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I’ve compiled a list of the best SEO quotes and tips from Rand Fishkin. If you’re an SEO professional and don’t know Rand, you should: he’s the author of The Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (free on his website) and co-author of The Art of SEO. Rand is the founder and former CEO of Moz.com.
[att_highlight color=”red”]Read Now:How to Grow Your SEO Company – A Video Chat w/ Rand Fishkin[/att_highlight]
100 Tweetable SEO Tips and Quotes from Rand Fishkin
1. You have to ask yourself, whenever you are producing any type of content, Who will amplify this and why? ~ @randfish TechEmergence
2. better content is outweighing more content ~ @randfish moz.com
3. anchor text rich links are very important, but they’re also a huge signal for spam ~ @randfish moz.com
4. never, ever, ever use a subdomain or a separate root domain to host your blog ~ @randfish moz.com
5. a click-worthy title is actually worth a lot more than just a perfectly keyword-targeted title ~ @randfish moz.com
6. We’ve got to create a unique, special experience for them and delight visitors in addition to satisfying their query ~ @randfish moz.com
7. The trend of design toward simplicity and accessibility in software happened for a reason—simple sells, simple’s usable and simple scales @randfish ~ logomaker
8. I’ve come to recognize that SEO will always carry a rough reputation, much like “used car salesman” or “wrongful injury attorney” or “member of congress” ~ @randfish HubSpot
9. When it comes to content and content marketing, you probably want to err on the side of making things SUPER amazing, not MVP ~ @randfish HubSpot
10. I have never seen and never worked with a large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn’t mean significant increases in organic search traffic ~ @randfish moz.com
11. There is probably 90% of my links where I have no control whatsoever over the anchor text, and that’s a good thing ~ @randfish moz.com
12. Calling your product, your brand, your series, your content a keyword phrase plus the brand name that you’ve got or the brand name plus a keyword phrase is truly highly effective ~ @randfish moz.com
13. SEO folks…need to be involved with the branding and the product design and development folks, so that you make sure you’re taking advantage of what people call your products before they go to market ~ @randfish moz.com
14. measure your customer journey, not just your conversion path ~ @randfish moz.com
15. Educate before you convert and find ways to filter for not right customers. ~ @randfish moz.com
16. any time you’re doing keyword research I now suggest that you just can’t rely on AdWords alone. It’s not good enough ~ @randfish moz.com
17. Approximately 5% of Google’s keyword data is still being reported. ~ @randfish moz.com
18. You don’t have to buy links or only ads… You can reach people organically ~ @randfish moz.com
19. Every test should be repeatable and repeated multiple times. ~ @randfish moz.com
20. some of the best link opportunities can be discovered by setting up email alerts for various things that are published on the web ~ @randfish moz.com
21. SEO is no longer just a job title, it has become part of everyone’s job description ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
22. Google has become more aggressive at policing web spam, making it more difficult for offenders to recover from penalties ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
23. Google is shortening the searcher’s path, pulling content and putting it directly into the search results page ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
24. Google is withholding more keyword and attribution, making SEO even more challenging to measure and improve ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
25. #KeywordResearch–> Google AdWords is not enough ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
26. #ContentCreation –> “Good” and “unique” are not enough ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
27. #LinkBuilding –> Links you build yourself are not enough ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
28. #MeasuringROI –> Sometimes the most valuable measurements aren’t enough ~ @randfish BigCommerce.com
29. without any domain authority or any page authority, it’s next to impossible to rank for competitive terms ~ @randfish moz.com
30. I find looking at websites that accomplish SEO without active link building fascinating ~ @randfish moz.com
31. there’s a ton that SEOs can do to optimize and nudge and create intelligent, non-manipulative ways of earning links ~ @randfish ~ moz.com
32. You’ve got to be wary of local colloquialisms ~ @randfish moz.com
33. Three things on these nudges for embeds, calculators, outreach, any of these things, you’ve got to keep that text natural, authentic, and honest. It has to be real. It can’t feel spammy and manipulative. ~ @randfish moz.com
