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SEOmoz’s Stats for 2007

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Following in Danny’s footsteps over at SELand, I’m offering up SEOmoz’s website stats for 2007. Enjoy! And if you’re interested, here is last year’s data as well - 2006 stats for SEOmoz.

Visits

January - 202,622
February - 309,924
March - 283,417
April - 280,284
May - 315,785
June - 254,604
July - 263,274
August - 263,295
September - 266,571
October - 312,147
November - 285,109
December - 242,348
TOTAL - 3,279,380

Page Views

January - 554,000
February - 694,760
March - 670,208
April - 697,881
May - 739,674
June - 656,939
July - 717,553
August - 739,397
September - 789,168
October - 861,499
November - 794,620
December - 674,978
TOTAL - 8,590,677

SEOmoz’s Unusual Search Terms from the Month of November

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by rebecca

As a special pre-holiday treat, we decided to share our more long tail search terms from last month (November 2007). Enjoy!

How to read minds: 225 searches. Ever wonder how Rand seems to have so many eerily accurate predictions about the future of search engine algorithm changes? Well, so do 225 other people…
Titties: 52 searches (thank Lucas for that one)
Better than google: 51 searches. Meh, we already knew that SEOmoz was better than Google, sliced bread, and real butter combined (mmmmm, butter and Google sandwich…)
How to speak English: 41 searches. Sadly, we only offer a course on "How to Speak English with the Occasional Injections of Superfluous U’s into Words," taught by our favo(u)rite Kiwi, Jane.
Barry bonds before and after: 22 searches. Sounds like a Jeopardy category waiting to happen…
Good questions to ask: 22 searches. If you have to search for this, then you fail as a human being.
Mud wrestling: 19 searches. How did they know about our team building exercises?
Simpsonized pictures: 18 searches. I only threw this in because I geekily think it’s cool that we rank for something Simpsons-related.
What is an encyclopedia: 13 searches. Seriously? Seriously?!
20 questions to ask a guy: 10 searches. Um, ask them anything. It’s not like Jane Goodall with the apes, for crying out loud.
the incredibles: 10 searches. Hooray, we rank for a Pixar film!
list of every website: 9 searches. Google returns a page saying "Displaying one of eleventy billion results."

6 searches:

ive got a golden ticket. That golden ticket, of course, is *ahemshamelessplug* an SEOmoz Premium Membership! Woo hoo!
fastest spider. I’d like to see a sequel search query called "2 fast 2 spider," but that’s just me.
hot young things. That’s right. At SEOmoz we’re so damn hot.

4 searches:

Good to great Collins: I’d say good Collins is True Colors, but great Collins is Sussudio.
Gorgeous website: Why, thank you! I’d say it’s not too shabby!
Self cannibalization: I bet we taste like spam (zing).
Most romantic proposal. Yeah yeah, we know, Rand’s romantic mushy mushy all that good stuff.

3 searches:

how to freebase coke. Rand, is that how you’re able to stay up so late blogging? We may need to stage an intervention…
things to do with your spouse. Oh, I don’t know, how about converse with them instead of spending all your time in front of a computer?
set it and forget it rotisserie. My mom has one of these. When she first got it she made pork roast every weekend. I call that period of my life "the best ever."
titties, titties, titties. Once again, thanks, Lucas.
what to say to your loved one. Well, "I love you" is a start…
how is oatmeal made? By grinding up pigeons, of course.

Two searches:

internet makes people lazy. I’d like to see Google return a one box answer of "No sh*t, Sherlock."
pay attention to me. Aw, they think the Internet is people!
paris Hilton thumbs. They’re probably covered with a mutant strain of gonorrhea.
how does google see my site. Through the tiny camera they installed in you the last time you got knocked out at the dentist, silly!
I work for google. I bet Adam Lasnik and Matt Cutts searched for this one, with Google returning a one box response of "Sigh, we know."
Why Canadians are the best at hockey. Uh, a healthy diet of maple syrup and Tim Horton’s?
What are titties. Ok, seriously, Lucas…
Weird porn thumbs. Apparently, if you have weird thumbs then you are well-equipped for a lucrative career in porn.
How to speak the English. The fact that it’s "the English" makes this search so much better.
How big is the world wide web. Oh, I’d say it’s about 650 Courics big.
Nambla site password: I bet there’s a fake retrieval site out there that promises the password and then busts the people who try to obtain it. It’s probably run by Chris Hansen ("Why don’t you take a seat…").
How to read minds for real. The "for real" part cracked me up, as if Google only shows the real results to people who are serious about mind reading.
Michael martinez hardcore seo. I bet the two people who searched for this term were Michael Martinez and his mom.
Names to call your loved one. I don’t recommend "ho bag."
What if ron paul wins? I wonder how many people were expecting a straight answer from Google (e.g., "Well, then you’re effed, I suppose").
Rebecca Kelley arrested. Okay, for the record, that old lady deserved it.
Hat sex xxx. Not only do these folks want hat sex, but they want it in its raunchiest form (hence the xxx).
Things to do when your wife is away. How about hat sex?
Underpants gnomes. Step 3: Profit!
Naked john Michaels. John Michaels, I’m not sure who you are, but apparently some folks are looking for nude photos of you. Just a heads up.

