The Moz Blog

Strategic Link Building: Why You Don't Need To Outrun Lions

One of my favourite SEO anecdotes goes like this: two men are walking through an African game reserve when they come across a lion, one of the men calmly puts down his backpack and slips on the running shoes he has been carrying.

Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization

The ‘over optimization’ of anchor text has been coming up a lot recently in conversations that I have been having and has been the subject of a few recent blog posts. When I have talked to people about this recently, I have suggested that a 7:3 ratio of non-targeted: targeted anchor text would be a good target to emulate a ‘normal’ link profile. I got curious about this though and decided to do some research.

Want Guest Post Links? Find Them Via Twitter [TOOL]

For a long time I’ve been pulling an RSS feed from Twitter for the query: "guest post" OR "guest author" [TOPIC] into my Google Reader. Every morning I would check it, blaze through 15-20 URLs -- most of which were the same URL being tweeted. Then, I'd record the best guest post opportunities, reach out to bloggers, publish a guest post and get links. It was a great strategy and resulted in a lot of guest post links.

Are You Wasting Budget With Online Press Release Distribution?

Over the years, I have been privileged enough to work with some large businesses that can afford to throw big budgets at online marketing. One of the first tasks I undertake is a meeting to discuss previous strategies. As my main focus is natural search, one of the things I always find interesting is discussing link building strategies carried out by previous agencies and internal SEOs.

Face-off - 4 Ways to De-personalize Google

Google recently launched a radical form of social search personalization and yet another way to shut off that personalization. This is a head-to-head comparison of 4 major methods to de-personalize search results, including Google's new toggle switch.

Comparing the Top 4 Retargeting Companies

For the past year retargeting has been getting some serious attention. I've been fortunate enough to speak on it at a variety of shows, brainstorm over coffee with some cool companies and even blog about it a few times. No matter who I am talking with or what the venue the number one question asked is "Who should I use for retargeting?"

Video Sitemap Guide for Vimeo and YouTube

Did you know that major search engines want you to make video sitemaps for all of your embeds, even if you're hosting on Vimeo or Youtube? Not only does it help them spider your website by giving the search engines clues as to where to look for video embeds, it may also earn your site a click through boost by giving you a picture in the SERP. Below I'll show you how I managed to index my Vimeo video embeds to include a thumbnail. Don't worry, the same steps should work for Youtube as well.

SEO Monitoring Tools and Tips

Servers go wrong, downtime happens, bad code gets pushed to production. All of these things can impact your SEO performance badly. In most cases, the sooner you know, the smaller the damage. This week, I run through a bunch of suggestions and ideas for monitoring the various things that could go wrong.

A Peek Under the Hood: How we Manage the SEOmoz Community

Have you ever been a part of a community and wondered, “How does it all happen?” Well today is your lucky day! In the spirit of TAGFEE, I've decided to lift the Moz hood and show you what it takes to manage a large community. In fact, this is just the first post in a series of posts on Community...

58 billion URLs in the Latest, Largest Linkscape Index Update Yet

I've got good news. Today marks a new Linkscape index (only 14 days after our previous index rollout) which means new data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, the Web App and the Moz API. It's also For the past couple years, SEOmoz has focused on surfacing quality links and high quality, well-c...

How To Handle Downtime During Site Maintenance

In this post I will explain how to handle cases of planned downtime. That is, a short period of time wherein you purposely make your website inaccessible. This can be due to significant changes to the site or because of server maintenance.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2014)

It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown this blog to hundreds of thousands of visitors each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we ...