34. You can turn a low conversion rate into a high one. But you can also in the long run cost your company if you aren’t measuring and thinking about the right things. ~ @randfish moz.com
35. As SEOs, we’ve got to be asking ourselves, “Okay, how do we build up an association between our brand or our domain and the broad keywords, terms, topics, phrases, so that we can rank ~ @randfish ~ moz.com
36. Even if it is the best converting keyword and our content resources are limited, we might want to target that on a bunch of different pages. ~ @randfish moz.com
37. The bidding situation in AdWords makes it a lot more difficult to determine keyword performance, and keyword performance is something that’s critical to us. ~ @randfish ~ moz.com
38. You’ve got to be using at the very least something like Google Suggest. I love the tool SEMrush. I love keywordtool.io. I think those are both excellent. ~ @randfish ~ moz.com
39. AdWords tends to be very focused on commercial intent terms, things that they know people are trying to buy or do some sort of commercial activity around. ~ @randfish moz.com
40. As you build up your domain authority, as you start to produce content directly for your customers that will influence them, it ranks in the engines. ~ @randfish moz.com
41. You have to think of these people, these other ones — press, classic media, blogs, trade publications, events and conferences, social accounts, industry experts, whatever it is. ~ @randfish moz.com
42. we may be getting more value than we think from a link that disappears in the future ~ @randfish ~ moz.com
43. Rankings have to be part of the test, but they can’t be the only part ~ @randfish moz.com
44. anything that promotes or inhibits link growth helps or hurts SEO ~ @randfish moz.com
45. Barnacle SEO: Leveraging other sites’ ranking for your own marketing efforts ~ @randfish moz.com
46. if formal usability testing is too expensive, and for most small and medium sizes business it really is, try these three apps: Silverbackapp.com, FeedbackArmy.com, and UserTesting.com ~ @randfish moz.com
47. #Blogging–> “if you want to earn that participation, you need to participate first” ~ @randfish moz.com
48. #Blogging–> “the first few people who are commenting on your blog, go check them out if they’ve left an email address, or a Twitter profile, or they’ve connected to their Disqus profile… whatever kind of commenting system you’ve got, make sure that you are going and figuring them out and at least at the very least, sending them a thank you over email or over Twitter” ~ @randfish moz.com
49. #Blogging–> mention, quote, include, and reference influencers ~ @randfish moz.com
50. #Blogging–> experiment with home grown or self-created visuals, and in addition to visuals, data ~ @randfish moz.com
51. #Blogging–> the most common ways your blog is likely to earn interactions that lead to links. And, those are translation and repurposing rights ~ @randfish moz.com
52. #Blogging–> having disparate opinions and challenging the status quo is a very powerful way to build up a unique voice and a unique audience ~ @randfish moz.com
53. the right way to think about social sharing. It is not fire and forget; it’s being thoughtful about messaging in a timely fashion to different audiences ~ @randfish moz.com
54. A lot of these folks fail to consider SEO properly…they think of content marketing almost like it’s a viral effort. ~ @randfish moz.com
55. Branded search is very important, because when people perform branded queries …you want to make sure you show up correctly in the search engines ~ @randfish moz.com
56. SEO Slog: putting a lot of effort into improving your rankings, improving your content… but you’re not seeing results. ~ @randfish moz.com
57. make sure SEO isn’t your only inbound traffic channel, and it’s not the only inbound marketing effort that you’re working on ~ @randfish moz.com
58. sort pages receiving traffic from search engines by mobile device…These are the pages where Google sends traffic from mobile devices to my site ~ @randfish moz.com
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59. you can do a lot of things to improve the performance of your mobile pages, and that includes obviously speeding up download speeds, but limiting ads, particularly overlays. ~ @randfish moz.com
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60. with mobile limiting choice is even more valuable than it is on a desktop/laptop experience” ~ @randfish moz.com
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61. I would urge you not to use density as a metric, not to think about it. You won’t find it in our keyword tools. You won’t find it in most good keyword tools. ~ @randfish moz.com
62. Go for the better user experience every time. ~ @randfish moz.com
