The benefits of attending MozCon 2013 are invaluable: You’ll go home with insightful tips from top marketers, actionable advice from data experts, connections to awesome people in your industry, new friends from the Moz Community, freshly honed inbound marketing skills—and your very own Roger toy. One of the biggest bonuses? It’s a fantastic excuse to visit Seattle during the most beautiful time of year.

I polled the whole MozPlex to curate a list of our favorite places to dine, swill coffee, imbibe boozy beverages, play games, bust a move, hit the water, and take in the view. There are over 130 Mozzers now, so the list is long. From locally grown, organic eats and family fun on Lake Union to bocce ball and craft beer, Seattle’s got a little something for everyone.

The Hipster • The Sophisticated Palate • The Sandwich Lover • The Coffee Fiend

The Beer Snob • The Cocktail Connoisseur • The Adventurer

The Hipster

Community Coordinator Megan drinks out of an ironic cup.

Recognizable by their tight jeans and plaid coloring, these gentle creatures can generally be found grazing the hill east of downtown. They might be slow to accept you into the herd, but once you’re in, they’ll share their abundant resources with you.

People’s Choice: The Mozzers’ top spot (and terminus to many a Wednesday beer night) is the Unicorn and its basement bar, the Narwhal (1118 East Pike Street). A kaleidoscope of circus décor, deep fried eats, and loud music, these bars are where Capitol Hill layabouts and techies alike unite in pursuit of good times and reasonably priced beverages.

The Seattle Institution: Grab a cold beer, tuck into a plate of nachos, and soak up some sun on the back patio at Linda’s Tavern (707 East Pine Street). The original Seattle

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Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down? 

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to
clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve
user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking
power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous. 

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There’s also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

From Dr. Pete’s post - An SEO’s Guide to HTTP Status Codes

Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a “perfect” redirect

A
perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your
content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL
stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When
done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a
301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The
new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity,
but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to
non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant
content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link juice.

For
example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page
about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about
“tacos” does not.

301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy
SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages
to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google

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Video can be an expensive and time-consuming investment. For small businesses especially, the cost of producing video will always have to be weighed against other marketing investments, and the sad truth is that video can be a tough sell — especially when the ROI from its significant expense is hard to predict or quantify.

I think part of the problem is that most marketers (including SEOs) don’t have a very good understanding of the value that video can provide for them; they see virality, branding, and perhaps increasing conversion rates as the extent of it. Video as a media type, however, has potential on which few people capitalise: the ability to secure fantastic, high quality links back to your site.

In this post, I want to outline nine ways in which video can be used to augment and enhance link-building activity, with the goal of giving you more ammunition to secure an investment in video as part of a wider inbound marketing strategy.

1. Using video as a media type within interactive content

The kind of content you need:

Video is a media type — a form of content delivery — rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function,” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when working out the best way to present a creative idea.

Pages where video is part of the overall sum of a multimedia interactive can be extremely engaging, and as such generate a lot of links.

For example…

http://cloudsovercuba.com/ is a fantastic microsite that uses mixed media to tell the story of the Cuban Missle Crisis. While this was not likely created with links in mind, the page has managed to secure 1,920 links from 266 link root domains (according to OSE).

Two guides from Simply Business, The Small Business

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It’s conference season! Our inbound marketing conference, MozCon, July 8th-10th in Seattle, is just around the corner, and we often get asked by your our community how to approach your boss, CMO, CEO, etc., about coming to MozCon. You want to know more about the value for you and your company or clients, about how we spend those MozCon dollars, and what you can expect once you’re here. And furthermore, some of you might be considering coming on your own dime, especially if you’re a freelancer, student, or owner of a small business.

Conferences can be spendy when you add up ticket costs, travel, hotel, meals, and more. It’s important that you can justify a positive ROI when it comes to your budget. At Moz, we’re big believers in what you can learn at conferences, whether in sessions or through networking, (clear ROI) and in the power of serendipity (which can have a less concrete ROI).

Let’s take a deep-dive into what MozCon looks like both from a value and a cost standpoint. MozCon’s truly an amazing three-day conference where you’ll take away a ton of actionable tips to implement on your site(s) and make new friends, whether the fellow community member sitting next to you, a Mozzer, or one of our industry leaders who are speaking.

And for those of you ready to take the MozCon plunge:

What’s the ROI of My Ticket

Actionable Tactics

This year, MozCon has an astounding 35 speakers! They’ll be talking about everything from linking building and international SEO to analytics, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing. We have an incredibly strong mix of topics with something for everyone. Our goal is really for you to bring something back with you from every session, which is why every single speaker has a keynote-style

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Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at YouMoz? Here’s an explanation of what we’re looking for, how to put together a good post, and some frequently asked questions.

I’ve had the privilege of being at the helm of the YouMoz editorial team for almost two years now, and have been amazed and awed by the content that you all have shared. On an average weekday, we get 5-10 submissions, and we publish about 10% of our submissions. I wanted to share more about who we are, what makes for a good YouMoz post, and how to get in that top 10%.

Who Reviews Posts?

• Miriam Ellis is a Moz Associate specializing in copywriting and Local SEO. She provides the initial review of your post.
• Melissa Fach is a Moz Associate with extensive editorial experience in the industry. She is one of the people who will closely review your post and provide you with feedback.
• Keri Morgret (that’s me!) I’m a Moz employee on the community team. I also will closely review posts and give you feedback, as well as do a final check of your post before publishing it on the YouMoz blog.
• Erica McGillivray, Jen Lopez, Ashley Tate, and Trevor Klein also help with the review process as needed.

What is the Review Process?

1. All posts are reviewed for obvious spam and if the post has already been published. In these cases, we decline the submission and leave a note for the author.

2. Miriam makes an initial review of the post and leaves internal notes for the team. The post status changes from “Pending Review By Editor” to “Pending – Reviewed By Editor”. This doesn’t mean it’s going to get published, but please know that only about half of the submissions even make it this far.

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“Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it’s a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology.

Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks”? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals.” What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess.

People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, “Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals,” and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” rather than the alternate use of the word “unmasks.”

This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the “rhyme as reason” bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, “If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational

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