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Posted by sam.nemzer While working at Distilled, I often come across issues with implementing technical SEO changes to websites. This can be for a variety of reasons: some sites have rigid CMSs that don’t allow for customization, while others have development queues of many months (or years, in some cases!). In these cases, it doesn’t matter how good a job we do identifying the changes that need to be made in order to improve a site’s performance — if nothing can be implemented, our advice is worthless. Something we like to say at Distilled is that “it's not our job to deliver reports, it's our job to effect change.” In order to make this a reality for clients with …

Posted by rjonesx. Historically, keyword research has often been limited to to keyword selection. This is not to say that keyword selection isn't important; in fact, identifying a small set of keywords to write a piece of content on, or target for a particular page, is still one of the most important skills an SEO should master. However, the maturation of keyword tools has given us far more uses than this singular skill. Unlike tools of the past, we aren't limited to the standard process of "keyword in, keywords out." In this post, I hope to show how a keyword tool like Keyword Explorer can be used to accomplish far more than page-level keyword targeting, bringing keyw…

Posted by MiriamEllis The craft that is your business navigates the local waterways. Whether yours is an independently owned natural foods store or a medical enterprise with hundreds of locations, it can be easy to get lost cresting all of the little waves that hit our industry, week by week, year after year. Google endorses review kiosks and then outlaws them. They pop your dental practice into a carousel and then disband this whole display for your industry. You need to be schema-encoded, socially active, mobile-friendly, voice-ready… it’s a lot to take in. So let’s weigh anchor for a few minutes, in the midst of these never-ending eddies, to evaluate whether …

Posted by lydiagilbertson Being a small or startup publishing company is hard. The digital advertising industry is broken. Larger companies like Vox and Buzzfeed are some of the only online publications that can hope to monetize their content effectively. Smaller niche publications often have an even harder time attracting return visitors or getting people outside of their current active users to see their content at all. Already at a disadvantage, most small publications are also understaffed and underfunded. These publications can use content marketing and search marketing concepts within their online distribution strategy to better reach their audiences and to compe…

Posted by ronell-smith Are you a good storyteller, able to hold a crowd at rapt attention for minutes at a time? Do you have a story you're bursting at the seams to share? Well, ye olde yarn-spinner, a MozCon Ignite talk sounds like just the thing for you. The five-minute talks have become quite a hit since being introduced in 2015, with talks leaving folks with belly aches from laughter or tears from personal heartache — and everything in between. If you have an enticing story in you just waiting for an outlet, we'll supply the audience. The MozCon 2017 Ignite talks — one of the signature networking events — take place Tuesday, July 18. Buy your Mo…

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard You may find yourself wondering whether the humble title tag still matters in modern SEO. When it comes to your click-through rate, the answer is a resounding yes! In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome back our good friend Cyrus Shepard to talk about 7 ways you can revamp your title tags to increase your site traffic and rankings. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm very excited to be here today. My name is Cyrus. I'm a Moz associate. Today I want to talk you about title tags, specifica…

Posted by Dr-Pete Just over 9 months ago, I wrote that 30% of page-1 Google results in our 10,000-keyword tracking set were secure (HTTPS). As of earlier this week, that number topped 50%: While there haven't been any big jumps recently – suggesting this change is due to steady adoption of HTTPS and not a major algorithm update – the end result of a year of small changes is dramatic. More and more Google results are secure. MozCast is, of course, just one data set, so I asked the folks at Rank Ranger, who operate a similar (but entirely different) tracking system, if they thought I was crazy... Could we both be crazy? Absolutely. However, we operate co…

Posted by Tom.Capper Back in September last year, I was lucky enough to see Rand speak at MozCon. His talk was about link building and the main types of strategy that he saw as still being relevant and effective today. During his introduction, he said something that really got me thinking, about how the whole purpose of links and PageRank had been to approximate traffic. Source Essentially, back in the late '90s, links were a much bigger part of how we experienced the web — think of hubs like Excite, AOL, and Yahoo. Google’s big innovation was to realize that, because people navigated the web by clicking on links, they could approximate the relative popularit…

Posted by JonoAlderson Websites, like the businesses who operate them, are often deceptively complicated machines. They’re fragile systems, and changing or replacing any one of the parts can easily affect (or even break) the whole setup — often in ways not immediately obvious to stakeholders or developers. Even seemingly simple sites are often powered by complex technology, like content management systems, databases, and templating engines. There’s much more going on behind the scenes — technically and organizationally — than you can easily observe by crawling a site or viewing the source code. When you change a website and remove or add elements, it’s not unc…

Posted by randfish Have you thought about what your pop-ups might be doing to your SEO? There are plenty of considerations, from their timing and how they affect your engagement rates, all the way to Google's official guidelines on the matter. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over all the reasons why you ought to carefully consider how your overlays and modals work and whether the gains are worth the sacrifice. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about pop-ups, overlays, mo…