One search:

Whats the number to the guy who invented the world wide web? It’s 555-are-you-effing-serious.
Good questions to ask people in truth or dare. How about "I dare you to get your ass off the computer and go for a walk outside, for crying out loud."
Is crack and freebase same thing. Okay, seriously, Rand, I’m going to tell you about this nifty little program. There are 12 "steps" too, and I know how much you like lists…
Why cliques are skinny. Because being able to see your sternum is all the rage now!
I can’t live without you. Aw, thanks!
Complete appetizer setup. Crab cakes and prawns of some sort are a definite must.
Evil cattle. They’ll moo-rder you.
Do you consider yourself to be lucky / unlucky? Give an example. It’s like this person is signing Google up for a dating site. "Google, describe your perfect date…"
Words to make up. If you search for a word to make up and find one, isn’t that word already made up? Just throw some darts at a poster of the alphabet, for crying out loud.
How to break a tedious day. This person has the freakin’ INTERNET right at his fingertips, and he performs a search on how to break up a tedious day. Clearly the man does not know what StumbleUpon is.
Please stop it. Aw, but I’m almost done!
Art with elephant on stilts. This is so absurdly specific that I kind of want one for myself.
How much is matt cutts worth. I bet Matt’s wife searched for this shortly after that life insurance policy kicked in…
Letting employees create their own fun. Ten bucks says that Bruce Clay searched for this. "Here, Lisa, here’s a slinky. You get to play with it for five minutes, and then it’s back to work."
Hammer pants blog. Oh man, I’d so read this. I bet it’s 2 legit, 2 legit 2 quit (hey heyyyyyyyyyy).
How do people start getting famous. Don’t wear underwear. That’s a good start.
Things you shouldnt do to your girlfriends dad. I’m guessing that asking him for a condom is at the top of the list…
Why must people be very careful when using ether. Geez, I’d hate to see this guy’s search history (I bet we’ll find "why does fire feel ouchy," "how come I can’t breathe underwater," and "gasoline smells good").
How is it anatomically possible for someone to have super powers? God, I love the Internet.
Ten signs that a man is never going to marry you. #1: You have a Cathy comic on your fridge and instead of a blanket, you sleep with 12 cats to keep you warm.
Why does someone keep bugging me. Maybe it’s because you’re on your computer all day, and your roommate needs your rent check, you lazy arse.
Opposing views on how anorexia and bulimia are bad for you. I like how this person wants to hear "opposing" view, like "Con: You can die. Pro: You’ll fit into those skinny leg jeans!"
How to make him think he cant live without me. The gift of an *ahemshamelessplug* SEOmoz Premium Membership is a good start! It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Hopefully you enjoyed a peek at our silly search phrases. We want to wish our readers a happy and safe holiday, and best of luck to everyone in the new year!

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Offline Marketing for Mobile Purposes

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by Jane

I want to buy a new telephone. There is really nothing wrong with the one I have right now: it’s been dropped a couple of (ten) times and I once dropped it into Lake Union. It dried. It calls other phones, receives calls and text messages, and it fits nicely in pockets and purses. But it doesn’t do Internet, and that’s not acceptable. Too often, I’m away from my computer and I want to look something up online. Often, my desire to use the Internet is driven by offline marketing that is aimed at Internet users.

As a consumer, offline marketing doesn’t mean as much to me as it will when I’m equipped to take advantage of it. However, there are already millions of people walking around our cities with iPhones, Blackberries, and similar mobile devices who can look up the URLs they see while they’re away from a desktop or a laptop. Offline marketing is only going to become more important with the increased popularity of mobile technology. As Rob Kerry wrote a few days ago, many instances of offline marketing could be executed better. Writing about how the advertising on trains is aiming to have people convert online, Rob says, "99.999% of people traveling into/out-of London will use the internet regularly and will most likely go online within minutes of leaving the train, at either work or home." Increasingly, people aren’t even waiting to get home. The "what’s that about?" question can be answered while they’re still sitting in front of the advertisement.

