SEO News Blog

Posted by Mel Gray

Howdy!

This is my first post and I aim to make it count, so I’ll spare you a lengthy introduction. My name is Mel and I’m from Texas. I came on board at SEOmoz just shy of two months ago, and it has been nothing short of a life changing experience.

I couldn’t be happier working with a team of folks who don’t just know what they’re doing, but have a damn good time doing it.  In my short tenure here I’ve been given the opportunity to work with a wide variety of very cool technologies alongside some very cool people. One of those technologies is called Ferret.
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Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

How People Interact with Search Engines

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO and search rankings is feeling empathy for your audience. Once you grasp how the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, uses search, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

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Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Part I: How Search Engines Operate

The major global search engines include Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft/Live, Baidu, Naver & Ask.com. This guide primarily covers Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft & Ask - the major engines in the United States and other English language countries. Sadly, we don’t have the expertise or experience to offer insight into Baidu (which operates almost exclusively in China) or Naver (Korea’s primary search engine).

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Posted by Eric Enge

Introduction from Rand: Guest poster Eric Enge (of Stone Temple Media) was gracious enough to contribute an immense effort on this impressive guide. In related news, he’s done a brilliant, not-to-miss interview with Matt Cutts that was released just tonight. Thanks a ton, Eric - we hope to feature many more of your contributions in the future.

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Frank Schilling and Shoemoney recently had two great posts about Google. When combined I think they paint a picture of Google that skips past the rhetoric and double talk. Frank said:

As a publisher, I’ve always viewed Google as a bit of a predator in this context.. taking publishers in, convincing them to serve Google ads, and then allowing those publishers to toil for Google, working sites into their algo to serve the beast, all for increasing revenues, finally to have Google’s algorithm scrub you from the index if you become too successful at punching ad converting pages to the top.. Good publishers take on the role of sacrificial lamb to show the algo guys where the holes are and they get to ride the express elevator to the street as a reward.

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Posted by randfish

Tomorrow morning starts my 8 hours of presenting for our first SEOmoz training seminar. As such, I ahve very limited time for blogging tonight, but I wanted to share this hard-to-believe piece of data:

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Posted by shor

I’ll admit I sometimes forget certain website addresses.

And sometimes I’ll Google eBay rather than type ‘ebay.com’ into the address bar (apparently I’m not alone, it’s the 3rd most popular search query in the US)

Besides confirming that I’m lazy and have the memory of a goldfish, my point is, wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to type in URLs, especially when we’re outside of the house and have to use our cellphones to connect to the Internet?
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Posted by randfish

I admit it - I struggle to understand patent applications (one of the big reasons that Si is part of our staff). However, Bill Slawski doesn’t and it’s made our collective lives in the SEO world (and the mozplex) considerably easier. Take, for example, his two incredibly fascinating posts collecting patent applications and speculating on how the engines might re-rank the results:

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Limited Competition in Secondary Markets

I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can’t appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.

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Posted by randfish

Rather than trying to make this post go through all the tactics and specifics of Rebecca’s already comprehensive Keyword Research Guide, I figured I’d instead provide a solid list of every which way you can look at a keyword to get an idea of metrics, value and potential from the engines themselves (rather than services like AdWords, YSM, Wortracker or KW Discovery). This is more of an “expert” level post, as you’ll need to use these searches/tools yourself to figure out exactly how they apply to your business, but it’s stil valuable to have all of this collected in one place.

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