Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of Moz, a leader in the field of search engine optimization tools, resources & community. In 2009, he was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek, and has been written about it in The Seattle Times, Newsweek and the NY Times among others. Rand has keynoted conferences on search from Sydney to Reykjavik, Montreal to Munich and spoken at dozens of shows around the world. He co-edited The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization: Theory in Practice (O'Reilly).

Thomas H?genhaven works as CSO in Chrisper Economy, primarily focusing on SEO and inbound marketing. He is pursuing a PhD degree in Information Science at Copenhagen Business School and is a visiting research fellow at Cornell University. Thomas was the co-author of N?r internettet har magten (about inbound marketing, written in Danish), and editor of Politisk Psykologi (political psychology anthology, written in Danish).

Introduction 1

SEO Is Changing 2

From SEO to Inbound Marketing 2

Inbound Marketing 3

Investing in Inbound Marketing for the Long Term 4

Why Read This Book? 4

Part I: Search Engine Optimization 5

The Birth of SEO 5

Life After Google 6

Cracking Down 6

How Search Engines Make Money 7

Tactics That Never Stop Working 8

The Future of Search 8

Chapter 1: White Hat SEO: It F@$ing Works 9

Some Points on Kris' Post 11

Black Hat ¿ SEO 15

Why We Can't Ignore Black Hat Entirely 17

Why White Hat Is Always Better 18

Chapter 2: [...]: Why You're Behind If You're Not Using It 23

Myth: [...] Markup Doesn't Get Rich Snippets! 24

[...] Is Not a Language 25

Five Underused [...] Applications 26

1 Events 26

2 Jobs 27

3 Reputation Management 28

4 News Sites 29

5 Ecommerce 29

Wrap-Up 29

Chapter 3: Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization 31

Best Practices for Optimizing Pages 33

HTML Head Tags 33

URLs 34

Body Tags 35

Internal Links and Location in Site Architecture 36

Page Architecture 36

Why Don't We Always Obey These Rules? 37

Best Practices for Ranking 1 37

Chapter 4: Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World 39

What Is Duplicate Content? 40

Why Do Duplicates Matter? 40

The Supplemental Index 40

The Crawl Budget 41

The Indexation Cap 41

The Penalty Debate 41

The Panda Update 42

Three Kinds of Duplicates 42

True Duplicates 42

Near Duplicates 42

Cross-domain Duplicates 43

Tools for Fixing Duplicates 43

404 (Not Found) 43

301-Redirect 43

[...] 44

Meta Robots 44

Rel=Canonical 45

Google URL Removal 46

Google Parameter Blocking 46

Bing URL Removal 47

Bing Parameter Blocking 47

Rel=Prev and Rel=Next 48

Internal Linking 49

Don't Do Anything 49

Rel="alternate" hreflang="x" 49

Examples of Duplicate Content 49

www versus Non-www 50

Staging Servers 50

Trailing Slashes ("/") 51

Secure (https) Pages 51

Home page Duplicates 51

Session IDs 52

Affiliate Tracking 52

Duplicate Paths 53

Functional Parameters 53

International Duplicates 54

Search Sorts 54

Search Filters 55

Search Pagination 55

Product Variations 56

Geo-keyword Variations 56

Other "Thin" Content 57

Syndicated Content 57

Scraped Content 57

Cross-ccTLD Duplicates 58

Which URL Is Canonical? 58

Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates 59

Google Webmaster Tools 59

Google's Site: Command 60

Your Own Brain 61

I Hope That Covers It 61

Chapter 5: Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings 63

How Google Scores Fresh Content 64

1. Freshness by Inception Date 65

2. How Much a Document Changes Influences Freshness 66

3. The Rate of Document Change (How Often) Impacts Freshness 66

4. Freshness Influenced by New Page Creation 67

5. Changes to Important Content Matter More 68

6. Rate of New Link Growth Signals Freshness 69

7. Links from Fresh Sites Pass Fresh Value 69

8. Changes in Anchor Text Signals May Devalue Links 70

9. User Behavior Indicates Freshness 71

10. Older Documents Still Win Certain Queries 72

Conclusion 73

Chapter 6: All Links Are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations of Search Engines' Valuation of Links 75

Principle 1: Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes 77

Principle 2: External Links Are More Influential Than Internal Links 78

Principle 3: Links From Unique Domains Matter More Than Links From Previously Linking Sites 79

Principle 4: Links From Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value 80

Principle 5: Links From "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value Than Those From Header/Footer/Sidebar Navigation Do 81

Principle 6: Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value Than Those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images 82

Principle 7: Links From More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value 82

Principle 8: Links Contained Within Noscript Tags Pass Low, If Any, Value 83

Principle 9: A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Outrank "Stronger" Competition 83

Principle 10: Legitimate Links on Pages That Also Link to Web Spam May Be Devalued 84

