SEMSunday – SEM, SEO, WebApps, etc

I’ve been a fan of the idea of sharing music among friends every since Napster started bringing people together in 1999.  I’ve only ever heard of file sharing companies described as bullies on the news and in the courtrooms – causing me to lean my support toward them as the underdog.

But the recent actions of some Limewire employees have challenged where my loyalties lay. As I was browsing through Tech Crunch I found a disturbing article (The Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco) chronicling a physical altercation between the employees of a small New York music label, Dovecote Records, and employees from Limewire.

Limewire

Limewire

According to the story, the Dovecote employees mistakenly took some pizza from a tray set out for a Limewire company party.  After useless apologies fell on deaf ears, the truth about the employee’s identy as Limewire staff came out, enfuriating the small record label’s employees – who quickly calculated the value of their 2 stolen pieces of pizza as incomparable to the money and music stolen by the file sharing giant.

The Dovecotes grabbed full boxes of pizza and made their heated escape, but not without being showered by pitchers of beer and roucous threats from Limewire staff.

I understand this is a war for freedom of file sharing, but come on – 2 peices of pizza.  Limewire, if you’re really about sharing everything royalty free, then lighten up a little – it’s only pizza.

So I’ll admit it – I’m an SEO noob. Trying to glean any and all knowledge and wisdom about optimizing that I can – reading articles and listing to podcasts. Search Engine Optimization is such a dynamic field that it feels impossible to ever fully wrap my head around all the techniques and tricks.  But I’m getting there and I figured I’d share some of the sweet tools I’ve found or people have recommended.

One of the most helpful learning tools I’ve come across (from my buddy Mike) is the SEO Fundamentals Pyramid created by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org. It’s really helped me focus my efforts in a diverse and confusing SEO world. Plus all the podcasts and articles I’ve read back up the Pyramid’s basis that all good SEO stems from having solid, accessible content.

I mentioned podcasts – Webmaster Radio has a great podcast called SEO Rockstars.  Most of the show is over my head but there are tips, advice, and tricks scattered throughout the show that I pick up on.  Plus Dave Ramsey says if you want to be a millionaire hang out with millionaires.  So I keep listening hoping to rise to that level.

I’ve also got a few of Firefox add-on toolbars – SEO Book toolbar, SEOmoz toolbar, SEO Quake bar, WebDev bar, and the Google toolbar.

SEO Quake: has my favorite density feature. And easily toggles on and off.

SEO Book: I very much appreciate the Search Engine Ranking Checker built into the SEO Book toolbar.  And I love the SEO X-ray tool, which reveals headers, title, META description, META keywords, external/internal links, and has a keyword density tool.

SEOmoz: is the only one with unique tools and rating systems such as Domain Moz Trust Rank.  However you have to have a registered SEOmoz account to log-in to enable the basic tools.  If you want to see the ratings for the other tools you’ll need to pay for a pro-account. The toolbar also has quick link access to SEOmoz SEO tools which are awesome if you are willing to pay for a pro-account. They also have an awesome collection of SEO articles to check out.

WebDev: Just helps me strip the site down to its basic text and links – to see what the spiders see.

Google Toolbar: I know what you’re thinking: “The Google toolbar?!?” But I use it
because it provides the most up-to-date and accurate Google Pagerank.

That’s basically it.  Those are the main tools I’m using. Feel free to comment if you have any advice or better tools.

Hey this is my frist post on my new WordPress blog. I’m just trying it out to see how easy it is to setup.