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Hey Brian, it depends on your needs, your business goals, the amount of time you have, along with your existing relationships with people and entities who might be good prospects for linking to you.
My favorite new resource from MozCon is Paddy Moogan's 35 ways to get links in 35 minutes. Check it out and see what you think. In the presentation he mentions a number of tools and tactics for getting links that matter.
Yes, thanks for the reminder, Zeal. PRO tools show historical ranking data going back quite a ways. I don't remember exactly when they implemented this, but it's a great feature.
I see that this conversation is happening broadly in our industry under different names. For example, this recent post on Ethics and SEO is largely a demand for transparency and authenticity.
w00t - someone please send Dr. Pete a Duck of Awesomeness ASAP! 
I can't decide if I want a "TAGFEE" wrist band or a "WWRD?" wrist-band. How about one for each wrist?
I LOVE THE DUCK OF AWESOMENESS! I'm about to give special recognition to one of our front-end developers here and your post has inspired me to start a similar effort at REI... maybe something like "The Carabiner of Awesomeness" or something...
Many thanks for the great tip, Will!
Wow, I love what you're saying about feeling a sense of relief and boosting personal health with TAGFEE. I agree that there's a strong correlation (if not causation) between following the TAGFEE principles and reducing stress, building better relationships, and getting the most out of life... all of which boosts mental health and brings a positive outlook.
The interaction on this thread makes me giddy, too! In all my interactions with Mozzers in and out of your office and events, I see TAGFEE in action and it's inspiring. I hope to get to the Jedi-like level of well-being that you're at someday.
Hilarious indeed, sir! Actually, I'm more curious about what you're saying about empathy. It takes time and energy and a careful hand and lots of attention to detail. But like you said, it's really, really hard to scale.
So beyond producing high-quality products (your Bing Quality Score research, for example) that meet the needs of your audience, what are some other tips for scaling up empathy. Or is it something that simply cannot be stretched beyond individual interactions?
Agreed! But I'm still curious about what TAGFEE looks like at Distilled. With your great events and the tools that you've released to the community (I'm especially a fan of the lovely Excel Guide for SEO), I imagine that you've got some good tips to share with us.
I love what you're saying about how you "also like to help out other individuals and agencies in the digital marketing space by promoting great content we find online." I think this sort of generosity is genuinely missing from a lot of folks in our industry who are shameless self-promoters. Good, engaging content (and people!) should always be celebrated.
Wow, great response, Joanna! I love your point about "the better you exhibit one tenet the better you are off on all the others." I agree that success breeds success and that a small, positive spark in any one of these areas can help light up each of the others.
I also like how you've transitioned TAGFEE into areas outside of work - that's something that I'm working on as well as a husband, son, brother, student, neighbor, etc. But most of all, I think that the hardest struggle in this area is to be transparent and accountable to myself. Setting realistic expectations and holding myself accountable is somehow incredibly difficult while doing so with other people seems much easier.
Do you experience that phenomenon as well?
Hey Anthony, I really like your point about being up-front about results, even (or especially) when they're negative. I think this is the hallmark of any conscientious and transparent/accountable person, whether they work in marketing or otherwise. How do your clients respond to negative data or results and how do you respond to their response?
Great answer, Gyi. I particularly like your "G" point about offering free advice. I think this is one of the key ways that, working together, we'll all rehabilitate the SEO industry. I think there's a great opportunity here to re-brand SEO practitioners from snake oil salesmen into competent, data-driven inbound marketers. And the first step down the road is education and free advice, not treating SEO like a secret or charging upfront. Well said!
I've been a big believer in SEOmoz's TAGFEE tenents since stumbling on them a while back:
TAGFEE stands for "Transparent & Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional". It's the core set of guiding principles that makes SEOmoz great... and a great place to work.
And even though I don't work for SEOmoz, I find TAGFEE inspiring and something that I want to implement in many aspects of my own life and work. It has occurred to me more than once that TAGFEE is, in and of itself, just as much a tool for developing your work as Open Site Explorer, the browser toolbar, or the Linkscape Index.
So I'm curious: do folks outside SEOmoz use these principles at their workplaces? Or do Mozzers use them outside of work in their community/communities of practice?
These are two metrics highlighted in the "Organic Traffic Data" report in the PRO campaigns. Since this report is composed of data linked from Google Analytics, I bet there's a way to find this same information in GA.
So...anyone know how to do that in Google Analytics? I want this information for some long-tail productivity/potential research.
Just wanted to second everyone's good points made thus far and add in my own reminder: SEOs shouldn't design sites or write content for search engines at the expense of people (actual human customers). When we do this, we might earn (temporary) high rankings, but will be responsible for driving a high bounce rate because people can't actually use the site or understand how it helps them succeed at their goals.
Ideally, SEO and UX design are like chocolate and peanut butter: two great things that go even better together.
Fundamentally, I agree with the others: this page/site needs help with UX more than it does with SEO. The text is hard to read and doesn't seem to be written with human customers in mind. The experience looks like it's optimized for search engines rather than humans. This may help in driving traffic, but because the site looks untrustworthy, it probably results in a high bounce rate and low conversion.