Posted by cara.harshman In 1998, Jeff Bezos had a vision for the Internet. At that time he was four years into building Amazon. It was taking off as a humongous online emporium of books and music. In an interview with the Washington Post that year, Bezos made a visionary statement about the web. “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores,” he said. Fast-forward 19 years and here we are in 2017. My Amazon homepage is extremely personalized to me. (In August it was showing me glow sticks and solar-powered lamps. It clearly knew I was going to Burning Man.) Bezos’ vision is reality for Amazon.com and many more e…

vBulletin 5.3.1 Alpha is now available. Customers with valid licenses are encouraged to test the software on their staging servers. Warning: Not recommended for Production Servers vBulletin 5.3.1 is a maintenance release with a range of bug fixes and a couple of new features. Support for Large Forums In the past there have been some performance issues with sites that have a very large number of Forum Channels (200+) and a large number of custom usergroups. In vBulletin 5.3.1, we have refactored how permissions are stored in the datastore and loaded into memory when people visit your site. This has allowed us to increase performance by an order of magnitude whi…

Dear community, We will be having some scheduled server maintenance today, Monday May 1st, at 22:30 UTC and should last approximately 1 hour. During this time our various sites may experience some down time including, but not limited to: https://www.phpbb.com https://area51.phpbb.com https://blog.phpbb.com We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but are expecting everything to be back up at some point during the maintenance window. Thank you all for your continued support, The phpBB Team Continue reading...

Completing long and complex forms online is tedious. It can be off putting having to fill in a lot of information before you can join a site or service. You may find that potential members never bother to convert from a visitor. How to convert guests into regular members is an often asked question. The simple answer is to lower the barrier to entry. Invision Community 4 already allows you to register with Facebook, Twitter, and other networks with ease. "Complete My Profile" is a system that will lower the barrier of conversion. Guests only have to complete a very basic form to gain membership. Members are then asked to complete any custom profile fields you require…

This entry is about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release Top Members For 4.2 we made some improvements to the Top Members section of the Leaderboard. A new overview page tab shows a selection of the top members across different criteria. Top Members Overview Page showing members with Most Reputation and Most Content The filter menu allows you to view more members in any chosen category, and a new AdminCP setting controls which categories should be available. Top Members Categories In the AdminCP you can configure which categories are shown on the overview page, the filter menu, and how many results show for each. Top Members Adm…

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release. You are probably already familiar with our content embedding feature in IPS Community Suite. When a link to content in the community is pasted into the editor (e.g. a topic, or a post, or a gallery image, etc.) it is automatically expanded into a preview of the content, usually with an accompanying image, allowing users to click through to that content if they are interested. An embedded Gallery image in IPS Community Suite 4.1 While it has proved a useful feature to members, each embed used essentially the same structure - a small thumbnail on the left, a title, and a few lines of text. This wor…

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release. The ability to automatically promote users from one group to another based on set parameters has been a staple of community software for some time. Traditionally, the most common determination of promotion has been post count. Additionally, the 4.x Community Suite supports promoting members automatically based on the time elapsed since the user joined the site and based on their total reputation count. With 4.2, we have completely overhauled and enhanced the group promotion feature bringing many new options to administrators looking to promote members through different group levels. To start with, the gr…

This is our second interview for MyBB forum owners and it is spork985. Some of you may know of him from the forum and free mybb hosting website called IcyBoards. IcyBoards is featuring on this blog post and spork speaks to us exclusively about MyBB. What features do you hope to see in MyBB 2.0 that would enable you to further develop your offering to the community? There are a lot of plugins we have installed that make very minor changes to the software. I feel MyBB could benefit from rolling some of these ideas in to the baseline code. Some examples include a “users online today” section, defaults for profile fields, redirect warning when the user clicks an exter…

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release. When you have a diverse range of topics within your community, it makes good sense to separate topics within forums and categories. This will ensure that the viewer can find relevant content by scanning the list of forums first. If you have a more focused community with fewer forums, presenting your community with a list of them can be daunting. This is especially true for less experienced visitors raised on social media. Fluid forum view allows your visitors to get right to the meat of your community; the topics. A fan site for a band is a good example of a community that will benefit with fluid view…

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release In previous versions of IPS Community Suite we have had an account history feature in our Commerce application. This feature showed many important actions that may be relevant to the customer such as when an invoice was generated or when a customer changed their account details. In IPS Community Suite 4.2 we have expanded this functionality and moved it into the core functionality of the suite. Member History Member Overview Member actions that will be logged include (but are not limited to) Email address change Display name change Password change Account merge Primary group change (The…