Image Credit: Vermin

When Disavow first launched, many people felt like they were doing “Google’s job.” At first, I completely disagreed with that sentiment. I loved it. I needed disavow, and yes, Bing did get to it first! However, since Matt Cutts’ announcement of Disavow at Pubcon to present day, I have started to change my tune a bit based on experiencing what I can only call disavow hell. I truly do understand Google’s position on the tool, but I am thinking a lot of small business owners need more transparency, as they cannot battle what they are up against.

SEER recently took on a client for whom we have disavowed what feels like about 85% of their links. Their owner is an amazingly awesome woman whose business is getting hurt due to the efforts of her previous SEO firm. The firm left her business in a bad place. She was doing #RCS already, and had built a real business that helped people find solutions to the issues of her niche. She was doing content marketing and building assets that added value well before she employed an SEO firm. Instead of showing some discretion on their aggressive tactics, they slammed the gas and went full bore on the spam. Her business grew and she hired people, not knowing that her SEO firm was setting her up for failure.

At first, I was a big fan of disavow. Now that I am personally spending tons of time helping out on two clients affected negatively by the tool, I can’t help but think…seriously, is the the best use of my time to help these clients succeed online? Instead of spending the same time strategizing on how to build assets that add value, I’m hunting down spammy link networks. Google, is this

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If you’re like most SEOs, you spend a lot of time reading. Over the past several years, I’ve spent 100s of hours studying blogs, guides, and Google patents. Not long ago, I realized that 90% of what I read each doesn’t change what I actually do – that is, the basic work of ranking a web page higher on Google.

For newer SEOs, the process can be overwhelming.

To to simplify this process, I created this SEO blueprint. It’s meant as a framework for newer SEOs to build their own work on top of. This basic blueprint has helped, in one form or another, 100s of pages and dozens of sites to gain higher rankings.

Think of it as an intermediate SEO instruction manual, for beginners.

Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Timeframe: 2 to 10 Weeks

What you need to know: The blueprint assumes you have basic SEO knowledge: you’re not scared of title tags, can implement a rel=canonical, and you’ve built a link or two. (If this is your first time to the rodeo, we suggest reading the Beginners Guide to SEO and browsing our Learn SEO section.)

Keyword Research

1. Working Smarter, Not Harder

Keyword research can be simple or hard, but it should always be fun. For the sake of the Blueprint, let’s do keyword research the easy way.

The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:

1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
2. Keywords with too much competition
3. Keywords without enough traffic
4. Keywords that don’t convert
5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

The biggest mistake people make is trying to rank for a single keyword at a time. This is the hard way. It’s much easier, and much more profitable, to rank for 100s or even 1,000s of long tail keywords with the

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With Mother’s Day in many countries having just passed (I learned this week that the UK celebrates Mothering Sunday earlier in the year), I thought it would be fun to have a conversation about SEO with one of the most incredible people on the entire planet: my mom. I asked her about what it is she believes our industry does on a daily basis as well as how she thinks search engines function in general.

The conversation was great; sort of similar to rubber duck debugging, except in this case the rubber duck was my mom, and instead of sitting there silently, she could comment when I started using terms she did not understand (and who can blame her; we’re pretty notorious for inventing words and phrases on whims).

Here are some of my favorite moments from the chat:

What do you think I do at work all day? “Work on your computer, fly toy helicopters, drink lattes… etc.”

Not going to lie, that’s pretty accurate; sorry, Will and Duncan!

What does SEO stand for?  “Search engine online”

Not quite, but at least she didn’t say “SEO optimization.”

Do you know what Bing is? “Bing bong?” *laughter ensues* “No, I had to look it up.”

I can appreciate the humor. I’m assuming she used Google but missed the irony; sorry, Duane.

How do search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo decide who to put at the top of a search result? “Don’t they base it mostly off of which sites are read the most?”

Not too far off, but how do they establish that list to begin with? “Test which ones people click on the most and then move them around a bunch to see what works best, right?”

Before I worked in SEO, this was how I thought it worked too; and in the grand scheme

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Last year at MozCon, we tried something new: community speakers. The feedback we receieved from those of you who attended was phenomal, and our four speakers were spectacular.

So this year, we’re opening up four community speaking slots again, and we can’t wait to hear from you. I know some of you have been preparing your ideas since last MozCon. Which means this year, I expect even more amazing submissions, harder choices, and to get over 150 submissions (which is what we got in 2012).