63. providing unique value is essential ~ @randfish moz.com
64. if you have an older page, it can be very wise to retire that content in favor of something newer and fresher ~ @randfish moz.com
65. in my opinion, we will continue to see links in Google’s rankings systems for at least the next five and probably the next ten years ~ @randfish moz.com
66. don’t ignore the value that you get from activities that might not directly earn you a link — just because those things don’t earn you a link ~ @randfish moz.com
67. Guest blogging, guest posting, in that classic SEO for a link fashion, is not a great idea. But it can still be a great channel to earn brand awareness and attention ~ @randfish moz.com
68. improve your rankings: “make your snippets better and your pages serve that intent” ~ @randfish moz.com
69. You make your pages faster, the Internet will reward you. ~ @randfish moz.com
70. leverage your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc ~ @randfish moz.com
71. Identify the pages on your site that make people happy but that aren’t earning organic search traffic…Go improve those. ~ @randfish moz.com
72. classic competitive link building is still just as valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can earn ~ @randfish moz.com
73. create lots of unique content to differentiate your site/page from others using the same material ~ @randfish moz.com
74. #DuplicateContent–> use iframes to keep it kind of out of the engine’s index, or at least not associated with this particular URL ~ @randfish moz.com
75. take content which is largely duplicative and apply aggregation, visualization, or modifications to that duplicate content in order to build something unique and valuable and new that can rank well ~ @randfish moz.com
76. The interesting thing about influencers is they need new, unique content to share all the time ~ @randfish moz.com
77. Twitter is really a platform for influencing, growing influence, gaining that thought leadership and authority ~ @randfish moz.com
78. Influencers can amplify social reach to your audience. ~ @randfish moz.com
79. Influencers can provide links, mentions, and other kinds of signals that search engines use to rank sites higher ~ @randfish moz.com
80. the likelihood of earning an influencer’s amplification is related to things like the personal connection that you have with them ~ @randfish moz.com
81. a lot of influencers who share content and material that makes either themselves or their brand or company, if they work for a brand or company, look good ~ @randfish moz.com
82. Likelihood of earning an influencer’s amplification = relevance of your work to their audience ~ @randfish moz.com
83. All links are not created equal. ~ @randfish moz.com
84. if you’re trying to reach that new audience that another site or page or blog has captured, great. Guest posting is a wonderful choice. ~ @randfish moz.com
85. #GuestBlogging–> For your marquee content, your best stuff, I strongly… suggest using your own site. ~ @randfish moz.com
86. #Homepage–> Make all the major sections easy to find/navitgate to ~ @randfish moz.com
87. #Homepage–> make it visual to easily explain what the product, company, service does” ~ @randfish moz.com
88. #Homepage–> “If you offer lots of products, make sure to convey the value proposition of what you do. ~ @randfish moz.com
89. the thing that I really like having on your homepage is a call to action. ~ @randfish moz.com
90. People will scroll. Just make sure to make the page’s experience compelling to draw the eye down ~ @randfish moz.com
91. #Homepage–> Give social proof / credibility signals ~ @randfish moz.com
92. #Homepage–> Answer some commonly asked / intuitive / empathetic questions ~ @randfish moz.com
93. #Homepage–> Focus on the most critical visitors and the needs ~ @randfishmoz.com
94. #Homepage–> Focus on a very small subset of keywords, possibly just brand-centric ones” ~ @randfish moz.com
SEO is powerful precisely because it’s hard to predict and hard to measure.” ~ @randfish HubSpot
96. The SEO I knew and loved 8 years ago still works sometimes, but increasingly, you’ll get beat …on the content/branding/social elements. ~ @randfish HubSpot
97. It’s not the secrecy of the algorithm, it’s the challenge of execution that makes SEO (and all of marketing hard). ~ @randfish HubSpot
98. I like to say that even if we got a copy of Google’s algorithm and understood every piece of it, we’d probably do very little differently. ~ @randfish HubSpot
99. For the first 5 years of SEOmoz’s marketing efforts, I doubt I spent [$200] on anything — just blogged, participated in communities, produced some interesting one-off content … ~ @randfish HubSpot
100. Imagine seeing that people who were first touched by advertising on Facebook vs. an organic follow/click on Twitter had 10% less CLTV. ~ @randfish HubSpot