http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-analytics-and-segmentation-for-better-conversion-optimization

I like articles that explain different tools and techniques through concrete examples. This one explains 4 different metrics that can be analyzed through creating segments in Google Analytics

http://www.seo.com/blog/the-value-of-fresh-content/

A little bit of circumstantial evidence supporting the claim that Google will boost your rankings if you feed it with fresh content. Which is probably true under very specific conditions, so I wouldn’t treat this as an article outlining a controlled experiment, rather as an interesting direction to check things.

http://www.johnon.com/716/google-breadcrumbs-seo.html

A commentary on Google’s move of replacing the URLs in SERPs with breadcrumbs. Interesting insights.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021217.html

Post on Bing link building guidelines, with links to the original Bing post and WMW discussion thread on the topic.

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/discover-what-google-really-thinks-of-your-pages.html

A great post describing how to measure and analyze data describing the frequency of Google visiting your site. With the visible PR being either outdated or unimportant parameter, frequency of spidering seems to be a likely contestant for the title of the parameter that defines the importance of your site. This article describes a way to measure and compare this frequency between different pages of your site.

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/5-seo-focussed-web-analytics-tools/

List of 5 not-so known analytics tools that (seem to) have been created with SEO on mind

http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/your-seo-kungfu-is-strong.php

Outline of a site-wide Title tag tweeking process for achieving maximal rankings and increasing overall CTR for those rankings. I don’t get the kung-fu metaphors, for some reason SEOs seem to be infatuated with them.

http://www.jonathanstewart.co.uk/a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-vince-update/

OK, this is probably going to be my last mentioning of the Vince (or the Brand) update on these lists. Here is a comprehensive guide on everything meaningful that was published on this subject

http://esseoo.com/forum/on-page/why-404-pages-should-return-404-codes-for-successful-on-page-seo/#p11

A nice case study explaining why you shouldn’t automatically 301 all your 404 pages back to your homepage. I do not necessarily agree with the way they have solved the problem – they could have done it without losing links to the non-existing pages, but that is another issue

http://seogadget.co.uk/google-keyword-tool-external-vs-beta/

Nice comparison of the old and the new beta Google Adwords keyword tool and the differences in the numbers they output for keywords with different search volumes

http://searchengineland.com/6-ways-local-domains-crush-dot-coms-in-international-seo-29898

A piece describing some reasons why country code TLDs have advantage over .com, .net, .org, etc. in local results

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/breadcrumb-navigation-examined-best-practices-examples/

Examination of breadcrumbs from the designer and user experience point of view

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/

Examination of breadcrumbs from the SEO point of view. A very nice overview of all the pros and cons of different ways to utilize breadcrumbs on your site. One point that the article does not mention is duplicating links back home or to inner pages by using breadcrumbs. Remember those “second link doesn’t count” issues? Make sure that the link you want to be counted comes before breadcrumbs in the code.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/30-seo-problems-the-tools-to-solve-them-part-1-of-2

Good overview of all the SEOMoz tools. I like the way that the tools are presented – through a specific SEO problem that each of them solves. Still waiting for part 2 of the post.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder

Awesome review of one of my favorite SEO Tools – Xenu. Combined with Excel (who else?) this little FREE tool can do anything. Do. Read. This.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=115210&lfe=1

A very interesting comScore research showing that 4% of internet users account for 85% of the clicks. That means you don’t have to target everyone. Some demographic research should be able to profile the heavy clickers for you and help you target those audiences that are most likely to click on your ads.

http://searchengineland.com/make-google-analytics-your-seo-watchdog-26475

A few tips on how to use Analytics to monitor for canonicalization issues on your site. Nothing Earth-shattering here but it is always good to have a variety of tools in your belt for doing the same task.

http://www.stonetemple.com/blog/?p=491

Interesting analysis by Eric Enge (haven’t heard from him in a while) on why deep links to your site’s inner pages increases the amount of juice that your homepage passes around.

http://www.ariozick.com/how-you-can-spam-google-local-for-fun-and-profit-in-10-easy-steps

