some of these suggestions you may want to flick through, some you may want to read cover to cover.

Posted by great scott! This week we've got a special Whiteboard Friday double feature! As you've probably heard, we launched our new link checker and backlink analysis tool, Open Site Explorer , this week and it makes use of some exciting new metrics: Domain Authority and Page Authority. We asked our old chum, Will Critchlow , to talk to Rand about these metrics to help everyone understand what they are, what goes into them, how to use them, and why we created them.

Posted by randfish For the past 15 months, we've been working hard to improve Linkscape , our index of the WWW. Today, we're releasing an entirely new platform for Linkscape's index with more accessible data than ever before. And, for the next 48 hours, full functionality is available entirely for free: The new tool, Open Site Explorer , makes gathering, sorting and exporting link data easier than ever.

Posted by Gil Reich 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. Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation. How many people use Q&A sites? In a recent Business.com study , 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites.

Posted by randfish At some point during your University's SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson )which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists(, a handy refresher might be in order.

Posted by Tom_C So it's a new year )doesn't 2010 feel like the future?!( and it's a new you. As Pete blogged last week plenty of new year's resolutions are being set. For many this may involve getting a better or job or getting paid more money. This post is for you. Hopefully by the time you've read this post you'll have some ideas to turbocharge your career. First, I present you with a brief personal history.