SEO. Scientifically.

People talk a lot about APIs in the SEO industry (me especially) – the tools you can build with them, the competitive analysis data you can access, the reports you can automate. However, we tend not to discuss the wider picture, the thousands of APIs out there for other things, and, most importantly, the profound effect that APIs are going to have on the web, and thus the SEO industry, in the coming decade. READ MORE ON SEOmoz

Google’s relationship with links has changed over the last 15 years – it started out as a love affair but nowadays the Facebook status would probably read: “It’s Complicated”. I think Google are beginning to suffer from trust issues, brought about by well over a decade of the SEO community manipulating the link graph. In this post I’m going to lay out how I think Authorship, and Google+ are one of the ways that Google are trying to remedy this situation. READ MORE ON SEOmoz

Recently Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. I extend that idea to present similar code for Twitter and Google+ and then wrap it all up in Google Analytics goodness. Using this code you can monitor which social networks your website visitors are logged into. READ MORE ON SEOmoz

Here I describe a way to abuse the login mechanism for both Twitter and Google to detect whether a user is logged in to that service. Facebook provides an API for this. So I provide a cross-browser javascript template that works for all 3 networks. If you want to get straight to the code jump to the implementation section or check out the Social Network Login Status Detector Demo. READ MORE

Most SEOs have a veritable plethora of tools but I still get asked often about simple ways to check the main social metrics for a page. I’ve broken the need for quick checks of these data down into 3 categories and continuing my recent trend of throwing together tools for the SEO community to use I’ve put together 3 tools to help out in these instances. READ MORE ON Distilled

Whilst creating my International SEO Backlink Analysis Tool, I wanted a way for people to use their SEOmoz API key in the same secure fashion as they would for their homebrew tools. That meant that their Secret Key shouldn’t be transmitted over the wire, but instead only a signed hash. Here is a Javascript library I crafted for this purpose. READ MORE