Ari explains how to “influence” Google Local results. Not sure about the lifetime of this one but I trust Ari that it worked at the time of the writing

http://www.iamsearch.co.uk/seo/spark-something-like-cohesive-marketing-strategies/

A very interesting study case of one failed and two successful offline campaigns that are supposed to support online marketing efforts. Includes a what-to-do-to-get-it-right list.

http://www.best-seo-blog.com/2009/10/19/signs-you-have-a-quality-web-site/

Michael writes about a few signs that should tell you whether you have a quality site. Some very important insights about personal branding and perceived quality

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links

A list of link-tracking tools. Besides the obvious, popular ones (Majestic, Linkscape, Raven and Yahoo backlinks), includes some less known tools that are worth a try.

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/11/29/how-to-exploit-personalized-search-for-seo/

A novel look on how to harness Google’s Personalized SERPs to your benefit using some social engineering, bordering on psychology

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-indexation-cap

Interesting discussion on Google’s practice to limit the number of pages it indexes on large sites. Something tells me that this is a very old phenomenon that was always known as “Supplemental Index”. Anyways, there are some tips in here on how to deal with this situation.

http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2009/09/value-of-inbound-link-factors.html

A nice basic sum-up of things to keep in mind when evaluating a potential inbound link you are about to acquire.

http://www.seowizz.net/2009/09/outgoing-links-why-you-have-to-love-them.html

On value of outgoing links. Yes, I wrote outgoing, not incoming. Look for a link to a relevant experiment written about on the same site.

http://econsultancy.com/blog/4666-exact-match-keyword-domains-the-fastest-way-to-first-page-serps

Sometimes it is important to read articles that do not teach you anything new, but can serve as an example of premature jumping to conclusions. It looks like the author has chosen the outcome of his experiment and did not let anything put him off track to reaching it. While exact match domains can provide advantage when optimizing for the exact match keyword (due to evasion of those parts of algorithm that are supposed to prevent over-optimization of onsite and offsite backlink anchors), buying an old domain, outfitting it with WordPress and providing quality content can hardly be considered as a sterile testing environment. Designing an experiment is not a simple task and one should always beware of engineering the test conditions that will inevitably lead to a specific answer over all other possible ones.

http://www.thinkseer.com/blog/an-important-analytics-distinction-bounce-vs-exit/2009/09/21/

Traffic analysis is one of the most important aspects of optimization and can serve as a source of significant improvement of conversion of your existing traffic as well as expose ways of bringing in new visitors too. This article gives a very nice explanation of a difference between the bounced visitor and a visitor that has exited your page,.

http://www.pamil-visions.net/press-release-seo-value/26169/

Interview with 3 SEO professionals (not calling them gurus on purpose) about the possible benefits of press releases for SEO. You can find some nuggets in there, but don’t forget to put on your critical reading glasses

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/link-building-techniques-online-pr

Another article about PRs. I thought this one was nice because it gives nice ideas about the research one should do BEFORE writing and publishing the PR, together with screenshots of different research techniques one should use.

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/revealing-a-competitors-long-tail-seo-success/

Nice little tactic for discovering your competition’s long tails. It shows an interesting approach according to which you should value keywords not only by traffic but also by the preparedness of natural linkers to use them in the anchors. Very interesting approach.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/10/how_do_people_search_for_trave.html

Some interesting insights on how people from the UK search for travel-related terms. Has a link to a recording of a related webinar so if this niche is of some interest to you, I recommend devoting it 41 minutes and watching it at the link provided at the bottom of the article (free registration required)

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/reunifying-duplicate-content-on-your.html

A nice summary by Google’s John Mueller (@johnmu) of different ways to deal with duplicate content on your site.

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/link-building-techniques-tips.html

A bunch of tips for a linkbuilder. Some of them are even new (to me). Others were heard before but it is good to have them all in one place and some should constantly be repeated.

http://www.clickz.com/831971

This should be a required reading for every manual link builder out there. List of guidelines to use when writing a link request email. Rules so simple, yet so unimplemented by the vast majority of them, judging by the link requests I get.