It is no secret that one of my favourite forms of offline viral marketing is Acquisio.com’s t-shirts. Simple, bold, well-designed, and funny, no one at SMX Seattle didn’t want one of them. I can’t go a day wearing mine without someone asking me what shit I hate doing and where I got the shirt. You can’t wear a t-shirt online, but the company gained links, built their brand, and acquired notoriety as a result of the offline campaign. The shirts were also strangely relevant to their company’s product: Agustin Vazquez-Levi explains in his blog post that they "(offer) ad agencies a solution for PPC management and the monthly reporting to clients… because we know they hate doing that shit manually. To make this perfectly clear, we decided to give out t-shirts to help people communicate this frustration, while offering them the solution."

If I didn’t know who created the t-shirts and saw someone wearing one, I may well be tempted to get out my (currently imaginary) Blackberry and look up "i hate doing this shit shirt" on a search engine. Agustin’s post ranks first. For the term "i hate doing this shit," the post ranks third. And don’t The Lisa, Susan, and Curtis look stunning!

Some offline marketing campaigns are more obvious in their intent. DirtyBeach is comprised of a group of people who sit beside the Thames and create sand sculptures. Perched on a couch made of sand, the artists include their MySpace and Facebook URLs in their displays.

They claim to have also registered a domain, dirtybeach.tv, but the website currently does not load. Without a presence online, this group would be too easily forgotten as an amusing aside when one is wandering along the waterfront. While only a small percentage of people will think to look the group up later, virtually no one would ever think of looking them up with a search engine if their social networking URLs were not available. Similarly, a clever advertisement, seen by commuters on their way to work, is less useful if the ad gives them no way to follow up online.

Offline Internet marketing hasn’t developed the bad reputation that it has online. While Diggers bemoan the denigration of their precious website at the hands of marketers and linkbaiters and claim that SEOs have "ruined search engines," no one complains when a clever commercial - paid or not - includes a URL. While I smile when I see a piece of obvious linkbait becoming popular at a social news service, I love it even more when I see offline advertising that blatantly aims to draw people to the Internet. As Rob points out when he talks about the visibility of contact information, it’s tougher to get people to a website when they can’t just click on a link: you have to pay even more attention to the branding and prominence of URLs. How do you get people to link to something if they don’t know or can’t remember its address? Even someone using a mobile device could forget a domain name as soon as they get off the train or walk past the billboard.

Getting people to remember your website’s address when they discovered it offline is either made easier or harder with the introduction of alternative TLDs. I’m not sure which. The conundrum is obvious: competitive keywords suddenly become more accessible, but do you think your mum will remember the .info, .tv, .mobi, and .biz TLDs she saw on a billboard? Or will she try and look up the domain names using ".com?" When you’re going to use offline marketing, this type-in problem becomes much more important.

Even my father now has a phone with good web capabilities. When people for whom the Internet was never much more than Yahoo! Mail can get online and look for the interesting thing they saw on their way to work, offline marketing for online purposes changes. You want your URL to be easy to remember, whether the domain be a business’s premier website or one developed exclusively for the ad campaign. You want to rank first for whatever catchphrase, keyword, or slogan you’re pushing. You want whatever genre you’re using to be interesting enough to catch the attention and warrant the time of people who are used to seeing ads whenever they look up.

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Thursday Roundup for the Week of 12/23/07

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by rebecca

It’s time for another roundup! This week was a bit slow going due to the holidays, but nevertheless there were still some happenings throughout the web. Oh, and every week I’ll be sure to also include what happened the Friday and Saturday before the start of the new week; otherwise, those days will slip through the cracks.

That being said…

New editions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

SEO product manager, SEM planner, and search marketing specialist for All Star Directories in Seattle, WA

Featured companies:

Featured resumes:

New events added to the Events Calendar:

