SEOmoz: A Path to Power in Search Engine Optimization
by Spencer Wade
SEOmoz is one of the great names in SEO. Founded by Rand Fishkin, it has grown into the best website for SEO beginners. They have also developed online SEO tools that are possibly the best that can be found.
SEOmoz is an incredible asset due to the tremendous amount of free SEO information that can be accessed through their site. The SEOmoz blog is always full of SEO tips and case studies, and their Whiteboard Friday is an awesome resource.
The SEOmoz site offers a paid member option called SEOmoz Pro. This membership gives full access to the SEOmoz suite of tools, and, more importantly, gives members entry into advanced SEO training workshops and training courses. The company offers a 30 day free trial of SEOmoz PRO, so sign up and play around with it to see if it’s right for you.
“Effectively Manage Your SEO” is the caption found on the SEOmoz homepage. In order to facilitate management of your SEO, the site gives users the ability to create campaigns for the different sites you own. As a PRO member, you can create up to 5 campaigns. This will help you in many ways when dealing with SEO.
Rank Tracking
The first step in improving your search engine rankings is knowing where your pages rank for specific keywords. Tracking your rankings over time will show you exactly how your SEO efforts are affecting your keyword rankings. SEOmoz Pro allows tracking of keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It also allows you to view your rankings over time in charts designed to display the results found.
SEOmoz Pro makes it possible to connect your Google Analytics account to SEOmoz. This gives the user traffic stats for different keywords. This feature can be used to identify keywords that do not rank high, but still give the site some traffic. Focusing SEO efforts on these keywords can boost traffic for the site once the rankings have improved. The only negative in this area is that rankings are only updated once a week; daily reports would be much more helpful.
On-Page SEO Reports
On-Page SEO Reports are very useful tools. They become even more important if you are new to SEO. Basically, a report will tell you how optimized your pages are for a specific keyword. The report gives results in a letter grade format; from A to F. The factors used to determine your grade are also given in detail. The factors are categorized by importance, so focusing SEO efforts on the most egregious errors will greatly aid in improving your search engine rankings.
Upon completion of site setup, the SEOmoz crawler will analyze your site for SEO related issues. These issues are displayed in one of three different categories depending on what type of issue is found. These categories are errors, warnings, and notices.
The findings of the Crawler can be quite important to fix. Issues like duplicate content and broken links can cause serious problems for an SEO user. The Crawler is able to identify these issues so that they can be rectified efficiently. Once issues are identified and remedied, your site will never again miss out on all the potential revenue lost to these mistakes.
Link Analysis
The Link Analysis feature is a standalone tool powered by SEOmoz’s incredible Linkscape Database. This database boasts an amazing 1.2 trillion crawled URLs in its inventory! This is an awesome collection of data that is available to all SEOmoz users.
Using a variety of metrics, the Link Analysis Tool compares your domain with up to three different competitors. These include SEOmoz’s proprietary metrics such as Domain Authority, MozRank, Page Authority, and MozTrust. It also displays other important metrics like total links you have, number of linking root domains, and number of class C blocks that are linking to you. You can also check the backlinks to your site and your competitor’s sites. By studying the external links you can do a comprehensive competitive analysis on your competitor’s linking profile. This will allow you to see where your competitors are getting links from, and find sources of links that you can use as well.
Other SEOmoz Offerings
Up to this point, I have only brushed the surface of what SEOmoz offers. The examples listed represent only a small portion of the available tools found at the site, and the descriptions given are only basic in their scope. SEOmoz Pro offers a Q&A Forum where users can get answers to all their questions. There is an extremely large, active, and helpful community of SEO professionals found there that are ready, willing, and able to lend their expertise to any issue you may face after becoming a member.
The forums you find there are full of information. These forums are set up to be browsed for answers to commonly asked questions, or you can ask specific questions that pertain to issues that are not listed on the board.
SEOmoz hosts webinars for its Pro members every month. These webinars focus on SEO or marketing topics, and end with an extended Q&A session. All in all the webinars average 90 minutes, and are full of useful information for SEO professionals and novices alike. These webinars are also archived at the site for easy viewing at any time, so even if you cannot make the start time for a particular webinar you can still watch it.
Final Thoughts
SEOmoz is a site that is well worth your exploration, and the Pro membership, for anyone serious about SEO, is well worth the cost. The tools are of the highest quality and their usefulness is beyond question. As a SEO consultant or provider, the Pro membership is a necessity. It will prove its worth on a daily basis in innumerable ways, and will open up revenue streams for you and your clients you had never dreamed possible.
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