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-ask-a-google-engineer-for-seo-help-27201

The chances are that the majority of you will be in a situation where you have to contact the search engine representatives for assistance with getting your site out of penalty or helping you with some other technical issue related to how your site is being crawled or ranked in SERPs. This article provides a list of guidelines how to establish contact in a way that will provide you with most chances of succeeding and getting your problem solved. Imprtant read.

http://ppcblog.com/decifering-googles-quality-score/

Did you mean Deciphering ? A solid post from the Aaron Wall factory on understanding the Google Adwords Quality Score.

http://www.ariozick.com/the-sem-toolbox-79-tools-and-tips-every-search-marketer-must-have/

This is my favorite post of the whole list. Usually, these lists are pretty much regurgitated stuff showcasing already seen tools or providing a stage for self promotion. Ari’s list is fresh, well organized and above all, damn useful. Since the article got published I have already used a number of tools from that list that I’ve never used before and scored me a couple of nice domains. Do not only read it, bookmark it and keep it for latter use.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/10/top-10-pitfalls-of-international-seo/

A very good piece on potential pitfalls in marketing your site in foreign markets. I particularly liked the “not giving consideration to how you will manage content” and “taking the agency’s international claims at face value”.

http://www.seobook.com/brands-vs-query-refinement-google-using-second-search

SEOs around the world have been bashing heads to understand the nature of the Vince (or brand update), including trying to understand how Google defines brands. This is another shot at trying to explain the nature of these algo changes. For additional reading on this topic, check out Shark SEO’s article on the same subject

http://www.stepforth.com/blog/geo-tags-what-are-they-and-why-you-need-them.php

All you needed to know about geotags.

http://searchengineland.com/link-building-with-content-how-to-attract-links-and-leads-27982

Another great article by Garret French on how to create content that will attract natural links. I suggest that you find a quiet spot, remove all other distractions and dig into this one, including all the links in the article.

http://www.linkprincessblog.com/2009/09/interviewing-potential-link-builders/

A very nice article on the type of questions you should ask when interviewing a potential link builder. Actually it is more about types of personalities you may encounter when hiring a link builder and which one of those you should be looking for

http://www.interleado.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/15/flash-and-seo-getting-the-balance-right/

A nice review of the problems Flash-based site may encounter in search engines and possible search-engine friendly solutions. Can serve as a decent referrence to clients. One thing though, when writing SEO articles, you want to be as non-vague and precise with your words as possible: “But if you go with this option remember to submit only the HTML version to the search engine.” Really ? Submit the HTML version to the search engine ? Come on, you know better.

http://searchengineland.com/link-building-outreach-5-steps-to-maximize-the-value-of-every-opportunity-24687

I cannot understand why this article is called “5 steps…” and not “Hundreds of practical steps and …just print it out and learn it by heart already”. I love articles which not only give you a list of concrete things to do, but also open your mind to numerous additional possibilities to develop. A must read for every link builder out there. Includes a download link to a link building outreach worksheet.

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/finding-links/

A nice overview on how to get the most out of Majestic SEO backlink reports. While being very useful, Majestic is not always the easiest tool to use, so any additional information on how to get the most out of it is great.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/09/50-blog-post-ideas-for-business-blogging.html

A very nice nugget. After actually convincing a client that it is important to blog, there is always the stage where his writer (or your writer working for him) hits the solid wall with ideas on what to write on the blog. Here is a nice list that can be explored to get ideas for a business blog writing.

http://www.stephanspencer.com/search-engines/creating-a-buzz-worthy-blog-contest-in-7-easy-steps

Stephen Spencer alert! Outlining 7 steps to successful linkbaiting. If you ignore the overnightprints.com hype (which was really a great case study, but one article was enough ) you will come up with some great starting points for your linkbaiting campaign.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/examining-the-top-150-inlinked-posts-at-seomoz

A post bursting with information. Analysis of the most linked-to posts on SEOMoz. Compares different types of posts (list posts vs. non-list posts), post categories and whether there was an image or video included in the post. Very inspirational.

http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/2009/09/26/the-most-important-question-when-linkbuilding/