I think that SEOs and UX design professionals can work together to solve problems like these by placing the human customer at the center of their strategy.
Best wishes and good luck!
Also see Rand's recent update to the search engine ranking factors. Keyword usage in <title>, <h1> and on-page content are all mentioned and measured.</p></title>
Interesting. When I look at the site in Open Site Explorer, it doesn't seem to return any kind of link metrics whatsoever, which is what you'd expect for a new site. Maybe the new Linkscape index update has solved this issue?
Hey Mozzerati, I'm curious if there's a way to expose and analyze historical data from each previous Linkscape/OpenSiteExplorer (OSE) update.
Essentially, I'm looking for something similar to MajesticSEO's Backlink History tool that can show you both daily links over a short time as well as cumulative links over a long period. I think the utility of such a tool is to see which competitors have gained many links over a short period, signalling that they're engaging in some form of link-building/-buying/-baiting activity.
Is there any way to yield this data (other than to record it manually after each Linkscape/OSE update) from SEOmoz PRO tools?
Ross asks and answers this question on his blog. He points to progress -- or perceived progress -- as being particularly important. This made me think about my own motivations and what gets me excited to "do SEO" each day:
But enough about me. What gets you going when it comes to SEO?
UPDATE: Here's a follow-up discussion from Sphinn about the most overrated SEO tactics.
Examples include:
Enjoy!
Looking over the discussion of underrated SEO tactics at http://sphinn.com/story/178993/ , I'm curious if folks here have any favorite SEO tactics that they feel are ignored, underrated, or somehow not appreciated by the community at large. Any thoughts?
Among the tactics listed in the Sphinn post:
Any others that should be included? I'd personally add segmenting your keyword traffic into trademark (those that mention your brand name) versus non-trademark segments for more thorough analysis.
Unforutnately, your elements are hidden inside comment tags. Here's what I'm seeing on the page when I perform a "View Source":
The comment tags are "". They're usually used to hide content from rendering on the client-side. Learn more about HTML comment tags here: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/misc/comment.html
Not sure why you'd contain these valid elements within comment tags, but that's why SEOmoz can't see them. I'd suggest that this is also not best practice for Google and other search engines, even if they've managed to extract them.
So: remove the two comment tags from your elements and you'll be back in the clear. Cheers!
I'm curious if anyone here running a large, complex, dynamic site has used the Apache server mod_rewrite module to simplify their site's URLs by rewriting them in a standard format.
The chief use of this module for SEO purposes would be to aid in canonicalization and reduce duplicate content. For example, you could easily convert all of you ALL CAPS or MixedCase URLs to lower case, change all "/index.html" URLs to just point to "/", change all word seperators to hyphens, and so on.
Any server-side ninjas out there with stories to tell?
Google Webmaster Tools -- create an account there if you don't already have one -- is also a useful way to find 404 errors and track down their sources. Once your account is setup, go to Diagnostics > Crawl Errors > HTTP (this is the deault tab for the "Crawl Errors" screen).
Assuming that your PPC landing page is going to be pretty similar to your main/SEO landing page in terms of <title>, <meta>, and other content, then don't forget to block your PPC landing page using <a title="http://www.robotstxt.org/" href="http://www.robotstxt.org/">robots.txt</a> so as to avoid the creation of duplicate content.</p> <p>Another option is to use the <a title="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical" href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical">canonical <link> element</a> on your PPC page pointing to the SEO page, but I'm not sure how effective this would be - better to simply avoid competing with yourself. :)</p></title>
Ryan, also be on the lookout for duplicate content, which is a constant challenge for most e-commerce sites. This can dilute your rankings and drive you down in the SERPs. SEOmoz has a great primer on what duplicate content is and what to do about it.
Hey UPform5, I think you're on the right track here, but the Google guidelines are a bit... blurry when it comes to tactics.
They say things like "[Don't create] Links intended to manipulate PageRank" - well, like eyepaq states, this is precisely what any link-building program ultiamtely wants to accomplish.
So I'm curious: in your experience, what are the brightest white hat link-building tactics that present the least amount of risk?
Thanks Pashmina - I think you really hit the nail on the head when it comes to traffic share.
I believe that tools like Hitwise and comScore can present some pretty compelling data around traffic share - have you used them, are they worth the cost, and do they work any better than the tools you list above?
Beyond the basic Google AdWords tool, I spend a lot of time going through Google Insights, which is especially good as a predictor of future searches instead of being purely backward-looking.
Open Site Explorer helps you see what keywords are being used in links. This is particularly helpful when researching what links your competitors are getting that you're not.
What metrics tell you the most when you're looking at your competitors across the search landscape?
What numbers speak volumes to you when you want to get an idea of how you benchmark against your competitors? And how do you communicate these results?
With our new knowledge -- yielded from J.C. Penney, Forbes, Overstock, content farms, et al -- that the link graph/link profile can be algorithmically mined by search engines to uncover non-natural patterns of links occuring over time, is there any level of link-building that is safe to engage in?
If so, then what are those "bright white"-hat tactics that are 100% safe for a site to use?
