Yes its true… if you don’t Twit you’ll die! Well in the same way that you’ll eventually die anyways… So bad news is… we’re all going to die (someday) but you can Twit and enjoy yourself along the way right? Now I know that I’ve talked about Twitter at least a handful of times on this site and several times on SEO 101. So why the special post? I was just really enjoying the fact that a big part of my job is social media and talking to AWESOME tweeple on a daily basis. So I thought I’d just share a few of the Gems that came across my desk today!
A new Gphone? like the iPhone only all Googley? Schweeeeeeet!
You cannot travel the webmaster forums, newsgroups, etc. without hearing complaints about the Open Directory Project (ODP) aka DMOZ. For those website owners struggling to get past the piles and miles of spam sites and included into the directory, it is a frustrating and lengthy process generally; many impatient and unsuccessful DMOZ directory submitters readily claim the death of DMOZ and downplay its importance. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of DMOZ has been greatly exaggerated; its importance as relevant today as it ever was.
BLUF: An inclusion into the Open Directory Project (DMOZ / ODP) directory is still the only way to get included into the Google Directory.
The OPD directory and subsequent Google Directory - using DMOZ feed, modified by Google - feed into countless other directories including, but not limited to: AOL, A9, Alexa, and many more!
Keeping up your diet of P’s - patience, persistence and professionalism - will help win the war of waiting getting into the DMOZ directory.
Don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of believing everything you read in webmaster forums - DMOZ is not dead, and it is still an important part of your website promotion. Despite personal beliefs and past failures of others to be included should NOT dissuade you from submitting your quality site to the Open Directory Project / DMOZ.
Make sure your site is ready by reading the DMOZ submission and site selection criteria and don’t wait another day - submit away!
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Catchy title eh? Well I stole it from a great article I just read over at the Google Blog. Which came to me via Matt Cutts twitter feed. (if your not on twitter yet go sign up… your really missing the bandwagon) </twitter push> So much going on and so little time to blog so I’m going to just jump in…
A common question I get from clients is “How do you get our site to Rank?” While there is no short answer to this, I’d like to try…. We keep it simple, follow best practices, and keep an eye on Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates… then adjust accordingly. In all reality building something useful for the rest of the web is the best SEO tactic any of us could apply to our sites.
I suggest you all take a minute and head over to the “Introduction to Google Ranking” Post by Amit Singhal. You’ll see where I found the title for my post… But this is the section of the post I’d like to point out:
No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! 
- question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.
Sexy Title eh? Sexy titles aside let me just take a minute to point out the fact that I VERY SELDOM endorse anything! Am I one of those geek elitist’s? Yeah a little, but mostly, it’s the fact that I’ve been screwed by eBooks promising fruitful knowledge, How-To do x,y, or z only to be told near the end of a ridiculously long read that I’m going to need to buy something else… Great! How far down the rabbit hole do you continue to follow that? I still believe that the best things in life are free!