Conclusion 85

Chapter 7: The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded 87

Part II: Content 91

History of Content within SEO 91

Types of Content 92

Turning Challenges into Opportunities 93

Video Content 93

High-Quality Content 93

Producing Content on Budget 94

Content at Scale 94

The Future of Content 95

Chapter 8: Beyond Blog Posts: A Guide to Innovative Content Types 97

Q&A Content 98

Presentations 99

Curated Content 100

Magazine and Long-Form Content 102

Imagery and Photojournalism 102

Video 103

Interactive Infographics 105

Product Marketplaces 105

Facebook Notes 106

Why Everyone Needs a Marketing Oracle for Their Content Platform 107

Chapter 9: Scaling White Hat Link Building-Scaling Content 109

Scalable Content 110

Cost 111

Scale 111

Quality 111

What's This All Have to Do with Link Building? 112

Great Content? 112

Use Only Great Writers 113

Quality Control 113

Automation 113

Filling the Hopper with Good Content 114

Scaling 114

Do We Have All This Stuff? 115

Chapter 10: 10 Super Easy SEO Copywriting Tips for Improved Link Building 117

1. Write for Power Skimmers 118

2. Why Headline Formulas Work 119

3. Get 20% More with Numbers 119

4. Free and Easy Power Words 120

5. A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Clicks 120

6. Use Sub-Headlines or Die Trying 121

7. When in Doubt, List It Out 121

8. Quotes 122

9. The Bold and the Italic 122

10. Be Honest 122

Part III: Social Media 123

Social Media Marketing: The Early Years 123

Social Media Awakening: It's Not Just About Me, It's About You 124

Example 1 124

Example 2 125

Social Media Management: The Online Community Manager Is Born 125

Social Media Strategy: A Part of the Team 125

Social Media: What Does the Future Hold? 126

Chapter 11: The Rich Get Richer: True in SEO, Social, and All Organic Marketing 127

Chapter 12: Life After Google Is Now: 9 Pieces of Advice on How a New Site Can Succeed Without Search 131

What Does Designing For Social Mean? 132

1. Only the Best Goes Online 132

2. Twitter Is for the Insider's View 132

3. Facebook Is for Debate 132

4. It's All One Product Concept = Better Use of Time and Energy 133

What We Learned 133

5. Do More of What Is Successful 133

6. Not Everything Succeeds 133

7. Jump on Every Opportunity 133

8. Partnerships = Win-Win 134

9. Tools Help 134

In Conclusion 135

Chapter 13: Tracking the KPIs of Social Media 137

Why and Where Social Matters 138

Which Social Metrics to Track 140

Facebook 141

Twitter 142

LinkedIn 146

Google+ 149

Reddit, StumbleUpon, Quora, Yelp, Flickr, and YouTube 152

Blogs and Forums 152

Tools for Measuring Social Media Metrics 153

Chapter 14: Everyone Should Hire "Social Media Experts" 157

Chapter 15: A Peek Under the Hood: How We Manage the Moz Community 163

Who Are We? 164

Keri Morgret 164

Erica McGillivray 165

Megan Singley 165

Lindsay Wassell 166

Christy Correll 166

Melissa Fach 167

Miriam Ellis 167

Jen Lopez 168

Community Doesn't Stop There 168

Ashley Tate 169

Peter Meyers (aka Dr. Pete) 169

Mozzers 169

What Do We Do? 170

Blog 170

YouMoz 172

Q&a 173

Social Community 175

Twitter 175

Facebook 177

Google+ 180

LinkedIn 181

Whew 183

Part IV: Outreach 185

Why Outreach Is Important 185

Good Outreach versus Bad Outreach 186

How Outreach Has Changed 186

The Dangers of Buying Links 187

The Challenges of Outreach 188

The Importance of Exceptional Content 188

Chapter 16: Throw Away Your Form Letters (or 5 Principles to Better Outreach Link Building) 189

1. Talk to People Like People (Throw Out Your Form Letters) 190

Opening 191

Sustaining 193

Closing 195

2. Stand out in the Inbox 197

3. Do Your Research 198

4. Offer Value 199

5. Maintain the Rapport 199

Conclusion 200

Chapter 17: A Link Builder's Gmail Productivity Setup (with Outreach Emails from 4 Industry Link Builders) 203

Gmail Tools and Tips 204

Gmail Shortcuts 204

Canned Responses 205

Rapportive 206

Boomerang 207

Undo Send 208

Send and Archive 208

Link Building Email Templates from Industry Link Builders 209

Broken Link Building 209

Guest Posting 210

PR 210

Push Content 211

Exchange for a Link (But Not a Link Exchange) 212

Incentivized Reviews for Ecommerce 213

Chapter 18: Putting Guest Post Outreach Theories to the Test [With Some Real-World Data] 215

Theory 1: Being a Woman...