Caydel’s SEO Blog

So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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Ogletree describes a great way to employ Google Adwords to track if your competitors are actively performing SEO by placing bids on typical ‘SEO’ terms such as ‘allinurl:example.com’, ‘link:example.com’, etc.

Handy little tip, one I will keep in the toolbox for the future. Of course, I wonder how effective it is considering that whatever you pointed it to could possibly be unrelated, resulting in a low quality score and high click prices. Your competitor could easily shut you down by clicking your link like crazy then.

Thanks again, Ogletree!

read more | digg story

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Ever felt the need to modify your company’s equipment to have some fun on a slow day? Check out the video below:

Man does that guy come close to smoking his head on the concrete…

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One of the most useful plugins I have on my blog is Dax Hererra’s Referral Feed plugin for Wordpress. I’ve used it since last fall on my blog, and totally love watching the different incoming search queries show up live.

At any rate, I just saw a rather disturbing search query come in which led to my site. Seems someone performed a search for ‘‘.

I’m not sure what surprises me more - that there is some anger-ridden kid out there who wants to knock off one of their MSN ‘buddies’ or the fact that my site is ranking high for that…

Edit: Aaron from the City of Angels Children’s Home in Tijuana informed me that Google offered him a list of ….

Google is so weird some days…

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QuadsZilla from SEOBlackhat just announced the first SEO poker tournament. The concept is simple - everyone puts links into the pot, and the winner takes all. All the links won must point to a single site or page, but can have whatever anchor text you want.

The ante isn’t actually as steep as I expected to see; of course, to enter the tournament by offering up a link according to the following schedule:

Ante is determined by this schedule:

Page Rank 4 Site: A sitewide link for 1 Year
Page Rank 5 Site: A homepage link for 1 year
Page Rank 6 Site: A Link From a Blog Post or Page on the site with a click distance from home page 2 or less. (i.e.: Home [click1] Page with link [click2] to target site.) for 1 year
Page Rank 7+ Site: A link from a Blog Post or Page on site with a click distance from the home page of 3 or less (i.e.: Home [Click1] About [click2] Friends [click3 is link to target site]) for 1 year.

*The links cannot be “nofollow” and there can be nothing telling the search engines not to index the link (such as disallowing robots or index=none)

** The link must be visible and in the same style as the other links on the page / site.

*** No porn or Pill sites. Some other sites may be disallowed at our sole discretion.

The site you ante the link(s) from must be the same site that will receive the links if you win. That means you cannot ante links from one site and choose to receive the links on another.

There are also cash prizes for the runners-up. $5000 will be divided up between the top 10% of the losers in the tournament.

The tournament will be played on Saturday March 24th, 2007 at 9:00 PM GMT. The game will be no limit Texas Hold’em.

So, check it out.

Note: QuadsZIlla is of course using an affiliate link pointing to the poker software he intends to use… Anyone else see that coming?

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A bunch of bloggers have been commenting today on the ‘misspelling’ in Google’s Valentine’s day logo this morning, which seems to say ‘Googe’ rather than ‘Google’.

decided to do a quick bit of research into ‘Googe’ to determine whether this was a mistake or not, and they discovered the following:

1. ‘Googe’ may refer to the 16th century poet Barnabe Goorge who is mostly famous for the line, ‘I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die’ which is obviously in the romantic, Valentine’s spirit
2. ‘Googe’ could be a reference to bassist Debbie Googe of My Bloody Valentine, an Irish-British rock band from the early 1990’s.
3. Lastly, it could be referring to the word ‘Googe’ as used in the Urban Dictionary. Warning: possibly NSFW, and just nasty anways…

So, hopefully that sheds some light onto the mystery. Once again, hat tip to The Puget News!

Not my usual SEO / Marketing / internet style, but I thought this was a cool idea!

Blood Toll is the first First Person Shooter game allowing players to earn money with every kill. The concept is simple: for every match, there is a price set on each player’s head. For every kill, you collect money. For every death, you lose money. Matches can range from $0.01 per life to $500 per life.

Currently, the game is in its first beta phase. All matches are currently played with ‘play money’, although real money arenas will be opening soon. Until the 28th of Februrary, there is a contest running. Whoever can earn he most play money will win a Playstation PSP.

There are three game modes currently offered in both ‘Real Money’ and ‘Play Money’ variants: ‘Normal’, ‘Sniper’ and ‘Efficiency’. Normal is your stereotypical deathmatch, similar in feel to any of the Quake or Unreal variants. In Sniper mode, you start with a rifle and 1 health; every hit is a kill shot. In efficiency mode, you start with all the pickups, but only a limited amount of ammunition, with no pickups on the ground. Once you are out of ammo, you are merely a moving target.

So far, the game seems to be quite stable. While the current version is running on a highly modified version of the older GPL’ed ‘Cube’ game engine, the devs report that they will be moving to a newer engine yet prior to the full release of the game.

This sounds like an interesting concept, and is likely to draw a number of the more hard-core gamers out there. Unfortunately, this means that the competition will be very stiff in the real money arenas. For those elite gamers out there, this could pay more than a day job; for those not so skilled, this could cost more than a drug habit.

More beta testers are highly encouraged to join in the game.

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