SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

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Headsmacking Tip #17: Use Your Bio as an SEO Advantage Posted: 22 Feb 2011 08:12 AM PST Posted by randfish Your online identity is going further, faster and with more impact than ever before, yet many of us miss out on the seemingly obvious SEO power of our personal and company biographies. It may be a headsmacker, but it's a good one - use your bio! Personal/professional bios appear most frequently in four types of online sources: Your Company/Personal Website - for example, I have a bio on SEOmoz and here on my personal blog Events, Conferences and Webinars - here's my profile on the Searchfest site, on OMS and SMX Content or Causes you Author/Contribute to - here's an old piece on the Y! Advertising Blog, some content I contributed for Brightedge's blog and an interview I did with Mixergy Social/Web Profiles that Enable Full-Featured Bios - here I am on TED Conversations, on LinkedIn and Quora and  In many of these scenarios, I've not been strategic or smart about making the bio sections more useful for readers or optimal for SEO. The image below shows some of the potential opportunities you can capture: There's a few best practices to take away: A great bio should have links - it's not just for SEO; users want to know, too! If I love a post or a piece of content or am inspired/interested by a line I read about someone, I should have the opportunity to learn more. That's why those links exist. Co-citation is potentially important here. If I use the words "SEOmoz" and "SEO Software" together, there's a much better chance that over time, I'll get Google/Bing to recognize that the two are related. Currently, thanks to our history, they're much more likely to think that SEOmoz is a consulting company (I almost made "consulting" an image, just to over-emphasize that point). Quantity of links and where they point is up to you. In the example above, I've got a lot of links - maybe too many, but because they're not aggressive with anchor text or clearly just there for search engines, it doesn't come across poorly (plus, as an SEO guy, folks might get suspicious if I didn't try linking in my profile!) Length is often flexible - you may wish to work on several versions from the very short, one sentence snippet to the several paragraphs often afforded you on some sites/spaces. I'm certainly not suggesting that we should all go stuff our profiles with obviously-SEO-intended links, using idealized anchor text for search engines to the point where it's barely readable. But, I would suggest that having an SEO review the strategy of evangelists, speakers and contributors of folks across your organization is likely a great idea. This is one of the most white-hat, natural and powerful forms of link building -- it's just poorly executed much of the time. Recognize the opportunity - be as aggressive as you feel is appropriate with third parties who post your bio (to get the description you want) and be sure to think carefully about branding, co-citation and keywords. p.s. Linkscape's web index just updated! New stats are below: Pages:  41,806,430,494 Root Domains: 111,479,320 Subdomains: 387,061,888 Links: 423,876,083,081 % of Links that are Nofollowed: 2.18% Average # of Links/Page: 61.69 % of Pages w/ Rel=Canonical: 7.02% Check out the new data in OpenSiteExplorer, the Web App, the MozBar and our Labs Tools. p.p.s. It's been a while since I did the last headsmacking tip (#16) way back in November of 2009! Hopefully this will spur me to re-visit the series more often. Do you like this post? Yes No

