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Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
A comprehensive guide to the practice of search engine optimization for those unfamiliar with the subject. The guide covers dozens of areas of SEO including keyword research, page optimization, site structure, link building and more.

The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website
This guide was developed specifically to help website developers, executives, marketing personnel and online publishers navigate the often-complicated process of launching or modifying a website to enable the highest potential of traffic from the major search engines (Yahoo!, Google & MSN). Inside, you'll find a carefully organized set of processes with tips, examples and illustrations that highlight the challenges and expose the opportunities for building a search-friendly website. Luckily, we've mixed in a bit of humor and a plethora of illustrations to help keep the material engaging.


URLs and Domains Tools

Term Target

Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.

Term Target

Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.

SEO Toolbox

A collection of Free SEO Tools that check Backlinks, PageRank, Inclusion, Indexing, Authority, Age, HTTP Status Code, Whois Data, and Outbound Links.

Term Extractor

The term extractor tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines.

Crawl Test

This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website - it examines title tags, http response codes, cache dates and presence in the search engine indexes.

URLs and Domains Q&A Discussions


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URLs and Domains Blog Posts


Older Sites Succeeding?
In the initial testing of the survey, one fact that consistently appears in the results that rank in the top 10 are sites that have been around a long time. Obviously, these sites have had greater time to build links & content, but there appears to be little correlation between these it...

Static vs. Dynamic URLs
Many in the SEO world have long questioned the neccessity of re-writing dynamic URLs - those that pull content from databases - into static URLs that appear to end with a finite .php/.asp/.html/etc. A dynamic URL is often criticized by search optimizers because of the difficulties search ...

Gonna Set it Straight this Watergate
To borrow from the Beastie Boys, Google's "crystal ball ain't so crystal clear". It appears that a successful sabotaging of a website is easier than one might hope. lots0 at Threadwatch points out that using the non-canonic...

Domain Buyers Anonymous
A few of the more prominent spammers at SEOChat have come out to play in a thread on the subject of domain registration. Geof starts off by noting that he's recently purchased 500 new domains, all of which will probably be b...

Bad Information from SEO-News
Following Nick's lovely recommendations for community building, I'll be doing a bit of link baiting in this thread. Actually, that's a lie; I'm just ticked off about this article from SEO News' Rob Sullivan about a conference call he had with some Google employees. I'll just refute...

Dirty Deeds at AdSense
Donna's got a good post on the topic of paying for the sins of former domain owners and why buying that old domain name may not be as worthwhile as you may think. From Donna: Should we pay for the sins of a former domain owner? Moral of the story...If the search engines...

Rules of Domain Name Selection
Domain name selection gets tougher and tougher as more names get snapped up. If you're unwilling (or unable) to afford buying an old domain (which I highly recommend), your best option is to follow some of these basic rules for domain name selection: Keywords are Nice, But they Don't Matter MuchDon't choose a domain name based on keywords in the URL. If you can't ge...

Sitepoint - Where Sites are Sold
Sitepoint's Website Marketplace is one of the more interesting forums to watch on the web. It's also a great way to predict the quick-sale value of a web property (by which I mean the price to...

Brief Contest Update
The v7n...etc. contest is in full swing, with Google and Yahoo! reporting respectable numbers of results in 5 figures. Sadly, the linkdomain searches to the new domains that are ranking aren't quite accurate (I hope). Either that or domain names really do carry a lot of weight in helping to rank. Note some of the leaders: www.watching-paint-dry.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem ...

Selling off an Old Project
I just posted this to Sitepoint's buy & sell forum, but I thought it was worth a mention here, too. SEOmoz is selling an old site, BeautySteals.com, that we simply can't manage any longer. The site is...

Quick Take on .co.uk vs. .com
Lots of questions popping up lately about how to rank well on Google.co.uk vs. Google.com. Danny shared this nugget of gold at SEW today: google uk is going to favor uk based sites by default, even if you don't use the pages from the uk option. you want to do well ...

Apache - Redirect an Index File to Your Domain Without Looping
The saga of redirecting all requests to http://www.seomoz.org/index.php to point to http://www.seomoz.org/ has finally come to an end. We now practice what we preach. For those who are not familiar, it's important to have all duplicate content point to a single, "canonical" edition of the content. Requests to index.php and requests to www.seomoz.org/ have the same content even though they have ...

Domain Names Are Important?
Aaron's got an interesting post noting that a search for "Aaron Wall" at Google brings up his personal site before SEOBook.com, despite the latter being the clear leader in every facet of "optimization" (anchor text, number of links, power of links, etc.). It's even ranki...

Beauty in URLs
Mike Schinkel has an older, but golden post on the beauty of URLs. There's nothing revolutionary here, but since I've been seeing so many ugly URLs in the SERPs lately (have hyphens and subdomains made a comeback with BigDaddy or is it just me?), I have to step in. A few of his rules include: Well De...

New TLD for Canadian Government
Thanks to Ian Mcanerin, who suggested the Canadian government's new TLD - .gov.ca (the humble fellow isn't taking credit, far too gentlemanly). The debate on what to choose was relatively interesting, with the French Canadian contigent complaining bitterly that .gouv.ca was not the choice. B...

