You’ve probably heard the expression, “if you build it, they will come”. While that may work in the world of Hollywood, it certainly does not work in the world of the internet as any veteran webmaster will tell you. Developing an idea is hard, creating the site is even harder, but the hardest task by far seems to be getting quality, targeted traffic to your site without having pockets as deep as Bill Gates. Search engine advertising can cost upwards of $1 per click but the vast majority of traffic these days is generated from web search engines. With over 300 million searches per day on Google, being the first result for any keyword is crucial to drive traffic to your site. However, if you’re like most webmasters, getting at the top of these results is a mystifying task. Luckily, very smart developers have created SEOmoz.org, a site that aims to help webmasters improve their site rankings on the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. How does SEOmoz work? Can it bring you from page 100 to the first result? The answer to these and many more questions are in this review.

Going to SEOmoz’s home page reveals two very important aspects of their service. Firstly, many big names trust SEOmoz. From Walt Disney, to Best Buy, to eBay, many large companies clearly turn to SEOmoz to retrieve the data necessary to further their rankings in the searching world. Secondly, it’s very clear that their services are truly top notch and they aim to sell their product to people who are serious about improving their search results. Indeed, it is truly one of the most comprehensive suite of tools ever designed and is sure to help anyone delve into their site and explore not only how a search engine sees it, but how a webmaster can change their content to boost their rankings. The best part is that you can try out their services completely free for one month! After that, the monthly cost is almost a bargain given the quality of information you can get.

Even before you sign up, the home page generates a lot of enthusiasm about the services provided. Services like Open Site Explorer, which lets you identify links, anchor texts, and comparing domains side-by-side. You won’t find this service on any other site as it contains a proprietary index of over 9.2 trillion links at the time of this writing. Other services included with your monthly membership include a Keyword Difficulty tool that will help you gauge how easily it will be for you to conquer a specific keyword and rise to the top. You can use Competitive Analysis to monitor your competition’s rankings and link metrics. Plus, their sales pages talk about the support you can receive – Q&A forums, webinars, online marketing guides, and so on. Naturally, this is all useful information to both new and veteran webmasters alike.

Once you sign up for a free seomoz account, the unparalleled professionalism and depth of SEOmoz becomes very clear from the first login. It also becomes very clear that it delivers on all its pre-signup promises.  The account page is very cleanly presented, with a list of your campaigns on the left and some popular tools on the right (which will be covered later in this review). Towards the bottom you will find a wealth of information related to virtually any topic of search engine optimization. You will see webinars on keyword research, articles on how users read search engine results, and interesting articles on landing pages. These were just a few of the articles that were featured when we created our own account. If you’re passionate about learning everything to learn about search engines, this is clearly the place you need to go.

As cool as that information might be, it certainly isn’t where SEOmoz really shines. Indeed, the campaign feature is clearly the best part of the platform and is very easy to both use and set up. Simply enter in the domain you wish to track, select the search engines you wish to track (presently only Google, Yahoo, and Bing, although most other search engines are considered to be very minor players these days), enter your competitors (to see how you stack up against them), and enter the keywords you would like to track. For the purposes of this review, I chose Microsoft.com and decided to see how it stacked up against their main rival, Apple.
As soon as the campaign was created, a wealth of information was already at my finger tips. I knew exactly how many followed links there were to both Microsoft and Apple (at the time of this writing 35,946,312 vs. 38,177,279 – it was kind of surprising that Microsoft had fewer inbound links). I knew what percentage were followed vs. non-followed and I knew what the domain authority was. SEOmoz defines domain authority as the metric that they use to predict how much weight just the domain itself carries and subsequently the amount of trust a search engine places in it.

Within a couple of hours I began to get some data on the issues that could affect Microsoft’s placement in any search engine: 400-series errors, duplicate page content or titles, too-many on page links, and so on. These are all errors that would make a search engine think negatively about a page and information that virtually any webmaster would love to have at their disposal. Indeed, even just being able to verify that none of the links in a complex site result in a dreaded 404 error is very useful. I also had interesting information about Microsoft’s position in the major search indices and gleaned interesting info. For example, if I was a competitor looking to win top spot for the keyword “windows”, I would know I had a strong uphill battle ahead of me. The top page is Microsoft’s with a page authority of 67 out of 100 and a domain authority of 98 out of 100. As a developing site to establish that level of authority, no matter how targeted my page may be, I would likely have a difficult time bumping Microsoft from the top spot.

Every week there are “report cards” run on your site that determine how well each page on your site is optimized for each search index. For example, I ran “google.com” to see how optimized it was to the keyword “mac”. Not surprisingly Google received a “F” for optimization for this keyword. Areas where it failed? For starters there was no exact keyword usage on the page, no keyword in alt attribute, and the keyword was not placed at the front of the title. Where did the page succeed? For example, it avoided what SEOmoz terms keyword self-cannibalization (targeting the same keyword with multiple pages which create competition with each other). These are just a few of the broader topic that these report cards will find, but nonetheless, they are all very, very important in understanding how your page will fare in the search world.

While campaigns may be the central focus of SEOmoz, they are certainly not the only aspect of the members’ page. There are many tools that are included at no additional charge. Want to get an overview of how hard it would be to crack the top 10 for a particular keyword on Bing? No problem with their Keyword Difficulty Report. Want to see how often your term appears in social media? That’s also no problem with SEOmoz’s experimental Blogscape tool . Want to know where your competitors are getting their links from that are boosting them higher in the search engine results? Check out their Competitive Link Finder. Everything you’ve ever needed to slice and dice Google wide open and better understand how you can boost your links is included in their tools section. The best part is that it seems to be constantly being updated – so chances are you’re only going to get better and better information a time progresses. Much like Google Labs, they also have an experimental section of beta tools that are dynamic, easy to use, and provide a wealth of information.

There is no question that SEOmoz is a truly invaluable tool to anyone who is serious about building their website’s traffic through search. Using all of their tools was an absolute pleasure and if I was working for Microsoft to improve their web site for the major search engines, there is no question in my mind that SEOmoz would give me the perfect place to start finding places to improve and new keywords to target. I can see why big companies such as Best Buy use the site to promote their rankings in the search world. Given all the information you can get about your web site even just within a few hours of signing up, I would highly encourage you to at least take advantage of the trial. It is entirely risk free and you can cancel within the month without any hassle (unlike some other companies that make it convoluted and complex to cancel). If you want to invest in the best suite of SEO tools on the market these days, you will not find any ones that are better than what SEOmoz has to offer.

=>Click Here – Free Trial at SEOMoz <=

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