WANTED: Software Engineers REWARD: $12,000 Posted: 21 Feb 2011 10:14 PM PST Posted by randfish In 2010, SEOmoz's software business grew from 4,000 - 7,000 subscribers and $3.1mm - $5.7mm in revenue (more transparency on details coming soon). Our customers have been loving our products (our web app now supports nearly 30K campaigns) and our data (over 250 companies use our API), but we're nowhere near satisfied. (*note: consulting revenue, which ended in 2009, is not included; 2011 revenue is estimated) It's our belief that growth is limited only by how much we can surprise, delight and reward our customers with software that rocks. We want to build more, faster and that's why today, we're announcing a new effort in bringing talented software engineers to the SEOmoz team. Have Engineer Friends? Send 'Em Our Way Why should you send your engineer friends to SEOmoz? Three big reasons: They'll be joining an amazing team at a great company earning top salaries at a place that values their contributions (see below) You'll get $12,000 in cash* (OK, probably a check, but still!) They'll also get $12,000 in cash** We're seeking 4-5 very talented engineers (possibly more) with experience handling large-scale problems like machine learning, web crawling, building and optimizing web services (APIs), coping with large quantities of data and dealing in massively distributed systems. You can learn more about the job requirements here. Engineers: Challenging Problems, Brilliant Co-Workers & Some Cool Bonuses Await You, Too As part of this process, we're making things interesting for talented engineers, too: If you refer/apply yourself, you'll receive a $12,000 cash hiring bonus** If you're not in the Seattle area, we can offer up to $10,000 to help you (and your family) move to the area If you make it to our final interview round (for a chat with our full team), you'll walk out with a free iPad Start your new job right with a $5,000 shopping budget to spend on the hardware/software/accessories of your choice (for either home or office!). Need a new desk and chair set for you spare bedroom to work those odd hours in comfort? Go for it. New laptop? No problem. Salaries for engineers at SEOmoz are substantively above the average/median for Seattle (according to Payscale, Glassdoor, SimplyHired). We'll be on par with the offers you get from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. in cash, and we're even better on stock. Benefits at SEOmoz rock - we have a great health and dental plan (for you and your family / S.O.), we'll cover your home Internet and your cellphone bill, 20 days of vacation time annually, transportation options, 401K plans and more. That said, we should all be picky about where we work and where we interview. It's not just about the salary, the bonus, the iPad or the shopping spree - there are other things that matter to us (and likely to you) when considering where to work: Will I be working on fun, interesting problems that will challenge me professionally and grow my skills? Will I learn from my co-workers and influence them positively? Does the company compensate generously and appropriately? Does my work make a recognizable impact on the company and the world? Am I contributing to a mission I believe in and a company whose core values I respect? It's my belief that SEOmoz does a solid job on all of these: The problems we face include "web scale" challenges - crawling, indexing and building metrics on billions of pages; collecting, filtering and making sense of millions of pieces of social data from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms; serving massive amounts of data to thousands of paying customers in a performant environment. The engineering team at SEOmoz is a remarkable and talented group. You'll be side-by-side with engineers with impressive backgrounds and serious accomplishments on the product and technology side. We are in the top quartile of compensation for software engineers in Seattle and our benefits, stock options and perks are considerably above the average. What you build will have a direct, measurable impact on our subscribers - and you'll be able to see it in the membership statistics and hear it directly through our many feedback channels (we get more than 300 messages about our products each week!). And, you won't just be helping SEOmoz customers - our mission of making it easier for ideas to be shared on the web is carried out every day, and we have tons of great stories and feedback to show it. We think it's great that Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the entire web ecosystem have built such remarkable platforms for sharing information. But, it's hard to get noticed in all the noise and hard to know what will help make your ideas scale and spread. That where SEOmoz comes in - our software is meant to help companies and organizations of all sizes and shapes to better spread their messages in organic, white hat ways. It's a mission we've found incredibly rewarding and we think you will, too. Why Do We Need So Much Engineering Talent? Because SEOmoz is taking off. Today, we provide some of the web's best and more popular software to help marketers understand, evaluate and improve their SEO efforts. In the months to come, we're expanding to help marketers conquer all of organic marketing - from SEO to social media to blogging, local campaigns, content marketing, PR/media and more. This means huge challenges like increasing the size, freshness and quality of our web index (currently ~45billion pages, moving up to 100 billion), building a "mention" index on our Blogscape platform that lets marketers see where their brand names are being used across the web (even if no direct links exist), scaling analytics, improving our machine learning algorithms, exponentially growing our data storage while simultaneously making things faster. And, unfortunately (or fortunately), our requirements for engineering talent are extremely high. We interview a lot of candidates and need not only the best and brightest in challenging fields (machine learning, large-scale crawling, natural language processing, large-scale distributed systems, etc.), but folks who fit with our core values of TAGFEE. We owe it to our customers and our mission to build amazing software and that means recruiting remarkable engineers. It's great to be a profitable startup, but money sitting in the bank won't do us, or our community any good. We want to put these dollars to work and build something revolutionary - we're aiming to be the future of organic web/inbound marketing software. Top 10 Reasons Why Should You Join SEOmoz Because a post like this wouldn't be complete without a top 10 list! Interesting, Challenging Problems (strategic and technical, and often on a very large scale) Engineering Centric Company (development and software are the core of our company's product and the largest team - you won't be in the "IT department," you'll be a key member at the heart of SEOmoz) Customer Focused Roadmap (we don't just build things that sound interesting, we build things we know our customers want, need and use - and when we do, we get great feedback directly from thousands of paying members) Transparency (you'll always know how the company is doing week-to-week and quarter by quarter. Virtually every metric except salaries are shared throughout the organization) Profitability (we're in the black - no burning runways or panicked cries for venture capital. We've got a proven business model and we've been doubling our revenue for 3 years) Excellent Compensation (We pay in the top range of salaries for software engineers in Seattle based on experience + skills. You won't have to sacrifice pay to work at a great startup vs. a behemoth) Amazing Co-Workers (Ask anyone in the Seattle tech, marketing or startup community and they'll tell you - SEOmoz's people aren't just talented, they're truly good people who care about each other and are a pleasure to spend time with) Flat Organization (If you struggle against the politics and bureaucratic inefficiencies of a big organization, you'll love it here. We have smallish teams, 30 people in total, and only a single layer of management - you'll report directly to the VP of Engineering) We Listen (Our engineers have contributed substantively to the product roadmap, to new ideas we implement, even to how we decorate the office) Great Benefits, Perks + Fun Stuff (we play Xbox Kinect on Friday afternoons, snacks in the office, 401K plans, flexible and generous vacation time, a great health/dental plan and more on the way) We hope you'll send your friends, family members and fellow Venture Brothers addicts our way :-) * NOTE: The referrer will receive this bonus only after the engineer stays employed at SEOmoz for at least 90 days after his or her start date. The referrer must also complete and return a w-9 in order to receive the bonus. The referrer is responsible for paying taxes on the referral bonus. Also, to qualify for the referral bonus, the successful candidate must have accepted our offer of employment within four months of your referral. **NOTE: The $12,000 signing bonus applies to all new engineering candidates, but must be paid back if you leave the company prior to 12 months. One more note: Candidates must be eligible to work in the US (citizenship, green card, visa, etc). While we'd love to recruit more from out of the country, it's not yet something we have the resources/connections to provide.  p.s. We also want to acknowledge our friends in Cambridge and the crew at EnergySavvy, who are both offering a $10K referral bonus currently (it's a great time to be, or know, an engineer!) Do you like this post? Yes No

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