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SEOmoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.
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- Seven Things That Reality Could Borrow From The InternetToday
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Posted by Jane Copland
The Internet, as fragile, infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly does some things that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in real life. I am not a programmer, so this is piecemealed together from things I do know... but in my ideal world, I'd be able to solve most of my problems with a couple of simple instructions and a hard refresh.
1. Redirecting phone numbers. When I moved to Seattle (two years ago last Saturday), I acquired a local number. In the days before Facebook became microchipped into everyone's forehead, I had little means of getting in touch with everyone I knew and letting them know that my number had changed.
I would like to take the hassle out of changing my phone number. I should be able to text my service provider with this:
Redirect 301 3456 1-206-555-2387
This would be far more convenient than trying to email everyone in my phone book.
Additionally, upon receiving a new number, it came to my attention that the number was only one digit different to that of a large parking garage in Seattle. No, I cannot help you get your car out of the Union Square garage at seven a.m. on Sunday morning.
2. To deal with the people who'd abandoned their cars in the garage whilst out drinking in Seattle, I'd like to text in:
if ($question=="parking garage - The Vast, Pacific HorizonYesterday
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Posted by randfish
Sunday night. Rays of sunshine are pouring in heat through the skies above Los Angeles, penetrating the plane's interior despite the drawn window shades. Mystery Guest is next to me, reading a book we picked up on the Santa Monica pier today, and a Macromedia Flash document is calling to me from the desktop tray, but I'm in the writing mood, so it'll have to wait a little longer.
SEOmoz has been a strange place to work over the last 9 months - not because we've moved offices or doubled our staff or shifted around the management, though those milestones have certainly had an impact. No, what's really odd is that we've been in a state of constant anticipation - working towards the biggest launch we've ever had and salivating in anticipation of the release. If you've ever smoked a brisket or braised lamb on the stove, you know the sensation. Every minute spent waiting feels like an hour. The olfactory assault teases you; the glances at the clock are too frequent, and your stomach voices its opinion that the time-space continuum is moving at a less-than-optimal rate. Stretch that over the course of a year and you've got a good idea how we all feel.
Rewind to the Fall of 2007. Seattle's having a rare sunbreak in late October and I'm at lunch with Michelle (our board member from Ignition). "What's my big idea?" she wants to know. The one I'm dreaming about - the one I'd build if resources we
- Headsmacking Tip #6 - Test with Paid Search Before You Target with SEOAugust 25
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Posted by randfish
This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optimization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV's it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."
The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produ
- Beware Pay-Per-Performance Agreements: SEM Sues Pop Phenomena 'The Secret' for Unpaid Share of Web RevenueAugust 25
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Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire
May It Please the Mozzers,In November 2007 I blogged about a wacky lawsuit involving the movie/book/TV phenomena called "The Secret" and an SEO, Dan Hollings. Several months have gone by and both parties have been busy.
Background SummaryThe Secret (and all the international conglomerations and people that have a finger in ownership of The Secret) sued Hollings for trademark infringement and violations of his alleged duty of loyalty. The Secret's Complaint accuses him of profiting off The Secret's trademarks by selling his own merchandise under the brand, cutting unauthorized side-deals with vendors of authentic merchandise, and generally using his SEO knowledge for personal gain.
Hollings denies all the allegations against him in his answer to the complaint.
It is worth noting that Hollings and The Secret had been engaged in a dispute about money before The Secret filed suit. Hollings had informally accused The Secret of withholding compensation that he was owed. It is possible, although unprovable, that The Secret proactively filed a suit against Hollings to pressure him to drop his informal complaint - Using Your Whole Business to Build LinksAugust 22
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Posted by willcritchlow
In my opinion, anyone working in marketing should be reading Seth Godin's blog. Seth is a new marketing expert and his brainstorms and thoughts regularly give me new ideas. I am in the middle of reading one of his books, Meatball Sundae. Its contents won't surprise anyone who reads Seth's blog; its premise is that mass market products are "meatballs" and the new marketing (in which he includes SEO) are "sundae toppings." Trying to add sundae toppings to meatballs results in a mess, and organisations need to be built from the ground up with new marketing built in.
We'll get on in a second to situations where this isn't exactly true, but the basic premise is certainly tempting:- Paypal wasn't done by an established payment provider - it was a start-up
- Ebay's marketing looks nothing like Sotheby's
- Amazon apparently gets ~30x the traffic that Walmart's website gets