OMCAR 2008

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

The NY Times has a piece about how blogging is a low-cost, high return marketing tool. While I agree with the article stating that blogging isn’t suited for everyone, I disagree that it’s not recommended for the majority of businesses out there. I think that, with a good writer, any industry or business can have a blog. Many blog readers and Linkerati elite are thirsty for information–just look at some of the random stuff that gets on Digg. Yes, tons of blogs are technology-laden, but there are still plenty of niche blogs that do well because they offer a clever twist or certain insight that makes them unique.
Barry Schwartz reports that Sam’s Club offers search engine optimization services on their website. No words on whether you have to buy a 24-pack of SEO, or if it’s located between the bulk spam aisle and the free sample lady. (Get it? A spam joke! Gimme a break, I’m still recovering from the holidays.)
Over at Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox takes a look at each search engine’s webmaster support forums. It’s a general runthrough of what each engine offers, what topics they discuss, how long they’ve been around, and all that good stuff.
Rand and Vanessa were on the Good Karma show on Webmaster Radio. Here’s a link to her post on Vanessa Fox Nude, and also a link to the .mp3 format if you want to give it a listen (I recommend curling up in front of a fire with a blanket and a mug of hot chocolate while listening to the soothing sounds of the Fishkin and the Fox as they chat about nerdy SEO stuff).
Quantcast put out a list of the U.S.’s top 100 websites, along with whether or not each site accepts advertising on it. I’m amazed that Geocities is still ranked highly (at #39)–insert animated .gif/frames joke here.
Advertising online is still a fairly unknown prairie, so it’s interesting to find out that this study deduced that ads in online shows work better than ads on TV. This is exciting news for all of us advertisers out there who have to repeatedly explain to our friends and relatives that we do "marketing, but online" and then have to watch their eyes glaze over.
For all you Americans out there, the United States is expected to hit a population of over 303 million by January of ‘08. Also, Nevada is the fastest growing state. Can you say Viva, vivaaaaa Nevadaaaaaa!
Read Write Web has a great list of 36 startup tips. Though a lot of them may seem basic, the fact that the list is so comprehensive and covers all of the bases, from general things that you may forget to other aspects that you might not have even thought about, warrants this post a hefty five moz stars. Anyone considering venturing off and forming a startup should peruse this checklist of helpful hints.
As Rand put it, this one’s an oldie but a goodie. It’s an article about the "myth of the market share," and about how focusing too much on your competition can actually hurt you. I’d like to think of it as the White Whale Syndrome, but it’s a really fascinating read and a good reminder that there is always a point where enough is enough, and that one shouldn’t focus his efforts on solely one thing, or he’ll risk damaging other areas.
ADDED: Tamar gave an exceptional roundup of the best Internet Marketing posts of 2007, so if you missed any of these, now’s your chance to read through them. She breaks them up into categories, too, such as post about Digg, StumbleUpon, social media, viral strategies, link resources, and many more.

That’s about it for this week. We hope you all had a safe and happy holiday with your friends and loved ones, and be sure to have a kickin’ new year, everybody!

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Whiteboard Friday - “Vanessa Gets Vertical”

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by great scott!

Well folks, Christmas has passed but we’re here with the gift that keeps on giving: Another installment of Whiteboard Friday! To round out our last episode of 2007, we brought our good friend and search industry celebrity, Vanessa Fox, into Whiteboard studios to talk about Vertical Search (or Search 3.0, if you will).

Vertical, Blended, Shaken, Stirred…however you like your search results mixed, this aspect is one that is becoming increasingly more important in our industry. As the engines work harder to integrate results, it offers tremendous opportunities (and challenges) in getting different content media for the same site to rank for target terms.

In the video, Vanessa and Rand discuss the results they found at the different engines for the search "britney videos" (no, I haven’t bothered to ask). The screencaps below the videos show the difference in the results offered up by Google and Ask, respectively. As you’ll see, Ask is way more integrated (in fact, blended results seem to be their primary marketing focus), whereas Google suffers a bit, despite the presence of non-thumbnail YouTube links in the SERP. Vanessa also mentions that the engines are all integrating their results because while us savvy folk know to click the Image or Video or Shopping tabs to find targeted content, average users don’t even acknowledge the existence of specialized search tabs.

Without further ado, here’s the video (broken into two parts because YouTube will not hook me up with an account that allows segments over 10 minutes long).

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Things I Hate About MySpace

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by rebecca

I hate MySpace, but then again, so does most everyone else. It’s not news or anything, but it’s just after Christmas and posting is light lately, so I thought I’d get this out of the way before the new year hits and Rand’s bugging me to put up actual, relevant posts.

