Moz

Something fundamentally missing from both versions - trust signals. Why does a user want to trust this software? You go to http://www.seomoz.org/, you see Zillow, Home Depot, Yelp and etc "love their software". Same with 37signals - WB and Kellogg's are using Basecamp? http://37signals.com/ Why isn't my company? It is not explicity apparent that anyone loves this software, especially nobody they know or have heard of, so why should they use it? It doesn't have to be who uses it, but could also be "featured on" if you (Patio11) got coverage and co-linked to the service there as well, which I bet is more prominent. Of course, families don't care about Techcrunch - relevant news is needed.

http://seomoz.org is an awesome research tool for seo. They do have a pro account, it's a bit pricy but well worth it for organic keyword research.

Inman is a great marketer and has all sorts of interesting tactics for driving traffic to his dating site. He's also the former CTO of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org). Here's a recent interview with him about marketing: http://blog.mixergy.com/real-marketing/

http://www.seomoz.org/ is the best resource I know of. Lot's of good articles and discussion.

http://www.seomoz.org/ http://www.seobook.com/ Not really SEO, but I love this book: http://www.calltoactionbook.com/

http://SEOmoz.org (as mentioned by others) is certainly one of the best. http://Websitegrader.com provides a quick and dirty analysis of your site. The SEO Web Developer's Cheat Sheet is very handy: http://seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pdf

1) You can't get any of those things from Google at all. You can get a few little morsels of vagueness from GWT which is free because it doesn't do anything worth paying for. And GA is a whole other service that has little to do with anything I described. Probably the only decent tool they offer is the AdWords keyword research tool and again ... it's not worth paying for, you have to come up with the keywords yourself... that's not useful. There's a whole industry of SEO tools like http://ginzametrics.com/ and of course http://seomoz.org/ that aren't cheap and compensate for the lack of 1st party tools. 2) There's a whole SEO industry that operates on a hazy interpretation of what Google is supposed to be doing these days ... lots of companies know what SEO is, they know what it does, they know why they need it, and they pay out the arse for it. This brings clarity to that industry and those companies instead of letting them reverse engineer the changes you make and speculate on what matters. If they're willing to pay $100s/hr for SEO they'll surely pay $1000s for a roadmap straight from the source. That's like a printing press for money because that data expires when you act on it. Money creates an unfair advantage right now. Pay people to spam backlinks to your website and you'll rate higher. Pay people to write summaries of blog posts and eventually you'll rate higher than those blogs you're sourcing your content from just because you can afford to generate…

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice. With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following). Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy. Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News. There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content. If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter. >> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore? I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles) There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and…

>but things like bounce rates and whatnot do affect rankings as well // How do Google, say, use bounce rates - they do have bounce rates for folks using Analytics, and I guess they could guess some form of bounce rate by analysing search clicks but they'd be missing data for lots of pages and lots of visits on pages they could get a rate on. So, do you have any insight in to how they or Bing or whoever do it in practice; or is it just a guess? SEOmoz ranking factors, http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-7, (and other pages there) suggest it's based on clicks on SERPs that follow after a visit to your site. Is that the/a known method or just the most speculated method. Seems it could be potentially abused, so for example the "are you sure you want to leave this page" (onbeforeunload) type warnings will clearly elongate the page visit duration.

Following the link in the upper right-hand corner, I find a page which talks about being Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-we-believe-why-seomozs-tagfee-tenets

Some of this advice differs from the carefully thought out style advice in the HTML5 Boilerplate project, http://html5boilerplate.com/ (which, dismayingly, is loading very slowly in Chrome just now, but loading fine in IE), the basis for my restyling my very old personal website. A line height of 1.4 is plenty large. The author is fully correct, of course, that it is best not to specify a font size at all, and especially not to specify a size that can't be resized at will be any user who happens to visit your site. Responsive Web design http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design is the way to go.

Sub directories are still considered best for maximal SEO value. [1] [1]: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-practic…

I'm slightly biased, but likely your best starting point is the Beginner's Guide by SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo Amazingly well-produced, and covers all of the basics -- without any of the snake oil. The SEO industry gets a bad wrap (most times, rightfully so) but once you parse out all of the shit, there's some great stuff out there. Hope that's helpful.