How to Launch a New Site
This morning, Conde Nast "launched" Brides.com, a new portal that combines content from Brides, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride magazine (why a once-in-a-lifetime event has three monthly magazines from one publisher is beyond me, but most thing wedding-related are). ...

Research & Statistics on the Availability of Domain Names
Dennis Forbes of Pragmatic Software Development put out a terrific post last week on domain name availability (or lack thereof). The following chart shows the percentage of domain names that are taken for 3, 4 5 and 6 letter combinations: ...

Country-Specific Targeting
When it comes to the search engines and country-specific content or searches, there are several obvious variables the engines use to determine the geography of a particular site or company: TLD (.com or .co.uk or .ca for example) Hosting (Is the site hosted in the UK, the US, Canada?) Inbound links (Are they primarily from US sites, UK ...

11 Best Practices for URLs
I could have sworn that someone has already a great post or forum thread on this topic, but I can't seem to find it (no matter how advanced my operators). I'm sure Mr. Malicoat has it in his bookmarks, but since blog posts are one of my personal systems for public bookmarking, here goes. Eleven Guidelines to Successful URLs...

Bizarre Handling of a 301
Normally, I'm not the type to point out ranking problems we have at our domains, but I thought this one was so particularly odd that it warranted some attention. As some folks may have noticed, we 301'd web2.0awards.org over to www.seomoz.org/web2.0/. It was always our intention to do this once we'd given the Google sandbox a thorough ...

Grabbing Expiring Domains
Since domain purchasing has become a major part of SEO (some would say it always has been), and considering how valuable expiring domain names can be, I figured dredging up Mike Davidson's old post on the subject was worthwhile: So if do...

12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name
For 99% of the projects we take on, a domain is already part of the equation. However, in some circumstances, we've been called on to provice advice for naming a domain, either for a new blog, a company launch or even just a friend's website. Below, I've listed 12 tips I find indispensable when helping people select a great domain name.

Want to Make Up Stupid Words? Then Create a Social Media Site!
That was my first attempt at one of Rand's SEO comics, so hopefully I did the Boss Man proud. I really don't have much to offer in this blog post except DEAR GOD, these social media sites'...

Ranking Factors Version 2 Released
In August, 2005, SEOmoz launched the first series of ranking factors. We asked a dozen folks in the SEO world to vote on the importance of over 100 unique factors surmised to be part of the search engines' ranking algorithms. Today, we've released a new version that addresses many of the issues that frustrated users of the first...

Best Practices for URL Formatting (aka how does Amazon deal with multi-URLs for same pages?)
I have several questions about URL formatting.  I'll start with some questions about Amazon, and then relate them to where I work every day.  But, I think the questions, and their answers, are broadly relevant to those with URL formatting questions.1) How does Amazon get away with having multiple URLs for the same website pages?  Don't bots penalize them ...

That Settles It...Right? Underscores vs Dashes
“Do not speak unless you can improve the silence” I still see many blogs that use underscores in the URL -- ../this_is_my_postBut from an SEO perspective, we've always been told dashes are the way to go, since older programming languages and PHP use the underscore with variables.. and then there's ...

My Personal Opinion - 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors
I think that sometimes we in the field of search marketing try to make the practice more difficult than it really is. True - there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank w...

Don't Link Here: default.aspx, index.html, index.php, and So On...
I originally asked Vanessa Fox to write a post about this topic, but she got real busy with her recent life changes.  Then I asked someone else to do it (sorry, can't remember who) and they never did it either so . . . I'll do it!Search Engine Optimizers love to talk about duplicate content, 301 redirects, .htaccess files, and a million other closely related items, however, ...

The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO
For as long as I can remember, the best way for me to learn has been to do. I have gone through countless checklists while trying to understand search engine optimization. The following is a compilation of the most useful checklists I have completed in order to learn SEO. My intent is that this list can be used by people who are inexperienced in SEO but want to learn more. (As a bonus I included h...

The Beginner's Checklist for Small Business SEO
For the last three months I have been hard at work learning SEO by optimizing a local small business website. The business is called Giggly Wiggly Preschool and is located in the Seattle suburb Issaquah, Washington. This Issaquah Preschool was the preschool I attended many years ago so I am happy I was given the chance to give bac...

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet
Update: New file includes many new additions from suggestions made in comments. In an effort to return to my roots, I spent the majority of the day compiling what I believe to be the mother of all technical SEO cheat sheets. The recommended viewing format of this cheat sheet is as a PDF rather than the traditional blog post (I found the blog posts inconvenient to print)...

Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
You would think that if someone didn’t know what they were searching for, they would stop looking. Yet everyday, I talk to people who aimlessly spend their time and energy looking for some far away holy grail. As a SEO my quest for success is a little better defined. I want to work on websites that drive immense traffic, be at the top of competitive SERPs and most of all, I wa...

Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate
Last week, I did a Whiteboard Friday, The Microsite Mistake, in which I called out a practice I see as potentially detimental to SEO - using a separate domain to accumulate links for your content site. I was not arguing against all microsite strategies or all domain separations or even all subdomains, just

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