Moz

1) You can't get any of those things from Google at all. You can get a few little morsels of vagueness from GWT which is free because it doesn't do anything worth paying for. And GA is a whole other service that has little to do with anything I described. Probably the only decent tool they offer is the AdWords keyword research tool and again ... it's not worth paying for, you have to come up with the keywords yourself... that's not useful. There's a whole industry of SEO tools like http://ginzametrics.com/ and of course http://seomoz.org/ that aren't cheap and compensate for the lack of 1st party tools.

2) There's a whole SEO industry that operates on a hazy interpretation of what Google is supposed to be doing these days ... lots of companies know what SEO is, they know what it does, they know why they need it, and they pay out the arse for it. This brings clarity to that industry and those companies instead of letting them reverse engineer the changes you make and speculate on what matters. If they're willing to pay $100s/hr for SEO they'll surely pay $1000s for a roadmap straight from the source. That's like a printing press for money because that data expires when you act on it.

Money creates an unfair advantage right now. Pay people to spam backlinks to your website and you'll rate higher. Pay people to write summaries of blog posts and eventually you'll rate higher than those blogs you're sourcing your content from just because you can afford to generate…

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice.

With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following).

Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy.

Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News.

There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content.

If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter.

>> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore?

I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles)

There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and…

>but things like bounce rates and whatnot do affect rankings as well //

How do Google, say, use bounce rates - they do have bounce rates for folks using Analytics, and I guess they could guess some form of bounce rate by analysing search clicks but they'd be missing data for lots of pages and lots of visits on pages they could get a rate on. So, do you have any insight in to how they or Bing or whoever do it in practice; or is it just a guess?

SEOmoz ranking factors, http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-7, (and other pages there) suggest it's based on clicks on SERPs that follow after a visit to your site. Is that the/a known method or just the most speculated method.

Seems it could be potentially abused, so for example the "are you sure you want to leave this page" (onbeforeunload) type warnings will clearly elongate the page visit duration.

I read this, and all I can see is:

"Don't do marketing."
"Just make a good product and people will find it."

I think this is the downfall of many great products. The current startup world has an idealistic belief that better products always win and if you build something people want, they'll find it, when in fact, this has never been true. The "best" politicians consistently lose to those better at marketing and branding. The "best" ideas in organizations often fall to those trumpeted with more style or by those with more clout. Many great startups shut down because they couldn't find a repeatable, low-cost way to acquire customers (and SEO is exactly this).

More here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-disagree-with-fred-marketing-is-for-companies-that-have-great-products

And here: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-for-startups/

Something fundamentally missing from both versions - trust signals. Why does a user want to trust this software? You go to http://www.seomoz.org/, you see Zillow, Home Depot, Yelp and etc "love their software". Same with 37signals - WB and Kellogg's are using Basecamp? http://37signals.com/ Why isn't my company?

It is not explicity apparent that anyone loves this software, especially nobody they know or have heard of, so why should they use it? It doesn't have to be who uses it, but could also be "featured on" if you (Patio11) got coverage and co-linked to the service there as well, which I bet is more prominent. Of course, families don't care about Techcrunch - relevant news is needed.

Some of this advice differs from the carefully thought out style advice in the HTML5 Boilerplate project,

http://html5boilerplate.com/

(which, dismayingly, is loading very slowly in Chrome just now, but loading fine in IE), the basis for my restyling my very old personal website. A line height of 1.4 is plenty large. The author is fully correct, of course, that it is best not to specify a font size at all, and especially not to specify a size that can't be resized at will be any user who happens to visit your site. Responsive Web design

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design

http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design

is the way to go.