We’re looking for four people to deliver incredibly actionable tips in SEO, social media, content, marketing analytics, conversion rate optimization, and any other great inbound subject. You’ll join an already killer line-up of speakers and lots of fun.

Fabio was one of our amazing community speakers last year.

MozCon 2013 takes place July 8th-10th at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. If this past weekend was any indication of how our summer’s going to be, bring your sunglasses and flip-flops for the sunshine. We’re expecting around ~1200 people, and tickets are already 50% sold out. We’ll have all the usual goodies like Roger photos and incredible speakers and a few surprises up our sleeves.

The details about the community speaker submission process:

• Your pitch must be submitted by Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
• Please submit only one pitch. We’re looking for the best of the best.
• Topics can range the inbound marketing spectrum, so submit something you’re passionate about.
• If you’ve never spoke before or have spoken hundreds of times, we want to hear from you.
• Presentations will be 15 minutes long with an added ~5 minutes for questions.
• These sessions will be from 2:00-3:20pm on Wednesday, July 10th.
• Widescreen-format slide decks will be due one week before MozCon.
• If you already have

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Creating demand where none currently exists is the expertise of a bullshit artist. Some in sales would take offense to that statement; some would agree. Where I believe this talent fails is with a particular kind of recurring revenue service – consulting and agency work. Inevitably you run out of steam and alibis. If you can’t produce what you promise, you either have to pack up your wagon and flee to another dusty town (which, let’s face it, is how some SEOs and digital marketers practice), or suffer sleepless nights worrying about facing your clients in the morning.

Personally, I don’t like traveling. I also really like my sleep.

This is a post about how I choose better clients. It starts with introspection, and ends with a connection. For each of these tips, I’m thinking specifically of a client I let walk away. If a strong partnership is what you seek, then you have to be able to decline potential clients. The customer is not always right. Sometimes they’re downright dangerous.

Now, I know this isn’t possible in every company. An agency I worked with rarely says no to work. Bad clients pile on and contribute to driving away employees in routine mass departures. When I was worked there relationships got contentious, and frankly, I didn’t see a lot of flawless consulting happening. The phrase we used around the office to convince ourselves this was normal was, “that’s agency life.”

I came to learn that wasn’t agency life.

To remind ourselves of some of the marketing ideologies we learned in college; most retailers employ the marketing department philosophy, whereas search fits the marketing concept. In SEO marketing we want to answer the searches being made more often than any other task, which may not fit nicely into a clients’ ROI demands. Luckily, this is something

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“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ron Garrett, and I work with Distilled out of their New York office. I’m just down here this week in Seattle, and Rand invited me over to tape an edition of Whiteboard Friday. Either which way, I hope you like it.

Today I’m going to primarily be talking to agencies, business owners, freelancers, and consultants. The topic is positioning your business for the future of SEO. Now we all know that SEO is rapidly changing. The skills that you need to be successful in SEO, whether it’s technical, being good with analytics and big data sets, UX design, content creation, all of these different facets, we need to constantly innovate and make sure that we’re at the top of our game.

What I’ve done today is put together a checklist of things that you, as an agency or a business owner, can go through your business and review to make sure that you’re staying competitive, to make sure that you’re focusing on the things that you should be focusing on, and really trying to figure out where you should be building your business.

Let’s go ahead and start off. Use the resources within your organization. Let’s go ahead and start over here.

First, start talking to your salespeople. They’re oftentimes the first defense to clients. So oftentimes when clients reach out, they’re going to be the first to talk to the clients and get a sense of what they’re looking for, get a sense of how they think about SEO, get a sense of how they’re spending for SEO and how their teams are working, their digital, their content, all those different teams are working together to be able to bring SEO and integrate it. Try to figure out what

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As you likely already know, the goal of content marketing is to build up familiarity and trust with your prospective customers. In this case, the content isn’t designed to sell a specific product or service, but rather to sell you, and to interested potential customers.

People buy from people that they know, like, and trust. And if you haven’t heard it yet, let me be the first to tell you that “familiarity” breeds trust.

Content marketing certainly isn’t new, but it’s been getting a lot of new attention online lately (and for good reason). Small business owners across the globe are re-discovering these tried and true marketing practices, and using them to get a big leg up on the competition.

One of the really big advantages small business owners have over the titans of industry is that you can get much more personal with your target audience than they can. You have a face and a voice. You can be human with your audience. And, as it turns out, one of the best ways to do that is by talking to your customers. One of the best ways to get a feel for some of the best-practices around the industry is to follow and watch how others are succeeding. As such, I’ve cherry-picked some of my favorite content marketing tips from experts around the web.