While not having specific tips on linkbuilding, this post tries to put the linkbuilder (and not just him) in a linkbuilding state of mind. See everything as a link building opportunity. One thing that I would like to add is when doing this, it is important not to forget about your inner moral compass that should be alerting you about those link opportunities that are better not taken.

http://www.10e20.com/blog/2009/09/18/link-building-through-relationships/

A good reminder of how relationships can be used to build links

http://markedmondson.posterous.com/wikipedia-seo-tactic-1

Some nice tips on using Wikipedia for your SEO purposes. Beware, not all of them are white-hattish

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/jump-to-information-you-want-right-from.html

This is cool. Google start showing links to specific sections of the page. This is something that the good people at Huomah blog have been discussing for quite a while now – Page Segmentation – and this is another way for Google to get even more granular with the ways the assign link juice and evaluate relevancy on a page level.

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/five-reasons-your-keyword-tool-may-be-lying-to-you-and-ours-might-too.html

Pay attention – it is extremely important to doubt each and every one of the tools in your box, especially the keyword building ones. Here is the list of reasons why your keyword research tool is probably giving you wrong data. There is another thing worth paying attention to in this article and it is who wrote it. I will expand on that at the end of the list.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020848.html

Google comes out with a new Adwords Keyword tool. Looks much nicer and much easier to use. Does it provide more information? Not so sure…

http://www.wordstream.com/information-architecture

An important part of on-page SEO – site architecture – does not bring maximal benefit if the structure does not reflect the keyword focus each section of the site is trying to target. This post explains how Wordstream free keyword analysis tool helps you perform this task. Again, notice where this post is being published and check out the end of this list for further discussion.

http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo/using-htaccess-for-301-redirects-seo-and-more/

A very nice overview of how to use .htaccess file for your SEO needs. Bookmark for future reference.

http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/seo-link-analysis-best-practice/

I usually don’t like putting interviews on this list, but this interview with Dixon Jones from Majestic SEO outlines some of the important features of Majestic, information that the current and future users can find useful.

http://www.seosmarty.com/practical-guide-to-finding-link-bait-inspiration/

You may have noticed already that I like these articles that provide ideas on how to do certain aspects of SEO, especially if they just scratch the surface without exposing specific tactics, thus rendering them useless pretty quickly. This is another one of those articles and (with the exception of listing Google Search as a potential linkbait idea finding resource) some of the ideas in there will make you go hmmm.

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-choose-content-management-systems-for-seo-24945

Another instant classic by Stephen Spencer (I think I should just RSS his stuff into this list every week). Gives all the important attributes that SEOs want in their dream CMS. This list can be used as it is when comparing existing CMS packages, or even better, when creating a CMS from scratch. The items on his list that made me go hmmm: Declared search term, Paraphrasable excerpts and Multi-level categorization structure

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/evaluating-long-tail-opportunities

Everyone knows that in order to increase the long-tail traffic to your site, you need to add relevant content, but a few people know how to do this process in and educated way. This article explains how to harness Google Adwords new reporting abilities to learn more about long tail queries that bring traffic and conversions to your site and use that information to guide your content creation

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020725.html

This one of those things that a lot of people were saying and that made a lot of sense, until a friendly Googler came out on record and said it is not so. Length of the domain registration period is apparently too noisy to serve as a signal in the quality assignment part of the algorithm

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link

Rand seems to be having quite a bit of time on his hands lately, so he writes these epic posts, summarizing a lot of basic SEO data. This one describes 17 possible ways that search engines look at links. While some of the statements in the article could be argued (like the way search engines treat nofollow), all in all it is a keeper.

