Whiteboard Friday

Yes, You Really Can Build Links With Twitter

Since Rand discussed a scammy link building tactics last week, he decided to tackle a good method that anyone can do. This week Rand has 8 tips on how you can build links using Twitter, yes Twitter! Rand discusses what methods he sees generating links and how you can use them. We'd also love to hear how you are using Twitter to generate links and what you see the future of linking building on Twitter will be.

Article Marketing: Mostly A Scam

Article marketing is mostly a scam. Well, wait... some types of article marketing are really scammy. Guest blogging, legitimate article sharing, and similar tactics are great and sustainable linkbuilding practices, but making up terrible article content and passing it off as something people should read or link to is both bad for users and bad for long-term SEO. This week, Rand d...

Statistics: Don't Make These Mistakes

Statistics can be very powerful tools for SEOs, but it can be hard to extract the right information from them. People understandably make a lot of mistakes in the process of taking raw data and turning it into actionable numbers. If you know what potential mistakes can be made along the way, you're less likely to make them yourself - so listen up! Will Critchlow, the co-founder and chief ...

What is Google's PageRank Good For?

Sure, PageRank is older than Emperor Palpatine, but a lot of SEOs still use it as their primary metric for link research. Unfortunately, using PageRank exclusively to measure linkbuilding outcomes can yield results as ugly as the Emperor's face. Since Google updates PageRank so sporadically, you may not know the results of your actions for months, or longer. That being said, ...

Tactics for Early Adopter Marketers on Google Plus

Roger Mozbot invited you to join him on Google+! Well, he would, if he had an account. Unlike the rest of us, he's waiting until it comes out of beta, a wise decision considering some of the problems the social network has faced in the past weeks. On the other hand, there's a lot to like a...

Replicate Google's Panda Questionnaire

Want to avoid the next Panda Update and improve your websites quality? This week Will Critchlow from Distilled joins Rand to discuss an amazing idea of Will's to help those who are having problem with Panda and others who want to avoid future updates. Feel free to leave your thoughts on his idea and anything you might do to avoid Panda.

Google's Negative Ranking Factors

You've heard about SEOmoz's study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention - and they ...

Is External Linking Good For SEO?

External linking doesn't sound like it's that difficult of a situation but for many SEOs there's an ongoing debate about how you should do external linking on your website. This week Cyrus, our web strategist, goes over two very different methods of handling external linking on your website. While there are benefits and problems with each strategy, we want to know what method you use and why! Feel free to leave you comments below and discuss what method you use.

Mixing Viral Content With Business Content

A site can be a lot like a mullet: business in front, party in the back. How do you muss it all up and keep a site in style? Any given website naturally attracts a broad set of visitors, and herding that diverse audience onto the right pages is a huge undertaking (as you know, it's something to consider when doing site infrastructure SEO, etc.). This funneling gets even more difficult whe...

SEO Interview Questions

We've all been in difficult interview situations - you get a hard question and go on and on and on without giving a solid answer. In our realm, though, there are some SEO best practices that are so well established that everyone should know and be able to describe them to other people. If you're a business looking to hire an SEO...

How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

It's here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are...

SMX Advanced: Andy Atkins-Kruger Talks International SEO and Yandex

When most of us talk about SEO, the search engines we implicitly refer to are Google and Bing/Yahoo, but that's about it. Do you know which of these search engines is most popular in Russia? Neither! The largest search engine in Russia is Yandex, with millions of users and more market share than eithe...