Dmoz and You

Perhaps the first thing you should do when starting your marketing efforts is to register your site at dmoz.com.

I have read both good and bad things about Dmoz and a lot of people think its no longer needed for success but I have to disagree.

The beauty about Dmoz is that you can get a good pagerank backlink from not only them, but the countless directories that feed off their information. There are a ton of sites that use Dmoz information and depending on your target audience, it can explode your list of backlinks.

Today Dmoz celebrates their 11th anniversary. Most people say they are no longer relevant to todays internet. It can take quite some time to get listed after you submit an application, if you ever are listed, since Dmoz relies on volunteers to update their listings.

If you do end up getting listed it will greatly help your SEO practices. It may not be included, but it doesn't hurt to try.

Link: and Reverse Engineering

When starting a new website and looking for links the first thing I will do is a Google search with my keywords to see who my competitors are. Once I find out the #1 result I then use the link: command.

For those of you that don't know the link command, goto Yahoo! or Google and in the search window type link:www.yourwebsite.com. This will pull up a list of all websites that link back to yours.

You'll notice that Google will only return a small fraction of links compared to Yahoo!. This is on purpose. Its not that Google isn't registering your links, its that Google only lets you view a small cross sample of random sites that link to yours. Matt Cutts from Google explains this as a security feature so webmasters can't "reverse engineer" your links. Of course if you want to know all of your Google links, sign up with their webmasters program.

Yahoo! on the other hand displays all links, which you can use to your advantage. First off, download a Fire-Fox SEO addon that displays pagerank and nofollow attributes in search engines. Then goto Yahoo! and type in link:www.yourcompetitiorswebsite.com. This will pull up every link your competitor has. Then its just a matter of looking for the links you want and adding your website as well. This will get you some quick, high pagerank links that your competitor took hours searching for, that you can get in an instant.

With reverse engineering you can take a lot of the groundwork out of searching for your own links.

Enjoy.

Bing No Match for Google

Microsoft is desperate to gain ground in the search engine market. For years MSN has been the third best search engine no matter how hard they try. Since they could not gain any ground in popularity, Microsoft went as far as trying to buy out Yahoo! just so they could take the 2nd spot. Of course this failed forcing Microsoft back to the drawing board and the best they could up with was bing.com.

Bing.com seems to model itself after Google with a lite, minimal design that consists of a background pic and a search bar. In my opinion it looked rather cheesy, but was worth giving a try.

After running a few searchs it seems like not much has changed from the days of MSN search. The search results still look like they are from MSN and are not as slick as Google's results. I am assuming that they have not spidered the whole Internet yet since an image search of my name only pulled up 8 images, in Google I usually get a few pages worth.

Bing.com is a lot nicer than its MSN predecessor, but in my opinion is still no match for Google. In an article I recently read, Google super nerd Matt Cutts went in a Twitter war with the people at bing accusing them of having a shabby search engine. He referenced 2 searches he made, 1 with his name and 2 for the MTV music awards, that either pulled up old information or spam.

I think it will still be a few years before someone topples the Google empire and I can tell you it won't be a major company. Odds are it will be 2 or 3 college dropouts that redesign an amazing algorhtym that knocks Google to its knees. Until then, I would concentrate all of my SEO methods specifically on Google.

The Internet......The New Wild West

In the beginning the Internet was just a network of nerds trading information and occasionally , well lets just call it adult jpegs!

Since people began making money from the Internet it has become the new wild west. People keep moving out west with the promise of gold and riches, but few actually succeed.

Lets face it. The reason you started a website and have any interest in SEO is to make money online. I have been doing this for 2 years now, albeit at a slow pace, but so far the only money I've made with Google AdSense has kept my hosting fee's afloat. Yet whenever I surf the net I read websites and ads about how you can make or how others have made a ton of cash.

Of course there are legit ways to make money online. Google AdSense has made a lot of people a small amount of money. Sites like elance.com and getafreelancer allow professionals to offer their services at a price. Sites like eBay and Craigslist have also allowed people to make some coin with their garbage.

But how do you make money from your website. Thats a question I ask myself everyday. I do know this. First of all you need to offer the public something and it has to be rich in content. In the Internet content is king. This will not only attract visitors who will click your ads or buy your products, but it will also make for great link building.

Bloggers are always using other peoples content. If your content is good, than people will link to that information and you will gain not only visitors, but links and hopefully some pagerank. If you forget about the money side of things and focus on content, in theory the money will come naturally.

The Pain of Follow/NoFollow

Ah, the art of getting links. Hard isn't it? Especially with all the spam filters websites and search engines are putting on the internet. The most annoying is the Google idea of Follow/NoFollow.

For those of you that are not up on the NoFollow tag, its basically a piece of code that literally says "NoFollow". This piece of code instructs Google and other search engines to completly ignore this link. NoFollow is great for spammers, but makes life difficult for real webmasters to perform any kind of SEO.

More websites use this feature then you might think. Wikipedia, social media sites, blogs, etc. all use the NoFollow tag whenever someone posts a link, regardless of how related that link is.

Go ahead, use either "View Page Source" or a Fire-Fox addon like DoNoFollow and see how many of your links fall under the NoFollow realm. Each and everyday it seems like more people are using the NoFollow tag and every website you find that has a DoFollow link seems to have a Pagerank of 0.

Once again Spammers have ruined the internet!

SEO Tools I like to use

There has been a ton of SEO tools that have (for the most part) helped me over the last 2 years of SEO. Here is a list of the ones I prefer.

1. www.seomoz.org
This SEO website features many paid SEO tools, but one of there most powerful is a free tool. Trifecta has been a great SEO tool for me. Full of information, Trifecta tells you crucial info like how many backlinks you have, PR for the page, PR for your top 10 pages, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast rankings, age in days, wikipedia links, etc.

2. www.Keywordenvy.com
This site is great for keeping tabs on your SEO efforts. Registered users have all kinds of options and are able to track their rankings from a variety of search engines, and keep track of incoming search keywords, etc.

3. www.getclicky.com
Great site to see how well your site is doing. GetClicky keeps track of all your visitor information so you can see how well your site is doing and keep tabs on where your visitors are coming from.

Thats it for now but I'm sure more will come to mind.

Introduction Attempting SEO

Lets start from the beginning. I work as a recording engineer at MCS Recording. At this job I have a lot of free time in my day. About 2 years ago I co-started up a website called Toronto Music Scene, with Sheena Lyonnais, as a way to connect and spread the word about the local music scene (plus it got me into some killer concerts!)

Around the same time I was living with a guy Ryan Maule who is a SEO genius. He introduced me to SEO and has been helping me along the way. Now I am in no way an expert, but I hope to use this blog to spread some of the things I have learned from him or by myself.

Since then I have also started Play NES Flash Games and Midnite Racing and hope to further my SEO knowledge, as well as some AdSense money!!!