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SEOmoz User Generated SEO Blog

SEOmoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.

Google Resellers Spamming Google SERPs?Today

Posted by The Lost Agency

This post starts out with a simple enough research exercise while watching a DVD.  I have realised that I need to focus more around link building as per one of the last blog posts I read on SEOmoz.org.  So I begin researching using Linkscape to begin to understand my how some of my competitors are outranking me in particular key phrases. 

I found a great number of links and continued building my directory database, which is slowly growing.  I’m using this database for my business and my client's business and have found the Linkscape tool amazingly helpful.  But there is an issue I discovered about the new LinkScape tool--it's too good!

The issue is that with a bit of fine tuning and experimentation the tool works much better than your competitors would have hoped.  By using Linkscape, you can now level the playing field. If your competitors are spamming the search engines, you can at least understand why they are ranked higher in the SERPs. 

So now your competitors who are using various black hat techniques can be discovered easily and quickly.  If you are being requested to be part of a paid directory, run a check to see if they are using <no follow> tags for all their members, or just free memberships. 

There was a website that had been mentioned several times to me about how great it does in th

Should SEO Agencies Exist and Are Their Days Numbered?December 1

Posted by Bloom Media

I was looking through the service offerings of the UK top 100 digital agencies (http://top100.nma.co.uk/section.php?section_id=1) and musing on the state of the industry. One observation that can be made is how the number of technical, creative and increasingly digital media agencies are offering SEO services, something that a few years ago certainly wasn’t the case.

It would appear that Specialist SEO agencies face an assault on their market space from all sides and, unfortunately for them, from major players in the digital arena. Personally, I have my own opinion on this which I have held from the day we started in 1999, but I wonder what the wider SEOmoz community felt and if you’d like to share your thoughts? I’ll follow up this post with my own conclusions and comments on the debate that (hopefully) will start here.

As I see it, SEO services are being provided from 3 main market positions...where do you think it sits best?

• Option 1: Specialist SEO agencies are best. The innovation and expertise required can only flourish in a dedicated agency.
• Option 2: Development agencies: SEO should be built in from day one and needs to be seen in the context of the customer journey.
• Option 3: SEO sits best with media agencies; organic search is so intertwined with media pla

Widget Marketing ModelNovember 30

Posted by Timoon

[Text translated from the French version of my blog - patricealbertus.net/_blog]

 

As you already know by using your iphone or by reading blogs, the widget revolution is flying up! But what exactly are all theses widgets offering to e-marketers? Let’s look at it as a gadget, one easy-to-use application, something which has to be practical for its user, in order to simplify as much as possible the essential meaning of a widget: your product, your service, your branding. This post will outline how to figure out the new widget marketing and “ecosystem" and about the innovation that opened its field from the Internet over to all new media from the numeric convergence.

Widget History

Some time ago, Apple proposed for its users the dashboard, enabling them one-touch accessibility to lots of different information and services. Every small gadget was on the same screen: weather forecast, contacts, latest charts release, stock exchange, news, etc. This format was so user-friendly and popular that Windows Vista soon integrated widgets, opening the market to a wide range of developers and widget providers. Everything can now be placed on our desktop, the latest area where marketing c

Hot Or Not: Manipulating Query SuggestionsNovember 26

Posted by Mitch Turck

Don't get too excited here... this is neither a how-to nor a success story. It's merely a hypothetical, and any research or insight you've got is more than welcome in the comments.

In commenting on a recent SEOmoz post, I recalled querying Google for a result that began "why did...", and noticing that the first "suggested result" from Big G was "why did I get married?" My first thought was, of course, "Ha! You poor suckers!", but my second thought was, "I wonder how many people started a query for something else like I did, but then clicked on said result because it's just so juicy."

It was at this point that any good SEO would naturally pose the following question: do users really have enough of an attention deficit that I could lure them away from their original queries with a preposterous train wreck of a keyphrase? And if so, could I really stretch that kind of traffic into legitimately engaged visitors?

I don't doubt that the answer to the first half of that question is a resounding yes; rather, I'd want to find out how much link building I'd have to do to get my phrase up there and start pulling some serious traffic in. Could I get away with simple on-page optimization and a handful of personal blogs taking my statement seriously and linking to me? I mean, if "Lindsay

Something's Up with Live Search. Period.November 24

Posted by Jac

I use Advanced Web Ranking. It does a great job of taking care of the necessary evil of rank monitoring. It runs automatically, has very easy set up, and emulates human search for us unfortunates without a SOAP API. I was checking some site rankings the other day and noticed that a few of our sites had completely dropped from MSN. Investigating manually, I saw this result for "st. augustine weddings":

Results are included for saint saint saint? They are? Well, congratulations, Live Search, you can correctly interpret that st. means saint. However, unless I click on "show just the results for st. augustine weddings," the results are completely irrelevant. A search for St. Augustine was normal, however. Searches for Ft. Meyers plus a term revealed the same anomaly. Searches for Mount St Helens versus Mount Saint Helens were the same, but putting Mount St. Helens gave very different results, many of which were completely irrelevant. That made me realize that the period was the issue.

I type punctuation out of habit, as I'm sure many many searchers do. Now, I know that Google doesn't, and I thought the other engines didn't register punc