Is this possible?

[Mike]

Does anyone think that if you follow Chris's tips on SEO (or anyone else that has lots of experience), you will get a top search engine position ahead of a company that is spending 'mega buks'?

By the way, just finished reading all of the articles, great work Chris

[Chris]

Definitely possible.

I personally rank better on lots of things than larger companies.

For instance take this site, I started promoting it 12 hours ago and I already have 4 DMOZ listings. One of my sites has approximately 20 Yahoo listings.

SitePoint, a far larger company than myself with 20-30 employees, has only around 10 DMOZ listings and they've been around for years (atleast two of those listings are for articles written by me as well).

Larger companies, for some reason or another, tend to ignore SEO, or only take a half-assed approach.

Sometimes you need to make sacrifices for SEO, such as using text keys for your database instead of numeric ones (which is less efficient) or focusing your site to get better rankings instead of having a "better" design (choosing text links over pretty graphical ones for instance).

Larger companies simply aren't willing to do this. They want their fancy high-graphic flash site, which sucks for search engines.

[Mike]

When you say you have 4 DMOZ listings and 20 Yahoo! listings, do you mean you are listed under those engines under 4 and 20 keywords?

Sorry, I'm new to all this search engine business - didn't realise that they were so important before I saw your articles on Sitepoint and here.

[Chris]

No, it means I have 4 URLs for this site listed in DMOZ. DMOZ has 4 links to this site.

Thats all a listing is really, a link.

Getting listed in directories is very important, its so easy to, all you have to do is submit appropriate pages to appropriate categories. Yet this is one example where some sites don't bother.

The most important directories to be listed in are Yahoo, DMOZ, and Zeal/Looksmart.

[Mike]

Ah, I get it...

I tried submitting my (old) site for google about a month ago, still not in, obviously for you it's different

Anyway, thanks for the help...

[Chris]

Google will actually take up to 7 weeks to fully list a site.

This is because they are on a 4 week cycle. They need to visit your site during a deep crawl, after which they process that crawl for about 3 weeks, then they publish their results.

You can get listed faster (sometimes) in directories because they are constantly updated.

It is very atypical to be listed so quickly though, some people wait months to be listed simply because submissions drastically outnumber editors (remember: directories are edited by humans, search engines are edited by machines).

[Mike]

Chris,

I have just launched my new site (found in my signiture), and submitted it to DMOZ a few days ago. However, when I search for 'Template Storm' I do not get any results, so I presume it is not in yet. Should it be by now?

Also, do I submit loads of URLS of the site to DMOZ, or just the homepage?

Cheers,
Mike

[Chris]

Chances are you won't get into DMOZ at all since DMOZ is anti-affiliate site.

Also... even if you weren't... I wouldn't expect a response for months (if at all). They are way overworked. With this site I got very lucky.

[Mike]

Ok, thanks