Posted by iPullRank  We can all agree that a large timesink in outreach link building is site prospecting. Who really wants to spend the time to go through a bunch of pages on a site to figure out if the site is worthwhile? Further, if you’re following the “Throw Away Your Form Letters” principles then you are looking for content on a blogger or webmaster’s site that is of interest in order to start a conversation – but that takes a lot of time too. It would be awesome to scale that process wouldn’t it? Now, there’s an app for that. I had the idea that if I spidered a site and matched the URLs

Behind every successful search engine optimization strategy is a great link-building plan to bring in new inbound links to your website’s best pages. This is also the step where many SEO strategies fall apart. Link building is hard work, and it’s very different than what many people have done before. However, inbound links are still the most important ranking factor to Google and other search engines, so it is critically important that you do great link building if you intend to rank for competitive keywords. Because one of the best link-building tactics available is guest blogging, let’s examine a step-by-step plan for ho

Posted by Sam Crocker 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. Hi Mozzers! Today I wanted to share with you a recent experience that highlights the value of hiring an inbound marketer/strategist prior to launch of a new product and some recent success a project I worked on has had in generating loads of links, tons of Twitter hype, some great traffic – and most importantly some solid lead generation… with just a holding page. Obvious discla

This is a guest post written by Pam Sahota. Pam is a marketing communications/social media manager and freelance blogger who loves Boston, photography, charity events, sushi, wine, and the Red Sox. Marketing and sales teams must work hand-in-hand in order to provide a company with the leads and profits it needs to grow and succeed. But let’s back-track a bit. Exactly how does a marketing team help a sales team with those leads once they’re generated? It should all start with a content map for lead nurturing, which can help a marketing team nurture existing leads into more qualified leads for their sales team. As a result, these

Posted by jamesagate 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. Cyrus Shepard’s Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text Whiteboard Friday back at the start of September inspired me to run an experiment. Cyrus pointed out that there has been some evidence to suggest that the exact match anchor text link may not be the holy-grail it once was. I wanted to test the theory out for myself though and try to delve a little deeper into the effectiveness of different

Special guests Brian Whalley and Janet Aronica hosted last week’s episode of Marketing Update. Brian and Janet discussed new LinkedIn company features, Steve Jobs, rooftop QR codes, the state bar of Wisconsin encouraging inbound marketing, and how few marketers target US Hispanics with Spanish-speaking Facebook pages.  New LinkedIn Company Features Brian and Janet explained how the newly released LinkedIn company status updates are useful for B2B companies to engage with their networks. Now businesses can control which employees are able to post updates that appear on their company LinkedIn page. This is a great new method of sen

Advertising Age has a cautionary tale about the recent Target.com redesign which calls out some of the many problems that can arise during a large ecommerce project like this. As I am in the middle of a significant ecommerce website redesign myself, I am always keen to hear about the redesign experiences of other online stores so that I can learn from their best practices and mistakes. ReadWriteWeb follows up (piles on?) on the AdAge article with their own lessons learned from Target’s experience and UserTesting.com highlights user experience issues encountered by their own test subjects with some enlightening videos. Of all the comme

Posted by Slingshot SEO 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. Subdomains! The bane of many SEO-conscious organizations, there is an easy solution right under your nose. By using subfolders in place of subdomains, you can unite your content under one domain. But What if two sites exist on two different servers? A reverse proxy can make the technical implementation quite simple. With that one change, the URL http://blog.slingshotseo.com/ becomes ht

Because content creation is core to inbound marketing, part of being a marketer now means being some form of a journalist. Therefore, to find success in inbound marketing, marketers must now master the art of marketalism.   Marketing + Journalism = Marketalism.   Marketalism [mar-keht-uh-liz-em] noun, verb:1.    the merge between the rudiments of traditional journalism and using content for marketing2.    to create content that is relevant and timely for professionals in a specified industry Still not convinced? Here are 4 lessons marketers can learn from journalists. 1. Create Important Con

Posted by Aaron Wheeler A couple of weeks ago, Rand went over his general SEO checklist for new websites. It’s a great resource to reference and help give your site that initial advantage other new sites don’t have. Keep in mind, though, that there are other factors at play when trying to rank in the local results specifically, and in many countries, like Peru, targeting local results is one of the best ways to start ranking. On this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines some of the specific strategies and actions you can take to target local SERPs specifically (though many of these strategies apply to general SEO as wel