I’m no business guru. I’ve never run or owned a business. But from what I’ve overheard from smart people who do run businesses, developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is crucial to succeeding. It’s the essence of being remarkable which is what Seth Godin talks about a lot. It’s one of the first questions that I ask clients when they come on board - "What’s your USP? Tell me why you’re better than your competitors"…

Here’s a directly actionable tip that any large brand should probably start doing right now. In fact most people should already have started doing it. Hopefully after reading this post they will. Take a look at these two searches:

Promo Codes (US keyphrase:)

Voucher Codes (UK keyphrase)

Out of all those brand searches across both the UK and the US not a single brand ranks number 1 for their own brand keyphrase…

Hello hello, today I’m going to talk a little about Google Local. The things I’m talking about aren’t necessarily new or ground-breaking, but I think it’s important to expose them to the Moz readership as Local isn’t something that’s talked about all that often on here and there are quite a few intricacies which you should be aware of when dealing with local optimisation, particularly for clients who have many locations and who rely on using a bulk upload to Google Local…

Hello, I’m here today to talk about Google penalties.

There’s much talk and confusion in the SEO industry about penalties. We’re always seeing in Q&A questions like:

• Do I have a penalty?
• Why do I have a penalty?
• How can I get rid of my penalty?

Unfortunately they’re elusive to tie down. Since you get penalties (generally) for doing something wrong in Google’s eyes they’re not very forthcoming about what they do to you when they catch you…

Over the weekend I was lucky enough to attend ThinkVisibility, a conference in Leeds (UK) where I was speaking on reputation management.

It was a one day conference which billed itself as:

"…A one-day mini conference with a focus on the areas of web development and marketing which are usually left behind in the creation process:
SEO, PPC, Monetisation, Blogging, Accessibility and Usability…

Sometimes the power of the internet and the modern age just astounds me. I’ll see something that I just need to share and this is one of those times. It’s not necessarily about SEO directly but it certainly demonstrates some amazing internet marketing and it re-emphasis just how powerful data and original content is.

I’m talking about the Guardian’s recent football (soccer) application called the Guardian Chalkboard…

Happy New Year, Mozzers!

I hope you all had a good break. I was going to write a 2009 predictions post but then I realised that I have no idea what’s going to happen this year. Facebook will go offline? Brazil will go on sale for 13p and Twitter will buy them? God knows. Anyway, instead of doing that I decided to write a post with something useful in it.

This post is all about monitoring your site for fresh links and reaching out to those people linking to you to ask them to amend the link for maximum SEO benefit…