1. Don’t build on rented land

Publish your best content on web properties that you personally own (i.e., your own self-hosted website). Social media has hit the business world like a freight train, and there is great value in spreading your message far and wide via these cheap media channels. The point of all that chatter, though, is to get all those eyeballs back to your own site. Once they’re there, it’s time to convert them, either into

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How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today I’m going to give you four reasons why I think this tactic is as dangerous as those it replaced.

Note: I’m not about to say that ‘all’ guest posting is bad – in the same way not all directories are automatically spammy. I’m also not about to say ‘all’ guest bloggers will be penalised. What I will do is point out the dangers of guest posting as Google becomes increasingly intelligent; and what you can do to avoid them.

Link Quality

Penguin really hurt sites that relied on low-quality links. Many have responded by setting a minimum domain authority threshold when prospecting. To keep the process efficient they then remove sites with a DA over a certain level – seeing these as less likely to accept content.

No new site owner ever sat down and thought ‘hmm, well I best not link to buybluewidgets.com today, my domain authority’s only 28 – I’ll wait a few months’. Equally, the reason Mashable’s not linking to you isn’t because your DA has yet to hit a magical level. If you offer something of value links naturally come from a huge variety of high, medium and low quality sites. High quality links are rare naturally, that’s part of what makes them so valuable, but they do occur. As a result, a completely natural link portfolio looks something like this:

I’ve now started to see new sites, fresh out of a ‘successful’ outreach campaign whose link portfolio looks like this:

There’s little way that this could have occurred un-engineered and, if it’s obvious to us

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Let’s assume you know the basics: content marketing is one of the best ways to engage with audiences and potential customers online. It is useful for improving search rankings, increasing brand engagement and loyalty, increasing brand visibility, and encouraging social sharing and interaction. If you are a consumer-facing company in this day and age, you simply cannot keep up with the competition if you are not actively building your content marketing skill set. 

Easier said than done though, right? You’ve probably dabbled in content marketing before, or maybe even hired a “top agency.” Maybe you have even seen some results; a few links here, a few hundred shares there, but then what? Certainly no fireworks, no massive ranking improvements, and no lead or sale increases. Maybe it wasn’t the panacea you’d hoped it might be. Short on time and money, you probably gave up and reinvested your money into tried and true marketing practices that could at least drive a few conversions. You chalked content marketing up to something too expensive or too difficult to find any real success with.

If any of this resonates with you, you are most definitely not alone. Doing content marketing properly is no easy task, and to beginners it can seem to be next to impossible to create anything that will stand out and get noticed. Add to that the explosion of agencies who claim to be gurus and deliver tragically poor results, and the whole “content marketing” arena can start to feel like a convoluted mess that can’t deliver on its promises.

So, what do you do? Other tactics are losing efficacy, your site is losing rankings, you can’t get social engagement for the life of you, and your frustration level is at an all-time high.

You go back to the beginning, and you relearn the

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Hello, Moz fans, I’m excited to be writing my very first post on the Moz blog. My name is Stephanie, and I manage client development for Distilled in Seattle. I have had the opportunity to talk to lots of different people about their concerns over their website, their goals for the future, how they can get more links, and how they can rank higher.

As marketers, it can be easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind, or focus on the latest buzz words, or the newest industry change. It’s nice to take a step back and revisit some marketing basics that are really the building blocks of what we do every day. Revisiting the basics of marketing is the best way to refresh your marketing skills to help your clients succeed. 

I’ve asked for recommendations from my team here at Distilled about the best books that really get at the core of what marketing is about. I spent some weeks reading through these and have reviewed my favorites below for you. Let’s dive in!

UnMarketing by Scott Stratten

In the introduction, Stratten says:

“Marketing is not a task.
Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is not a job.
Marketing happens every time you engage…”

Right out of the box, Stratten gets to the point and says, “Hey, if taking the time to be genuine and build relationships is too much work for you, don’t waste your time reading this book.” It’s so true. A loyal customer base isn’t made by spamming people’s inboxes, cold calling, or responding negatively to customer feedback. How do you like it when companies do that to you? I’ll tell you. You hate it.

Stratten really covers the “basics” of good customer service, which people often forget by focusing purely on the numbers. You might think, “500 people is more

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