Anyway, I created an account a few years ago, and within the last year I’ve been letting my account awkwardly hang out by the punch bowl while I make out in a corner with Facebook. Today I logged in for the first time in eons, and I was so frustrated with the experience that I felt the need to share it with my other MySpace-haterz. So, in no particular order, here are things that I hate about MySpace:

It takes eons to load anything. What the crap? I have a cable modem, and it feels like I’m back in 1999 trying to download an Our Lady Peace song on a dialup connection. Why the heck does it take forever to load anything on MySpace? I was trying to load a user’s image, for crying out loud, and it went something like this:
- Click on "Album"
- Click on first photo
- Wait
- Refresh
- Wait
- First photo loads
- Click on photo to see second photo
- Wait
- Wait
- Wait
- Click "Refresh" eighteen times
- Blank page loads
- Raise fists towards the heavens and curse the visual STD that is MySpace
Every 3rd click brings up some "internal error." It’s ridiculous.
Photo albums don’t give you a "Image 1 of x" status, so I click aimlessly through someone’s album until I realize that I’ve rounded the bend and am 1/3 through it again.
I don’t receive any more emails notifying me when I have a new friend request, new comment, or new anything. I understand that it’s a ploy to get you to log in regularly to see if you’ve gotten anything new, but I don’t do that because I largely hate the site, so unless I get some sort of heads up ("Hey Rebecca, we know you hate our site, but your friend just posted a comment so maybe you want to take a looksee"), I’ll continue to only log in once every few months to spy on folks I went to high school with (which is the only semi-useful thing MySpace is good for).
It’s made a half-ass attempt to emulate Facebook while still looking as ugly as Michael Douglas between facelifts. I’ve noticed that MySpace has added "Friend Updates" and the ability to tag people in photos, but it feels slapped together and is still wedged between blinking ads, AdSense, crappy featured profiles, and other nausea-inducing atrocities.
I’m in my extended network? If I look at my profile page, it says "rebecca is in your extended network." Uh, yeah, I know that because I’m Rebecca, and that profile you’re showing me is actually mine. Meanwhile, Facebook is smart enough to know when you’re looking at your own profile, and thus it personalizes your profile page with things like "What are you doing right now?", "View photos of me," etc.
All of the junk I don’t care about is front and center on my profile page. To the left is my profile picture, and to the right is a huge ad, "Cool new videos," a "Featured Profile," and "MySpace Links" I don’t give a rat’s ass about. There’s also "Sponsored Links" and a "Featured on Myspace: Comedy," all on my page. This kind of feels like MySpace’s page that they’re graciously allowing me to use a teeny part of. I will acknowledge that I use the "classic" view (the "new home skin" isn’t much better–it looks like a cheap Facebook knockoff and shoves all of the ads and crap to the left column) because I don’t give a damn about customizing my profile, seeing as how all of the "customized" profiles adrift in the MySpace Sea are akin to loud, obnoxious, fuschia colored, blinking Christmas light-adorned party cruises, while mine is a boring but smooth-sailing and sturdy rowboat.
The "New birthdays!" notification basically shows me any and all birthdays, past, present, and future, within a half-month radius. Today it showed me Scott’s birthday, which was about 10 days ago, CK Chung’s birthday, which was December 12, and my friend Kevin’s birthday, which was December 11. It wouldn’t surprise me if my friends are getting a "New birthday!" notification informing them that mine is just around the corner on August 6th.

I’d post more complaints, but frankly this site isn’t worth any more of my time. I know that some of you will undoubtedly post in the comments various ways I can fix #4 or how I can tweak #7 or whatever, but while I could feasibly fix a couple of these things on my own, the bulk of it is MySpace’s offense, and it’s really infuriating that they put out a sloppy service and aren’t on the ball about making positive changes to their site’s look, functionality, and user experience. I don’t care how many people use MySpace or how successful it is right now–I think they could really stand to improve their site if they want to retain even more of a userbase.

Oh, and I’m sorry for ranting, but someone emailed me a while back and complained to me that 1/10 of my posts are of a negative or complaining nature, and I thought "Hmm, that’s only 10%. Surely I can keep that going." So, in order to meet my internal quota, here’s the negative post. Happy Friday, everyone!

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Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide - Part IV Continued: Titles, Meta Data & URL Structures

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Title Tags

The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page’s content. It creates value in three specific areas (covered below) and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization:

Title Element in Mozilla Firefox Browser
The NFL’s homepage features the title tag "Official Site of the National Football League"

The title tag of any page appears at the top of Internet browsing software, but this location has been noted to receive a relatively small amount of attention from users, making it the least important of the three.

"National Football League" appears in bold at the top of the search result listing for www.nfl.com

Using keywords in the title tag means that search engines will "bold" (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms. This helps garner a greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.

