Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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!  

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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.

I've been a big believer in SEOmoz's TAGFEE tenents since stumbling on them a while back:

• **Long version: **http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-we-believe-why-seomozs-tagfee-tenets
• **TL;DR? Here's a shorter version: **http://www.seomoz.org/about/team (scroll down)

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?

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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.

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:

• Blog commenting
• Analytics to identify low-hanging keyword fruit
• Getting your site set up properly at the server level
• Unique and relevant imagery
• Internal links
• Google Place page optimization
• Several more...

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.

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.  

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!

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:

• I don't really "do SEO" all day long.  Part of my day is spent as an analyst, another part as a creative consultant and code reviewer, still another part as a business case developer, yet another part as a researcher and forecaster, and another part as a technical writer.  Wearing many different hats -- as most SEOs do -- helps to keep things moving.  Invariably I can find tasks within each of these disciplines that are fun or exciting.
• Results -- even when they're not what I want them to be.  I love that you can launch an SEO campaign or make some optimization and then start digging into the data almost immediately.  We're blessed in this industry with a sort of instant gratification for our efforts (as compared to, say, off-line publishing or -- god help us -- politics) that we probably take for granted.
• Emerging tools, tactics, and trends.  I can confidently say that search marketing evolves every day.  So there's always new ideas and strategies to explore.
• My colleagues -- they're the best and they rock.
• You: I learn from experts in the field all the time.

But enough about me.  What gets you going when it comes to SEO?

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.

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?

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>

Do you know what kinds of keywords are leading to less organic traffic?  Are they keywords for your brand name or down in the Long Tail?

My guess is that your organic traffic is, in fact, going down, but not because your rank is going down.  Rather, it's because of multi-touch attribution.  If you're advertising less (esp. less in the Long Tail), then you'll receive less organic traffic for keyword searches involving your brand name.

This is because a new visitor will often vist your site more than once - the first time, they'll use a PPC click and the second time, they'lls earch on your brand name (because now they know it from the earlier PPC visit).  But if you reduce your PPC spend, then you can't get as much multi-session traffic.  Make sense?

There's a clear relationship here.  See this presentation on Slideshare for an example of how my company tested this relationship in a few different ways.  You'll see the kinds of results we ot and then can formulate your own tests.