By now, most of you heard the news that Rand Fishkin is transitioning out of Moz, the company he founded 16 years ago. I've known Rand since 2005 or so, when he and I were moderators back at some old SEO forums. He is a genuine person, caring, deeply devoted to furthering the SEO community is so many ways including the obvious technology front but also from a humanistic approach.

He has individually given so much of himself and his resources to the SEO world and for him to leave his company, although not shocking for a VC backed company, can feel shocking to the SEO community he has been so instrumentally involved in changing and furthering. What is a bit more shocking about all of this is that Rand himself has not commented at all, at last that I can find, about this announcement - not on Twitter, not in any blog post, not on any forum.

1. Choose a targeted market

The biggest mistake most people make when starting a business is that they choose a product and then try to find people who want to buy it. If that is the direction you are starting from on your journey, then you are going the opposite direction from your destination. Wise businesses operate from a different concept. They pick a market first, and then they pick a product those people are searching for. In other words, instead of trying to find leads to sell their product to, they find targeted leads and then ask them what they are wanting to buy.

2. tart Your Own Opt-In List

Almost every full-time Internet marketer I know has developed their own Opt-in email list of some type. For most of them, it is a weekly newsletter they send out by email. For others, it may be a Tip of the Day. Other people might just have a list that they send out important updates to.
No matter what you choose to do, odds will be on your side if you concentrate on building a list of loyal email subscribers. Very rarely do customers purchase from you the first time they visit your site. Most of them will get on your list, hang out for a few weeks or months, and then they buy from you. They have to get to know you before they are willing to spend their money with you.

I have found that the most effective leads come from offline advertising. For example, you could purchase ads in a popular targeted magazine for your business. You could also purchase a postcard in one of the card decks. Start up a co-op and get 10 other people to advertise with you and run your own ads for free. Offline leads which come to your site often turn out to contain a much higher percentage of buyers than any of the online advertising methods.Once you put our short 10 step outline together you have a basic map to creating your own Internet success story. You wouldn’t consider going on a trip without a map. So don’t try to go it alone online without a map.

3. Excessive listing (Not, not this kind)

You are currently reading a “list post.” List posts grab attention. Survey research by Conductor suggests that headlines with list numbers are preferred over others. Likewise, CoSchedule analyzed 1 million headlines and found that list posts were by far the most likely to get shared. So don’t stop making list posts. But there’s a particular kind of listing that can just trash your site’s rankings. In 2013, Matt Cutts from Google had this to say on how listing can be interpreted as keyword stuffing:

Keyword stuffing is almost like a grab bag term to describe a lot of different things…You can be repeating…You can use different words. You know: so you’re talking about ‘free credit cards,’ ‘credit cards,’ ‘weight loss pill,’ you know, all sorts of stuff…it can even be almost gibberish-like

So while a list of facts, statements, or opinions draws shareability, simply listing a series of short phrases in succession can be harmful. Avoid long lists of phrases, whether separated by commas or in a numbered list. Search engines expect some degree of elaboration. As with almost any rule, there are exceptions. Just be aware of the pitfalls, put UX first, and use discretion.

4. Excessive bolding and other formatting

Shoving your keywords into “bold” or “strong” tags doesn’t exactly happen by accident, but it’s the kind of thing that is encouraged often enough that otherwise innocent webmasters might do it, thinking that it’s just standard or even best practice. It’s not. You can find plenty of correlative studies showing an association between bolded keywords and rankings, but you need to keep something else in mind

If your content is structured around specific ideas, it’s only natural that you will have bolded subheadings that feature keywords related to that idea, in much the same way that it will show up naturally in h2 or h3 tags.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Google+
• Pinterest