Posted by invseo This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. In the past few months, I have been watching a very unsettling trend unfold in very competitive ecommerce search results on Google. It appears that huge amounts of money are put into place to systematically and successfully manipulate highly competitive search terms in order to sell fake merchandise of almost every bigger brand out there. Some of these sites even solely exist to steal people̵

HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella visited Harvard this week and shared some of his research about the science of social media as it applies to marketing.  Dan attends many events where  people share social media advice and most of it is what he calls ‘unicorns and rainbows.’ Stuff like ‘engage in the conversation’ or ‘hug your followers.’ It’s good sounding advice, and hard to disagree with. He says, “I am not going to tell you to punch your customers in the face. The problem is that it’s not based on anything more substantial than what ‘feels right&rsq

Two years ago, 2009 was announced as the year of mobile marketing. When we entered 2010, the marketing community again held our breath for that moment of utter mobile innovation. Now that 2011 is here, everyone is sure this will be the year of mobile. Or is it? These hopes and hesitations were thoroughly discussed during the mobile marketing session at MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Summit. Neal Narayani, Director of Marketing at Caesars Entertainment, shared how his company’s adoption of mobile marketing resulted in higher revenue. Here are some of the takeaways from his presentation: Don’t Annoy People The first piece of a

In early December, Twitter posted that in 2010 alone they added more than 100 million new registered accounts and saw 25 billion Tweets. This impressive growth begs the question – where are all of these new users coming from? Earlier this month, I posted an article about usage in the US with a map that illustrated how states compared to each other in terms of Twitter users per capita. If we compare the 2009 rankings to those of 2010, we see that 9 states made the top 10 both years in a row. The exceptions, however, were Maine (which fell down to the 11th spot in 2010) and Utah which saw a huge jump from 43% below the average to 2

Wow — it’s almost February. January is flying by with too many meetings and the always lovable planning activities. In this whirlwind, it is easy to miss some interesting marketing news that could affect future strategies. So in case you missed it, check out these 10 stories that will help you catch up to this busy week in marketing. 10 Marketing Stories to Know This Week 1. The 6 Essential Steps to Writing a ?Killer Press Release – While many people may want the press release to die, it is still hanging around. The folks at Copyblogger outline steps for writing one that can drive results. 2. How To Use Twitter To Boost Yo

Got writer’s block again? Keeping the blog articles flowing on a consistent basis can be difficult. Get creative and blog about current events, trends, local news, celebrities, and even the weather! Get with the times to get more blog visitors. Blogging about news and current events helps demonstrate that you are at the pulse of your industry. Additionally, writing about timely subjects and connecting them to your business, can drive additional traffic from search engines and social media. People are more likely to share information that has novelty and that they feel others in their network might not know about yet. When there is act

Posted by caseyhen Hello mozzers!  Wow, my first post as a Moz staffer and it’s not even something I wrote or recorded, I promise the training wheels will come off soon.  This week Rand dives into a topic that many of you have asked about in our Pro Q&A, “Interlinking my websites, can I do it?” As an SEO you can almost guarantee that you will be asked; “Why can’t I just buy 100 domains and link them back to my website with amazing anchor text and then conquer the world?” Rand give some helpful hints on when it is appropriate to link to your other sites and when it’s not such

If you don’t have any compelling offers on your site today, you’re ignoring a huge opportunity to grow the size of your email list. This is true whether you’re an ecommerce site or a B2B company – offers are one of the most effective ways to harvest email addresses and leads from your site traffic.  Keep reading for enticing offers that deliver real value for your visitors and help grow your email reach when the offer is placed behind a landing page. You’ll want to note that your boring quarterly newsletter is NOT featured below Below are 21 ideas for offers that can help dramatically increase the size of

In episode 5 of Inbound Now, Christoper S. Penn (@cspenn), vice president of strategy & innovation over at Blue Sky Factory joins us to share some valuable insights on podcasting and email marketing best practices. Chris is an avid blogger and has been in the podcasting game since it’s inception in early 2004.  In this episode we talk about: Podcasting for Business – the dos and don’ts, how to get started with it. Email Marketing Best Practices – How to avoid common mistakes & how to tie social media in with your email marketing. An invaluable twitter search tip that will help you fi

There are a lot of acronyms in the internet marketing world, but here’s an important one: CMS. The following post is a 101-style article to dig into exactly what that means. CMS stands for content management system, a tool that a person can use to design, manage, and publish a website. There are tons of CMS tools out there. Some are big, small, robust, simple, free, expensive, and everywhere in-between. So how do they work? Well, each solution is a little different. For example, HubSpot’s CMS tool has little modules you can rearrange and edit, like you would text in a Word document. Others may be elaborate and focus on detailed