Avinash Kaushik's books "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" (beginner) and "Web Analytics 2.0" (advanced) are often recommended as accurate and comprehensive no-nonsense books. On the more general topic of SEO, there is seomoz's beginners' guide [1]. [1] http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Only one I know that hasn't been mentioned: http://www.seomoz.org/ X-Recruiting: If you're reading this, maybe you should be working at SEOmoz instead. Check out www.seomoz.org/about/jobs

Great beginner resource for SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Not to go on a complete SEO rant, but here it goes. Page Rank is next to useless, like that hangy thing in the back of your throat. Page title and meta description are a close second, but still needed. Kind of like a title of a book, these serve only to "introduce" your page to the search engines and the users. Content, content, content. That's where it really matters. Despite what most people think, there IS useful SEO reading on the web. This is an excellent guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo But, as another poster mentioned, something strange is going on here. How long has your site been live?

There's an infographic in one of the slides about the SEOMoz culture that I love and reminded me of the originating post that gives a solid overview: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-principles-at-seomoz

All you need: http://www.seobook.com/ http://www.seomoz.org/

1) anyone that's 100-150 a month is going to waste your time.. or rather, you're going to waste your money and time 2) anyone that's amazing at SEO is doing stuff on their own bc they can make mad loot 3) Just learn yourself. Download the following documents, they are honestly amazing: - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet - http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-start… 4) This is also amazing, will change your life.. soooo many good articles - http://www.bluehatseo.com/ (old, but amazing.. AMAZING) - http://justinbriggs.org/portfolio

Just came across a link on SEOMoz that just got published and talks more generally about awesome link titles - may be interesting if this post interested you, too. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/are-your-titles-irresistibly-click-worthy-vi…

I read this, and all I can see is: "Don't do marketing." "Just make a good product and people will find it." I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this). More here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is-for-compa… And here: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-for-s…

It's not what you say, it's what people say about you. Kinda like a popularity contest in high school. If you are quarterback screwing the hot cheerleader, most people are looking/following you (whether they "like" you or not). So, get links. Lots of 'em. source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Yes, setting up your site based on broad or long tail terms is good foundation...but you can rank your site for words that aren't even on your site. Why do you think disney ranks for 'exit' and 'leave'? http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/14/the-evolution-of-google-ra…

What a great speaker Rand is. Definitely makes me interested in the service. Loved the examples of real marketing such as urbnspoon, dropbox, seomoz, and simply hired. Also, he gave 2 months of his svc away for free for the talk: http://www.seomoz.org/partners/hackers - Found this in the hackers and founders site.

I highly recommend learning SEO (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo). I used SEOMOZ and David Mihm's blog (http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml) to rank a local pizza website to the top of Google for my town. I did this for free to learn how to do it. I charged money for my next client and from there everything rolled smoothly.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-gia… Helped me a lot. Also I think your website it awesome. I love the idea behind it.

Google can and does include a Javascript interpreter in their crawler: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/new-reality-google-follows-links-in-javascri… . They don't need to solve the halting problem in order to run a Javascript interpreter for a certain amount of time(maybe 10-15 seconds) and see how that changes the page content or redirects to a different site. If you want to make your visitors wait until after the heat death of the universe before you actually redirect them, I'm sure you'll be able to fool Google too.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html You may want to take a look at the link above and try again. You'll get much better results. That said, a great place to start for learning about SEO is here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo Good luck.

It's a "normal" submission time for DMOZ, but you shouldn't worry about it anyway: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-a-link-from-dmoz-isnt-worth-what-it… (the article is from 2006)

I came across this article on SEOMoz by a YOUMoz member who in two years was able to rank #1 out of 92,000,000 for the term "auto accessories." He doesn't tell us in detail how he did it (step by step), but he does talk about the high level steps he used to rank well and drive traffic to his site. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/boy-do-i-love-linkbuilding-and-you-should-t…