Welcome to the Q&A Forum

BJ, I'm afraid SEOmoz isn't going to do a single thing to improve the rankings for your website.

What it will do though, is give you tools, education and ideas to help you do this yourself. That's what you pay for if you sign up.

This is a process, not a single event that you pay for and get results - the good news is that if you spend time here, learn some good techniques and implement them into your marketing, good things will happen over time.

If you are using Open Site Explorer to check your links, after the last update you'd be expecting to see fewer than before.

See the post Rand made on this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

This might not account for all you are not seeing, but would explain some.

Ewan, interesting you should ask that, the owner of our small business asked me the same thing just the other day.

When we signed up at the end of last year, one idea we had was to be a member for 6 months or so, learn all there is to know so, then we could bail complete with all this new expertise and spend the $100 down the pub insead.

My answer was that Moz is well worth the investment. Since I took over the marketing role (I was sales manager before and still do that) the company was very traditional and conservative on the marketing side. Now we are hugely relying on inbound marketing and Moz is a big part of that for me. The phones are ringing, the emails are mailing so I know we are going in the right direction.

Sure there are a lot of free tools that can give much the same functionality as what we get here at Moz, but for me it isn't just the tools it is the complete package offered here.

When I get to my office in the morning (an hour before everyone else) after checking that our sites are still up, my first job is to read what's new at Moz. Being an SEO beginner, I learn something new here every day, from the two blogs, from the Q&A (lots of gems here!) and WBF and the webinars.

I know that a lot of this content is available to everyone regardless of being a paying customer, but to have just about everything I need to improve our sites and continue to get my head around inbound marketing in general here in one place is well worth the price as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe one day I really will know everything there is to know about SEO and inbound marketing and no longer need the Moz, I have a feeling that might take a while! 

Totally not a good idea to use photos from Google images. Most of them are subject to copyright and the penalties for infringement can be severe. We've had a digital photography business for the last ten years or so and people stealing images has been a nightmare. Really glad I'm winding that down these days.

Best is to use your own images and if this is not possible, as Alan mentioned use Creative Commons photos. They are all over the place - a big Commons section on Flikr for example. Make sure that you if you use any CC images, you stick to what the licence requires.

Some are licensed as non-commercial so you can use them on a personal blog but not a business one. Others are fine for business as long as you provide attibrution to the licence holder.

Personally, I think CC is the best way to go (I have several sites that are licensed CC) - you can read more on the licenses and the requirements at the link in Alan's response.

Edit - a quick thought, just this week we bought licenses for some images for a tradeshow backdrop at http://www.shutterstock.com/ Very reasonably priced and huge selection.

Adam, as it happens SEOMoz seems to be hosting a webinar on this very topic next week.

You can sign up here

That's cool. So Google is finally taking some steps to remove spam and improve the experience for their users?

Does this mean that other link building networks are facing the same thing? As someone working on building up our company's sites - with good content and following the ideas I learn here, I see this as a really positive move.

SEM Rush is a good tool for that: http://www.semrush.com/

Hi Ivan,

Scribit does look to be quite interesting, although I don't think it is anything we'd use for our own marketing.

Getting good content on our site is obviously important, but we want to generate our own, not randomly find related stuff on-line.

I suppose have a news site in a particular industry that would be populated by Scribit and then used to serve up AdWords for revenue might work to some extent, but otherwise, I don't really seem the point.

I wonder if all these links would be seen by google as "unnatural" as well?

Actually, I got the POV = Point of View OK, it was the Miveu = My View I struggled with a little.

Like Fransisco, I don't see any problem with the videos - other than some are not very good.

David, I think your product is really cool and I'd expect that a lot of your customers are going to be posting videos they have made with all kinds of keywords.

If I were going to market your idea, I'd have a blog on your site and embed some of the coolest YouTube videos that your customer make in some of the posts. A good blog that you update with really good stuff will be great for your SEO anyway.

This is a product you should be able to have great fun with!

Jerry, if it were me, I'd work my way through all the suggestions that Rand suggested over in a recent "White Board Friday"

It might well be that the previous owner had left you more than just the links to clean up and I think this would help you out.

Ryan, I think you should keep with the Starbucks!

Thanks for taking the time to put that response together, good info like that is what makes a visit to the Q&A forum very worthwhile.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

Kibin, what I'd do is work to make sure my home page is nicely optimized for the search phrase I think is the most important (I'd use Google's keyword tool to get a feel for which is the most likely one) and then be sure to add a blog to the site.

In the blog articles, I'd make sure that I cover the different search phrases that I think my potential visitors are going to be searching for. Over time with a portfolio of blog stories that provide useful content for your potential clients, you'll see good results - share your content on the social media sites too.

Fraser, one thing you can try (if you haven't already) is to use the "Fetch as Google" feature in webmaster tools.

Once you've entered the url of your page, and Google retrieves the data, you have the option to then submit that url to the index.

I've done this a couple of times and it seems to work - of course, Google might have been ready to index the pages anyway, but who knows!