Keyyword Use in Title Tag from Ranking Factors
Keyword Use in the Title Tag (from Search Engine Ranking Factors)

The final important reason to create descriptive, keyword-laden title tags is for ranking at the search engines. The above screenshot comes from SEOmoz’s survey of 37 influential thought leaders and practitioners in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword use in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, following best practices for title tag creation makes for terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:

Be Mindful of Length - 65 characters is the maximum amount that will display in the search results (the engines will show an ellipsis - "…" to indicate when a title tag has been cut off), and sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you’re targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.
Place Important Keywords Close to the Front - The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they’ll be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results (at least, according to SEOmoz’s testing and experience).
Leverage Branding - At SEOmoz, we love to start every title tag with a brand name mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach - think about what matters to your site (or your client’s) and
Consider Readability and Emotional Impact - Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results and can help to invest visitors in your site. Thus, it’s to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor’s first interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive impression possible.

For more advice on title tag optimization, see this post from SEOmoz - Best Practices for Title Tags.

Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally intended to provide a proxy for information about a website’s content. Each of the basic meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use:

Meta Robots
This tag can be used to control search engine spider activity (for all of the major engines) on a page level (for site-wide spider control, the robots.txt file is a better choice). There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines treat a page:
- Index/NoIndex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines’ index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex," the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary.
- Follow/NoFollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute.
- Noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the "cached" link in the search results.
- Nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page’s title and URL in the search results.
- NoODP is a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.
- NoYDir, like NoODP, is specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo! Directory description of a page/site in the search results
SYNTAX: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, NOODP">

The tag above would tell spiders to index the page, refrain from archiving a copy while following the links and refraining from using DMOZ as a description in the search results.
Meta Description
The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page’s content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results:

The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords (notice how Google "bolds" the searched keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.

Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters (as in the Balboa Park example above), so it’s generally wise to stay in these limits.

SYNTAX: <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="YOUR PAGE’S DESCRIPTION">

For more on meta description tags, see Making the Most of Meta Description Tags from the SEOmoz blog.
Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization. For more on the history and a full acount of why meta keywords has fallen in disuse, read Meta Keywords Tag 101 from SearchEngineLand.
Meta Refresh, Meta Revisit-After, Meta Content Type, etc. - although these tags can have uses for search engine optimization, they are less critical to the process and so I’ll leave them to John Mueller of Google’s Webmaster Central division to answer in greater detail - Meta Tags & Web Search.

URL Structures

URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations, including:

URL appearing in search results
Above, the green text shows the URL for SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards

Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact clickthrough and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents and those pages whose names include the queried serach terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.

URL in browser
The URL as it appears in the browser window

URLs make an appearance in the web browser’s address bar, and while this generally has little impact on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences.

URL as a Link
The URL above is used as the link anchor text pointing to the referenced page in this blog post.

URLs are frequently utilized as links by third parties, and as such, carry anchor text that is interpreted by search engines and users alike. Short, descriptive, compelling, keyword-laden URLs can thus provide both click-through and search ranking benefits.

Below are several guidelines to construct great URLs:

Employ Empathy
Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you’d expect to find on the page, your URLs are appropriately descriptive. You don’t need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.
Shorter is Better
While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails, blog posts, text messages, etc) and fully visible in the search results.
Keyword Use is Important (but Overuse is Dangerous)
If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don’t go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes - overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters (from email clients, search engines, and even people!).
Go Static
With technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, there’s no excuse not to create simple, static URLs. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing (SEOmoz itself switched from dynamic URLs - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog?id=123, to static URLS - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls, in 2007 and saw a 15% rise in search traffic over the following 6 weeks).
Choose Descriptives Whenever Possible
Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize information, use real words. For example, a URL like www.thestore.com/hardware/screwdrivers is far more usable and valuable than www.thestore.com/cat33/item4326.
Use Hyphens to Separate Words
Not all of the search engines accurately interpret separators like underscore "_," plus "+," or space "%20," so use the hyphen "-" character to separate words in a URL, as in the SEOmoz 11 Best Practices for URLs example above.

For more information about URL Structure, see the SEOmoz post - 11 Best Practices for URLs.

Sorry I’ve been away from the blog so long. I needed a break, and am finally getting a bit of a real holiday. SEOmoz is closed tomorrow (New Year’s Eve) and Tuesday (New Year’s Day), but we’ll be back up and running Wednesday, January 2nd and are looking forward to bringing you more great stuff in the New Year.

