When I was in highschool I got involved in online First Person Shooters. To be more specific, Quake 2 was the title of the game that got me addicted. I have been playing games like that ever since (about 10 years). There’s one site in particular that I visited daily way back then and I still find myself participating on it today. It’s a little site called ESReality.com. ESReality is a site for competitive gamers, more specifically those who have roots in Quake games. Before I ramble on forever about competitive gaming (or eSports) let me attempt to get to the point of this story.

The reason I think people like me have been visiting this site for so long is because it focused on a niche when we needed a site to focus on it and it had people who brought the best stories about that niche to one place. This is exactly what I have been trying to apply to the community site’s I’m working on now.

To get to my point I think if you want to run a successful community site you need to really find your niche, something that you’re passionate about. The second part is find other people who feel the same way and are willing to contribute (if you want to start a community, you need people!). Finally, just start writing and provide users with the tools they need to contribute to your community. If you have those things, the people will come and they will contribute.

Three Point Summary:

1. Find a niche.
2. Get others involved.
3. Provide users with the tools they need to contribute.

I quickly went to my computer and setup a tumblr account. It was easy to use and took very little time to get started. I then asked myself “could I use this to quickly setup a search engine friendly website with no budget.

After a quick search I found that dot.tk allows you to register a free domain with no ads and found that weebly.com allowed you to make a more flexable website. Tumblr is great but it seemed to be aimed at blogging and social media rather than a static website for businesses.

This is what got me to setup what I’m calling the weebly seo experiment. Visit the website for the latest updates.

The meeting is this Friday(1/12/10) at 2000 Technology Drive Pittsburgh, PA 15219. For more details please visit the Pittsburgh SEO Group website and RSVP while there are still spots available.

Part of being an SEO professional is keeping up to date with major search engine updates. To keep things simple I’m just going to talk about tracking Google’s algorithm updates. Of course one of the best places to start is the official Google blog. Subscribe to the feed using an RSS reader like Google Reader. I attempt to read through my RSS feeds everyday, prioritizing each feed into specific categories. The official search engine blog sites are the first ones I read everyday then I work my way down my list; advanced SEO blogs, basic SEO news, social media news, webmaster news, etc. This way I get the most important updates (algorithm changes) first.

Follow Respected SEO Professionals

Now that we’re getting updates from Google themselves, we’ll soon find out we can’t rely on them to tell us every little change. At this point you’ll need to learn to also get RSS updates from respected SEO resources like;

• http://mattcuts.com/blog
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://www.wolf-howl.com

These and other blogs do your homework for you and provide case studies of their results. Reading these blogs will be the third best way to track Google changes using RSS feeds. You’re probably now asking yourself “what was the second best way?” The second best way is to do your own experiments, track your own results and analyze your own experience.

Bookmark The Important Updates

The final step of the process is having a place you can go to to review the most recent Google Updates or even look to the past to reference an older update. This process is something new that I just started doing this month but has already become very valuable to me when working with clients and explaining changes that may effect them. I have been using my favorite bookmarking delicious.com to bookmark the updates that are important. Please feel free to subscribe to this feed for yourself.

Use Collaboration to Make a Larger List

One other suggestion is to work with others to have a shared list of updates. This way you have a greater chance of catching all major algorithm updates. Maybe put one person in charge of tracking Google, another person tracking Bing and a third tracking Yahoo (even though they’ll become Bing soon) and Ask.

Good luck!

In the past I’ve used a number of tools and plugins to determine this but it wasn’t till recently that I found the perfect tool to fit this task perfectly. This tool was FoxyRank for firefox.

Link building factors that came to mind;

• Does the page you’re getting a link from have PageRank?
• How many other links are on the page?
• Does the site appear to be trustworthy?
• Is the page relevant?
• How long will it take me to require the link?
• Can I use anchor text?

Analyzing Hundreds of Factors

These where just some of the factors that came to my mind right away. As with any part of SEO there is no single factor. The truth is there are hundreds of SEO factors and a lot of it comes down to a sixth sense that is acquired after doing SEO for a while. After creating your own sites and analyzing others you can quickly see strong and weak points on your sites and the sites which link to you.