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=2859

This post actually complements above Rand’s post very nicely – if Rand is looking at how search engines evaluate every single link, Bill Slawski provides a “high level overview” on how the search engines may classify links and understand the linking structure of whole websites and groups of websites. And he discusses the search patents related to his observations.

http://www.baseonesearch.co.uk/blog/2009/09/importance-of-internal-linking-structure.html

A nice checklist of all the ways to improve an internal linking structure of your site

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/reciprocity-link-building-method.html

Linkbuilding is a practice that makes it so easy to fall into worn out patterns, which makes every new and fresh idea very rewarding. This article takes a very nice approach to gaining links by doing small favors to webmasters. It is usually approaches like this that make a difference between a successful and a gray, bland, average linkbuilder, so pay attention to Melanie Nathan

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/url-configuration-wordpress/

Michael Gray publishes this series of posts on WordPress SEO. Some interesting tidbits in there. This post discusses all the different ways you can configure your URL structure in WordPress

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/internal-linkage-wordpress/

To quote Michael:”While there are hundreds of thousands of posts on maximizing external links for your blog, like a red headed step child no one pays much attention to internal links.” The more successful your blog becomes, the internal links will have more impact on your rankings. You better take care of it early.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/wordpress-living-urls/

How to create posts that get their content updated without using the link love that the original content acquired over time.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/use-scrapers-to-build-links/

This is an issue that gets neglected a lot by the blog owners who usually cringe at the thought of someone scraping their content. Michael shows not only how to encourage them to do so, but also how to make sure you reap the most benefits out of scrapers to score links. Includes mentions of plugins that help you with the job.

http://searchengineland.com/directory-link-dont-group-think-25697

Directory submission is largely considered to be an SEO tactic that belongs in history. Debra Mastaler explains why this is an unjust generalization and gives some guidelines how to do directory submission right.

http://searchengineland.com/google-lets-you-tell-them-which-url-parameters-to-ignore-25925

Every once in a while Google comes out with a new feature in Webmaster Tools that makes webmasters’ lives much easier. Whenever that happens, you can bet on Vanessa Fox writing up an extensive review of the new feature on SEL. This time it is about Google enabling webmasters to define which URL parameters Google should disregard. This is something that was usually done through URL rewrites, robots.txt, canonical tag or other options that usually involved a webmaster changing something on their site. It seems like Google wants to enable webmasters to control the ways a website is being crawled and index without making those on-site changes. In addition to presenting the new WMT feature, Vanessa presents all the other options for URL canonicalization and their pros and cons.

http://technmarketing.com/web/ten-steps-to-maximize-your-linkedin-network/

OK, this is not an SEO article but I thought it was interesting enough to make the list. This article gives some tips on how to put your LinkedIn profile to better use. Besides having a potential for being an amazing traffic source, LinkedIn should play a very important role in everyone’s personal online identity management. Read this article.

http://seogadget.co.uk/build-authoritative-irrelevant-links/

This is an interesting observation: link authority and anchor relevancy outweigh

http://ppcblog.com/ppc-vs-seo/

While the Title of this post suggests that the reader will come out with a clear preference of one over the other, the result is actually quite different: the article explains how those two marketing tactics can feed into and support each other.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020778.html

Another one of Google revelations on the algorithm, covered by, who else if not, Barry. While being important for a whole lot of other reasons, the fact that your site validates will not give your pages a boost in Google

http://searchengineland.com/5-tips-to-achieve-alignment-between-seo-keyword-strategy-content-25430

One of the first signs that tell me that a website has been SEOed is a dissonance between the keywords featured in the metatags and the rest of the content. While being an SEO flag for me, it can be a serious turn-off for your visitors, affecting conversion rates, bounce rates and what not. This article gives some guidelines on how to align between your keywords and your content.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawling-indexing-its-not-as-simple-as-just-in-or-out

A short post with a great chart explaining all the inns and outs of how the search engine bots crawl and index pages and what are the differences between these two processes.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-international-versions-of-websites

A great review of all the factors that can influence your geotargeting on search engines. Clears up a lot of terms and reasons why your rankings can vary between different countries.

http://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/follow-the-top-40-seo-experts-on-twitter-in-one-click.php

And finally, a post that gives a list of top 40 SEOs to follow on Twitter. There are three reasons for listing this post:

1. Following SEOs and engaging them in conversation on Twitter is an invaluable tool. Really. Cannot-put-a-price-on-it kind of tool.
2. While not everyone on that list is an SEO, I went over it and I have already been following 90% of the people there, meaning that they were already providing real SEO value to the conversation.
3. I am on that list