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New Year’s Resolutions for Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by randfish

It’s common for people to enter a new year with a resolution, but this year, I thought I’d try something entirely new (and probably overflowing with hubris) and assign New Year’s resolutions to the big players in the search market. Thus, without further ado…

Google should resolve to:

Build more search demand with the money they’ve amassed. At 70-75% of market share, their focus in engineering should be, jointly, on improving quality (which is already very high) and continuing to experiment with new ideas for the SERPs (and beyond). More importantly, though, is to make search an even more essential part of life - and second nature to more of the human race. I still know plenty of tech savvy folks who don’t instantly think "I should search for that" when questions arise. Through marketing, advertising, or other creative outlets, Google should work to capture those minds.
Clone Matt Cutts and find others like him. Matt does a brilliant job of representing Google to an exceptionally antagonistic community. Google’s other products need their own Matt and web search needs another dozen of him. My advice would be to select individuals who are already cut out for the work, rather than hiring public relations experts and sending them through press training - that’s not the way Google should want to be perceived, and it could hurt them in the long run to craft their image rather than remain au natural. Oh yeah - and get them to blog and comment as openly and candidly as Matt does.
End the paid links debate of 2007 by responding to all the issues with a few sentences. Something like

Feel free to link however you like for whatever reasons you like. Use nofollow as you please or ignore it if you’d prefer. Google was built on an open concept of the web and we will not ever tell you how to run your business or your site. For Google’s rankings process, we use a lot of different signals to help tell us how to weight links. Links that we perceive to be less valuable, either because of how they were acquired, the relationships between the linking parties, or a lack of relevance may be weighted lower, or possibly discounted altogether. If you use nofollow to show us which links present a potential conflict of interest (paid links, comment spam, etc.), we certainly appreciate it, but we also build algorithmic methods to sniff out and discount links we’d prefer not to count. If you see the PageRank in your toolbar drop, that’s just our method of letting potential buyers of links on your site know that they might want to save their money - we’re not penalizing you or the sites you link to, just removing links from our graph that we don’t think are valuable to the ranking algorithms.

Yahoo! should resolve to:

Win back searcher’s hearts and minds through advertising, branding, guerrilla marketing, and creativity. Their search is nearly as good as Google’s for 80%+ of queries and probably better for a fair 10% (the other 10% is considerably worse, but that’s for engineering to handle). They need their users to start thinking about them as a search destination again. Create a story and make it resonate - make it compelling. Make it so my grandmother hears about it from her friends, not just her TV.
Take a bold leap with blended search, possibly along the lines of what Ask 3D has done. Remind us that YouTube isn’t the only video site on the web and that Flickr really is the best image search out there.
Buy Yelp or CitySearch and make Yahoo! local a superior product to what Google has. it’s not that much of a challenge, but it will be if you wait too long.
Buy Technorati and make a Yahoo! blog search that’s better than Google’s. Once again, it’s not hard to do now, but when Google turns their energy towards blog search, it will pay to be a few steps ahead.

Microsoft should resolve to:

Let Live/MSN Search loose from Microsoft corporate. Build the division the same way you built Xbox - as a completely separate company of innovators and fresh minds. Don’t let the Microsoft hierarchy or corporate structure or even the aesthetics overlap. Just let it sink or swim on its own (with lots of funding, of course).
Spend double the marketing and advertising budget (whatever that may be) on engineering. The product itself is still so far behind that it’s not usable. Yes, there have been tremendous leaps, particularly in the last 6 months, but no matter what the user survey satisfaction numbers are saying, the relevance still isn’t up to Yahoo!’s and Google’s. Advertising and contests earned you a little bit of extra share and plenty of extra searches in 2007, but you’re a long-term kinda company, so think long term. Invest in the product quality now and market it later. Or heck, do both - you’re sitting on a mountain of cash reserves and it’s hard to imagine a project with more potential return.
Change the name back to MSN. It’s one of the most recognized brands on the planet - I love that Live was going to be something completely new, but there’s still time to re-brand without losing anything.

Ask should resolve to:

Get a crawl rate and index size similar to Google’s. It’s hard to tell how good their algorithms and vertical integration is with such a small slice of the pie. The rumor that Ask hand-approves websites runs rampant in the SEO community - end it by investing in the hardware and the people to make a truly competitive index.
Make an iPhone-like interface. As the search company with the greatest ability to innovate the results page, go for broke and make something so inspiring to use that every tech geek in the world can’t wait to show it off. BTW - A good place to start is by making a gorgeous mobile search interface for the iPhone itself. Capturing those early adopters worked for Google, and it can work for you.

p.s. Credit where credit is due - this post was actually Mystery Guest’s idea. Thanks angel, it’s really tough getting back on the blog bandwagon after so much time off

p.p.s. Happy New Year!

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Thursday Roundup for the Week of 12/16/07

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by rebecca

It’s Thursday, so you know what that means: another installment of Roundup Thursday! This week, I’m implementing a more formal layout that will be executed in every recap post from here on out. Hope you enjoy it!

