9 Lessons from 1,000 SEO Questions
I recently survived a milestone - I've answered more than 1,000 SEO questions since our Q&A relaunch. These are 9 lessons that I've learned from those questions.
Advanced SEO
What do you do after you've mastered Moz's SEO starter guide? The answer may be Advanced SEO.
Advanced SEO is simply any set of SEO techniques that require some degree of expert knowledge. It varies from person to person, but let's just say you probably won't master these in your first few months.
Advanced SEO typically involves technical concepts that are somewhat advanced, and/or a deeper understanding of the workings of Google's algorithm and are often employed by Professional SEOs. Anyone can master advanced concepts with the right strategic guidance and real life application.
Here, we've listed some of our favorite resources on advanced SEO, and you'll find the most recent blog posts below.
Professional’s Guide to SEO : Professional SEO strategy all in one place, with chapters written by SEO experts, including Pete Meyers and Tom Capper.
Advanced SEO Strategy : Your SEO is only as good as the strategy you've set. Learn how to craft a next-level SEO strategy that will work for your business and goals.
Working in SEO : What does it mean to work in SEO? Learn more about the skills you need to advance your SEO career with this final chapter of the Professional’s Guide to SEO.
20 SEOs Share Their Key Takeaways From the Google API Leaks : Discover expert insights from the recent Google API documentation leak with actionable strategies to help you become a better SEO strategist.
Most Recent Articles on Advanced SEO
17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid
If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it's that poorly-executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well-intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey...
What's Better - On-page SEO or Link-building?
People are always asking me whether they should spend their money on on-page SEO or links. The short answer: "It depends." The long answer: read the post and find out ;)
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How SERP Ranking Affects Conversion Rate: A Study
Usually, the SEO community is extremely helpful and always willing to lend a hand to new SEOs learning the ropes. But after scouring the web for information correlating rank and conversion rates, I hardly found anything. It might not seem important at first, because hey, if you rank at the top, you’re bound to see more conversions, right? Well, sure, but at what cost?
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Grassroots SEO - Strategy, Process & Life Cycle
If you're a patron at search events, conferences and workshops, you might walk away the way I typically do: full of "stuff" to try but no clue where to start. Weeks go by, your notes become a beautiful art piece with dozens of brown coffee cup circles and doodles, eventually getting crumpled into a ball and tossed across the room just next to the trashcan you were aiming for....
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Tools, Twitter and a Ton of Opportunity
Often times, you need to discover the right combination of tools in your toolbox to have the internet work for you. In regards to twitter, you can pull more data than you've ever wanted - and easier than ever. I wanted to share some information that I've managed to make use of for a variety of projects, that turned out to be rather helpful.
Introducing Branded Keyword Rules and Metrics!
Looking at your site’s aggregate organic search traffic is a bit like docking a boat without a depth sounder: Sure, you can gauge where you need to go, but you’d be wise to have more details before you head in. On that same tack, we should have more detail about our overall search traffic before we use it to make decisions. First and foremost, this bucket of attention can...
Blocking Bots Based on User-Agent
Normally as SEOs our focus is on giving Google and other search engines as much access to the sites we are working on as possible. There are times however in which privacy is a good thing. We have found blocking bots based on the user-agent very useful for development servers where you might be hosting multiple sites which you do not want crawled or indexed.
What Every SEO Should Know About IIS
IIS Server through the eyes of an SEO Disclaimer: This post is long and technical, but has been lovingly paraphrased for the benefit of non-technical SEOs to get involved and step out of their comfort zone. Recently, I’ve had to deal with sites running on IIS and rather than just prescribing universal SEO fixes, I decided to get my hands really, really dirty. This is what I’ve learned...
16 Insights into Google's Rating Guidelines
Last week, a leaked copy of Google's quality rater guidelines appeared. I pulled 16 insights from the document that help you understand how Google thinks about quality.
7 Lessons Learned Running an SEO Agency
My first real company was an SEO agency. I was only 17 years old when I started it and I had no clue what I was doing. The only thing I knew was there was a business to be made from SEO because companies spent millions of dollars on pay-per-click advertising. I was fortunate enough to get my agency $10,000 to $20,000 a month in revenue within a year, but scaling the company to millions of dollars a year was a much harder challenge.
8 Ways PPC and SEO Are Better When Used Together
Many people approach SEO and PPC as completely separate strategies. And while they are different in many ways, it can be helpful to think of SEO and PPC as being two sides of the same coin: search. There are many ways in which SEO and PPC efforts complement each other, and lead to a more successful search strategy. Consider these eight ways that make a coordinated SEO and PPC ...
Whoa... Can Query Volume Directly Influence Rankings?
I was lucky enough to recently speak at the MozCon conference in Seattle, and during my talk one of the points that I covered were some experiments that I’ve conducted with query volume in Google, and how this affects various parts of the algo.
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Multiple XML Sitemaps: Increased Indexation and Traffic
Utilizing XML sitemaps and sitemap indices is an advanced tactic that we recommend to all of our clients at Distilled. In fact, Rob wrote an exceptional how to post on this topic earlier this year, looking more at diagnosing indexation issues. This tactic is not just for large sites thoug...