Posted by Aaron Wheeler I don't know about you, but I have an incredibly short attention span. Well, actually, I do know about you - I read about 1/16th of those articles about human attention spans, until I got bored and watched Conan's rendition of Oprah's secret plan for world domination. Oh, Conan! Now there's a man who knows how to share his content. This week, Rand helps the rest of us figure out how to do the same: create content that's not only interesting,

Posted by Danny Dover Last week Rand Fishkin covered the new ways social media is impacting traditional SEO . While many SEOs had assumed this was happening already, this announcement marked the first time this new type of content endorsement )links within Facebook and Twitter( was actually confirmed as a ranking factor by search engines representatives. Although there has not yet been enough time to run a formal experiment on the impact of these type of content endorsements,

Posted by Petter El Fakiri 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. Around one year ago Google announced that sitelinks could be added to Google AdWords ads. What's the effect of this feature on users' click patterns?

Posted by randfish In early June of this year, SEOmoz released some ranking correlation data about Google's web results and how they mapped against specific metrics. This exciting work gave us valuable insight into Google's rankings system and both confirmed many assumptions as well as opened up new lines of questions. When Google announced their new Places Results at the end of October , we couldn't help but want to learn more. In November,

Posted by randfish Many years ago, one of the search marketing industry's early great minds, Mike Grehan, wrote a seminal piece that's been referenced and influenced ever since - Filthy Linking Rich . Mike's point was well encapsulated in a few sentences: The Mathew effect, when applied to networks, basically equates to well connected nodes being more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor In fact,

Posted by Justin Briggs If you want to boost rankings, few things are as effective as link building. It's also the one of the hardest and most time consuming parts of SEO. I'd love to hear from others, so in the comments below share your best or most unique tips for link builders. Following are nine of my tips to help you as a link builder. You may already be using some of these, but hopefully you'll find a helpful nugget of information in here.

Posted by Aaron Wheeler And now it's PPC coming into the ring... he is looking ready to rumble! Pumping his fists, he's showing off to the audience - looking to the left, to the right, and - wait, what's that!? The crowd is going wild! PPC just straight out dissed SEO, who's in the other corner, looking ready to strike! I tell ya, folks, I haven't seen a rivalry this bitter since the great Northeastern College of Computer and Information Science Star Wars vs.

Posted by randfish As of yesterday, both Bing and Google have confirmed )via an excellent interview by Danny Sullivan ( that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings )in addition to the positive second-order effects they may have on the link graph(. This has long been suspected by SEOs )in fact, many of us posited it was happening as of November of last year following Google + Bing's announcements of partnerships with Twitter(,

Posted by pmahler 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. Every few years I make a browser switch and my web use evolves sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. My particular evolution went something like this: Netscape, IE,

Posted by randfish The holidays are right around the corner )Hanukah actually starts tonight( and I'm excited to announce our second annual San Diego meetup is ready to rock. Tuesday, December 21st, I'll be in downtown San Diego jointly hosting a brief but substantive presentation on SEO with Jamie Smith of EngineReady, followed by some free beers and great networking. If you haven't been to an SEOmoz meetup before, they're tons of fun, completely free,

Posted by randfish First off, let me just say that there are a lot of people smarter and more experienced in scalably attacking web spam than I am working in the Search Quality division at Google and specifically on the Spam team. However, as a search enthusiast, a Google fan and an SEO, it seems to me that, all due respect, they're getting played - hard. Word is,

Posted by JoannaLord I've been traveling for the past few weeks and talking to dozens of SEO consultants, and you know what they are all saying? They are at their max for clients. Yup, that's right...they can't take on new clients. They have TOO much work! This is good for all sorts of reasons. One, it shows we are in a good place during an economically difficult time, and two, there are people out there desperately seeking out your services, with nowhere to turn.

Posted by Kate Morris Meta tags are the beginning of most SEO training, for better and worse. I contemplated on how to introduce this topic because we always hear the bad part of meta tags, namely the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they are at the top of every page in the header, therefore the first thing seen. But we don't want to get too negative,

Posted by number1george 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. As you probably noticed, last week Google did a pretty big makeover of its local search results page, incorporating the local results directly within the organic results.

Posted by Aaron Wheeler Happy Thanksgiving! In case you haven't heard, this week Seattle underwent the most brutal snow storm in the history of mankind. To call it a snowpocalypse would be an understatement, as can be witnessed herein )it gets good so keep watching!(. Unfortunately, Danny Dover was the one up to bat this week for Whiteboard Friday, but he perished in the harsh winter )he was the one that got off the bus after it careened into his stop.

Posted by Dr. Pete One of the things we struggle with as SEO content providers, whether it's as bloggers or event organizers, is what level to target content at. It seems that, almost no matter what the content, some part of the audience complains that it isn't advanced enough. This is clearly an industry-wide struggle we even have conferences now with "Advanced" right in the name. The problem is that "advanced" means a lot of things to a lot of people.

Posted by randfish Yesterday I wrote a post: Ten Question Litmus Test for Professional SEOs . Today, as promised, I'm providing my answers to these questions. Note that these aren't the only way)s( to answer correctly, as some of the questions are more open-ended. In the answers, you'll also see citations to sources for the answers.

Posted by randfish If you use Google Analytics, you've undoubtedly seen a report like this: The problem is, there's no breakdown of "social media" in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and "see" this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it's mixed in with "referring sites" and "direct traffic" but luckily,

Posted by randfish A few years back, I wrote a popular post on SEOmoz featuring a set of questions I felt were a litmus test for SEOs seeking to charge for their consulting services. It's time to revisit that, as many of the answers have changed and the baseline has moved )forward(. If you're in the SEO business professionally - either as an in-house marketer helping your team with SEO or as an SEO consultant )solo or agency(, this knowledge should be second-nature.

Posted by Sam Crocker Today we're going to break down a number of different tools and resources for getting insights into competitors traffic data. We have looked at a handful of tools here and will break them down one by one as to their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the validity and usefulness of the data provided.