Today’s blog post comes to us from Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOmoz

SEO is more than SEO. In 1999, it was enough to make sure that keywords were on your landing pages and that your website was crawl-able. By 2003, it was a good idea to add keyword rich text to your H tags, and create horizontal adjust site architecture, and building inbound links took up most of an SEO’s time.

Fast forward to 2012. Social signals are strong and increasing in importance. The industry is maturing and expanding. The Internet marketer’s organic toolbox has a new name: Inbound Marketing or Earned Media Marketing. The distinction is significant. This collection of tools is growing and changing to accommodate major shifts in the search engine algorithms.

Gianluca Fiorelli recently posted this simple graphic illustrating the expanded inbound marketing landscape:

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOmoz

Credit for this actionable, ecommerce-focused checklist goes to Casey of Slingshot SEO in Indianapolis. An SEOmoz recommended consultancy, Slingshot SEO was recently listed number 58 of the Inc 500 fastest growing companies. Woohoo! I love it when Mozzers do well! You can read the original post, complete with information on related primary research here. While it focuses on Cyber Monday, the tips apply to all cyber shopping days leading up to Christmas.

Today is Cyber Monday, but it isn’t the only Cyber Monday of the year.  Begun in 2005 as a one-time marketing effort, Cyber Monday has become a juggernaut phenomenon that continues to boost instant and long term business for e-commerce sites the world over.

Since the advent of Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping days have occurred on the Mondays leading up to Christmas, and Green Monday, the second Monday in December, will be here before we know it.

With $1.028 billion in online spending, Cyber Monday 2010 saw the heaviest online spending day in history. According to Comscore, Cyber Monday 2010, was the first to pass the billion dollar threshold with the online spend reaching a respectable $1.028 billion. Hey, a billion here, a billion there; soon you’re talking real money. Here’s how to get your share of it and more.

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOmoz

Social media had been the watchword of the day for months now. As ecommerce site owners, we are exhorted to set up Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts. We’re supposed to get our customers to check in on FourSquare, and give us a thumbs up on Google Plus. Will it never end?

Well, yes. And no. Expect the social media space to continue to burgeon over time. Mobile apps, social platforms, and crowdsourcing platforms will continue to grow and diversify for the near future. After awhile, however, things will not just settle down, the platforms will begin to buy each other up and converge again. So keep breathing. This post will make you feel better about the effort you’ve been (and will be) putting in to your social media efforts.

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOmoz

We are not born to read. We are born to run around the Savanna and if the grass moves oddly, race up a tree. We are not born reading. Reading requires work. Here’s a compendium of hundreds of years of knowledge we’ve accumulated about how people read and about 2 generations of info about how we best /most easily consume written content on screens.

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Today’s blog post comes to us from Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOmoz

For sellers of the unusual, the unique, one-off’s, few-off’s, and artisanal products, this article will really hit home. But, even if you’re selling products that everyone else is selling - name brand stuff that its sold strictly on who-has-the-lowest-price-including-shipping metrics, these ideas will help you set pricing that works, rather than simply competing to sell at the lowest possible price.

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Today’s guest blog post comes from Gillian Muessig, President and Co-Founder of SEOmoz .

Being found in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) when folks are looking for your products/services is the key to ecommerce success. That process, keyword research, starts with understanding which words folks are typing into the search engines when they need something you might be able to provide to them. So where do you start?

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Today’s guest blog post comes from Gillian Muessig, President and Co-Founder of SEOmoz.

Write great content, promote it, and you will be rewarded with inbound links that will help your website rank well in the SERPs (search engine result pages) when people are looking for your products.

Um, yeah. But my website is an ecommerce website. How much content can I write that anybody really wants to link to? Descriptions of products? Not so much! Get real!

I hear your cry. So how does an ecommerce get to the top of the SERPs?

Fortunately, there are more ways to get there than there used to be. While links are still the cornerstone of how the Web is put together (search bots still need to hop from one page to another via links), social signals have become increasingly important over the past months.

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It turns out that writing well really does make your website rank better for those critical keywords that people type into search engines when they’re looking for your stuff. But what does writing well mean these days? War And Peace isn’t going to it anymore than the works of James Joyce. Writing well means addressing and honoring the needs and desires of your readers (customers) on the Internet.

Here are some hot tips on writing copy that will help your website rank higher in the search engines as well as entice your viewers to buy your product:

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Search engine algorithms are changing. Social signals are getting more important. While links to your website are still important in getting your pages to rank well, recent research at SEOmoz provides clear evidence that social media is playing an increasingly important part in the process.

Here’s an example of what we found. The two pages below were part of a test. They are practically identical. Lots of links were built to the first page. The second page has only one link, but lots of folks were asked to (and did) tweet it.

The question was: which page will rank better?

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I answer a lot of marketing questionnaires. Not because I want 50 points at MyPoints or eMiles, but because I want to know what major brands are asking their potential customers. By the 4th or 5th question, it's usually pretty easy to figure out who's asking the questions. I see some trends:

• Financial institutions (banks, credit card companies, investment houses) are asking whether you're more or less likely to think well of them, recommend them, and do business with them if they donate to NPOs
• Vehicle manufacturers want to know if you'll buy their car if they are perceive to be a green initiative supporter
• Retailers want to know if you'll buy your next pair of slacks from them if they donate to environmentally focused NGOs

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