So What is the Most Important Factor?

If I was forced to pick the single most important factor when building links I would have to say relevancy. The reason for this choice is because this is exactly what search engines are trying to provide to their users whether it’s Google, Bing or Twitter search they all want to provide the best answer to the users query so that the user continues to use their service. If you ensure that your website is relevant and the links to your website are also relevant then you’re on your way to building a strong online presence.

Theses are ordered in the way I would recommend to read them.

1. Search Engine History
2. The PageRank Citation Ranking Bringing Order to the Web
3. Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents
4. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
5. Combating Web Spam with TrustRank
6. The seven ages of information retrieval
7. Information retrieval data structures and algorithms
8. Information retrieval on the world wide web

Hope you enjoy this resource list!

Hat’s off to Rand for not only providing a great article but writing it in such a way that it’s optimized and enjoyable to read. It’s got everything;

• intriguing keyword rich title
• good use of secondary headers to break up the content
• bullet points
• graphs
• personality but not too much

Not only does it provide a good structured list of data but Rand incorporates a lot of SEOmoz’s own research data into the guide.

I often get asked by younger individuals what courses they should take if they want to get into the field of search engine optimization and internet marketing. Currently there are very few institutions that offer SEO courses and since there are very few clearly defined standards for SEO many schools struggle to come up with an effective course outline. I thought it might be useful for those individuals wondering what path to take if they heard the path of someone who has built a career around what SEO has to offer.

*here are the ingredients that made up my path to an SEO career

Have a Passion for Technology

In high school I gained a love for the internet and building websites and when I got the chance I jumped at the opportunity to take a tour of a school that focused on information technology . From there went to get my Associates Degree in Computer Applications and Programming. Not sure what I wanted to do with the degree I just acquired I took the first computer related job I got offered which was the IT consultant for a small business. There I setup a computer network, provided support for their custom software application and worked on the company website. Of all the things I did there working on the company website was my favorite, but at the time you still had to do most of the HTML coding by hand. Powerful content management systems like wordpress, joomla and drupal weren’t widely available and the training that school gave me was very limited since we learned a little about a lot but not enough of one thing to really apply ourselves.

Think Like a Business

After working as an IT consultant for  a while I realized that computer programming wasn’t really for me. At this time I decided to go back to school and for something I always thought I had a knack for… business.  While acquiring my degree in business I had a co-worker who setup his own website but didn’t have a clue on how to get traffic to his website. This is the moment that got me involved into SEO. I spent the next few months reading every available SEO article, blog and website I could get my eyes on. After a while I was able to figure out who the reliable SEO sources where and which sources where bogus. This is important since a lot of the material online about SEO may be out-dated or written by someone who has no real SEO experience.

Develop an Online Portfolio

Once I helped get my friends site optimized and it started to generate traffic I quit my help-desk job and took a pay cut to get a job in web development. I knew that before I could get a job in internet marketing I was going to need some more background in the web. After working as a web designer for a small company 6 months I developed my own portfolio site to showcase what I’ve learned and started sending out my resume to every SEO company even if they weren’t hiring. In no time I got my first interview and my online portfolio turned out to be a big selling point. Included in my online portfolio was a directory I setup, my friends site I help setup and a site I put together for a non-profit organization(great way to gain experience).

Have a Desire to Keep Learning

Even after getting my job in SEO I’ve gone on to get my MBA, continue to purchase new books and spend about 30 minutes a day reading SEO RSS feeds. I strongly believe you need the desire to keep learning new things in order to be successful in the field of internet marketing. You must also be willing to try new things, this is where my interest of social media marketing came into play. You must be willing to go outside of your comfort zone.

Related Resource
Poll: what degrees upcoming SEOs and SEMs should obtain
Good Luck!

I’m proud to announce that after many proprietary in-house tools we are about to release our first public tool. Until then here are a few of my favorite tools to use for SEO analysis; Majestic SEO, SEO Browser, SEM Rush and Link Voodoo.

What are some of your favorite tools?