That being said…

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

SEO specialist for the Seattle Children’s Hospital in Seattle, WA (hint, hint - SEOmoz is their search agency)
SEO specialist for the Latitude Group in London, UK
SEO specialist for Rocket Spider in Sheffield, UK
E-Services producer in Danville, CA
Senior designer in Danville, CA
Internet marketing coordinator for On Target in Denver, CO
Jr. SEO specialist in Jersey City, NJ
PHP web developer for Digitally Imported in New York, NY
Account manager for Rise Interactive in Boca Raton, FL
Sales consultant and account manager for Rise Interactive in Chicago, IL
Application developer for Rise Interactive in Tamarindo, Guana, Costa Rica

Featured companies:

Featured resumes:

Katherine Watier

New events added to the Events Calendar:

Current Issues in Complex IP Licensing on March 6, 2008 in Phoenix, AR
BlogOnExpo January 15-18, 2008 (digital conference)

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

The NY Times, ReadWriteWeb, and this interview with Peter Norvig, Google director of research, all state that Google admits to using actual, living breathing people for feedback on their search results along with user clicks/their algorithm. Danny Sullivan countered with a "Yawn, we already knew this k thanks" response on Search Engine Land - 2 stars (that’s right, we’re rating the links in our roundups!).
Eric Enge interviews Sep Kamvar, engineering lead for personalization at Google. It’s a fairly standard interview that covers the definition of personalization and basic factors Google uses, which is why this link gets 3 out of 5 Moz Stars.
Stephan Spencer brings us another solid interview for Roundup Thursday, this time with Matt Cutts. Some of their topics of discussion include social bookmarking links, the "value" myth of .edu links, are poorly constructed site maps really just doorway pages, and more. It’s a good interview, but it’s fairly long.
Apollo SEM brings us a comprehensive step-by-step on how to expose Adwords keyword data beyond "other unique queries" in search query reports. After implementing the changes, you should be able to see the exact search query a user typed in that brought him/her to your ad.
FoundRead provides a post about Startup Math, and how 1+1 = 1/2 due to the time and effort it takes to train a new hire. It’s a cheeky observation, which is why I give it 4 stars.
PBS has a piece about how journalists and bloggers suck at startups. It posits that the failure rate is due to writers thinking they know more than they actually do, and their excitement at being a part of something rather than just covering it or writing about it. It’s a pretty interesting (and kind of depressing–guess I’m doomed to never succeed at startups) article.
Jon Mendez wrote his top 10 multivariate and A/B testing results in 2007. This is a really interesting list, and a lot of factors that you wouldn’t think would make a difference in conversions indeed made a big difference. We may need to test a few of these out for ourselves, as we’re in the process of tweaking our landing pages.
Portent Interactive had a staff linkbait contest, and the winner created PPC Villain. The "Internet Marketing Domination Seminar" video (link to bigger video on YouTube) is very amusing if you’re in the industry (which I am, so I thought it was funny, which is why I’m giving it…)
(From Rand - had to add this one) Rae Hoffman’s blog, as many who’ve talked to her over the past few months have found out, can’t rank for crap. It’s in what appears to be a virtual replica of the old "sandbox effect" we used to see so often from 2004-2006. Her explanation and walkthrough is brilliant and gives you some good insight into just how remarkably unfair Google’s ranking algo can be when they falsely suspect/detect negative attributes on a domain. BTW - Just because Rae’s very smart about how black and gray hat practices operate doesn’t mean she is one - in fact, looking over her new stuff, there isn’t a domain she’s working on currently that she’d be afraid to show to the search engineers. Like Rae, I think the problem with her blog is a Google glitch or false positive on spam detection, and nothing personal.

Woo, that’s quite the roundup I served all of you! Expect something like this every week, and I hope you enjoyed this week’s version of web goodness.

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Whiteboard Friday - “Changing Context”

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Posted by great scott!

Hey Gang! This week Rand talks to NetConcepts’ CEO, Stephan Spencer, about cloaking and redirection via black hat, gray hat, and white hat methods. This is pretty high-level stuff but incredibly interesting, even if it is of questionable Glegality (that’s Google Legality, heyooo!). Is it effective? It sure as hell can be. Will it get you into trouble? Well, only if you get caught I suppose, which is why Google is rumored to have the "Boser Tool" that they use to try and keep an eye out for this stuff.

Anyway, enjoy the video and happy holidays to all of you wonderful, beautiful folks! We’ll be back next week with another brand new Whiteboard Friday.

p.s. For those who may not be aware, Stephan’s blog was hacked this week - sorry about that, buddy

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