You’ve Got A Friend In The ‘Biz by Michael Wood

Here’s another good read for all you “do it yourself” people out there. I got this book as a v-day present from my girlfriend, and although at first, I felt it would have little to offer me (as I’m so full of knowledge)… I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it opened my eyes to a few search engine placement meta tags that I didn’t even know about. What’s truly embarrassing, is that I’m a professional web consultant by trade right now and my specialty is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I suppose this is living proof that “the more I learn, the more I realize I know nothing at all”.

The section of this book that I’m excerpting from is called “Welcome to the Online Jungle” and the article is called “Is Google Your Biggest Fan?“. Search Engine Placement is composed of numerous components ranging from;

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
   making your pages keyword friendly
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
   guaranteed placement with a classified ad (you pay per click)
3. Social Media Optimization (SMO)
   making your website interface with socials site, i.e. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
   another form of SEM but placed on SMO websites

There is much more to it than the above, but that’s it in a nut-shell. So Michael Wood, the author of “You’ve Got A Friend In The ‘Biz” covered what I would refer to as “Google Basics” for SEO. He covers the basic concepts and even includes a few lines of example code which is what really struck me. Here’s what he included;

1. Title Tag
   - used by Google as a headline for your site in their listings
   - also used as the name for the page when you bookmark it
2. Meta Keywords
   - these would be the targeted words you want to be listed under when people search for them
3. Meta Description
   - this is the small paragraph of text that search engines use in their listings just below the headline
4. Meta Language
   - this one identifies the language of your site
5. Meta Robots
   - this one kills me… a year ago, I misused this one on a corporate website I built… it literally erased them Google’s database. It’s used to instruct search engine robots (also known as crawlers/spiders) whether they should or shouldn’t index or list the page or site. Apparently, my error cost the corporation 3 million dollars!
6. Meta Revisit
   - this is a new one to me… I’ve always used a sitemap instead.All this one does is instruct the search engine to come back for updates in X number of days… but really, I think it’s useless cause they’ll never come sooner than what’s convenient for them… so unless you’re looking to delay their return… don’t bother.
7. Meta Author
   - i’ve used this one before… it’s kinda like a signature used for credit. If ever a client of mine doesn’t want me to tag their site with “Site designed by Nautical Progressions” at the bottom of their page… I’ll just do it using this meta tag which is only visible in the source code, but at least there to prove I was the designer.
8. Meta Rating
   - also a new one to me… but i’ve seen a fair deal of search engines that will filter “adult content”… that being said, I gather this would be one of the elements they would use to filter out anything that was rated “adult”.
9. Meta Copyright
   - i’m not sure if this one has much weight to it… there have been a lot of ill advised individuals who have been told that sending their intellectual property to themselves by mail would suffice… or that a copyright isn’t required if the material has been publicly performed or showcased. Every line of code in your page will inevitably slow down the spiders/crawlers, so if it’s something you can disclose in the footer of your visible site, I wouldn’t bother placing it in my meta tags.

All of the above tags are to be placed in the header section of your web page. I recommend going to www.w3schools.com for the full picture, but for now, let’s touch on the other items covered in this book;

1. Google (Direct) – www.google.com/addurl/
   - submit your site to google… they don’t guarantee it’ll be listed and if you submit more than once, they may throw you into the naughty kids sandbox until you grow-up (sandboxes are fun, but not this one)
2. Add Pro – www.addpro.com/submit30.htm
   - this is a new one for me also… seems like a batch submission tool, but it requires a reciprocal link, which isn’t very cool.
3. Submit Express – www.submitexpress.com
   - wow this one is powerful, it’ll even scan your website’s code and tell you where you are weak.
4. Robots – www.robotstxt.org
   - this is an extension of that meta robots tag. very nifty if you’ve got any “secret” pages you want to keep under wraps.
5. Sitemaps – www.sitemaps.org
   - most search engines have their own “standard sitemap”, but you’ll get insight as to how to make one for your site. It’s used to list all your pages and can also be made publicly available to make things easier to find for people as well.

All in all, I would totally recommend buying this book. It serves as a great up to date precursor to all aspects of the music industry. The author Michael Wood is still pretty young, but he’s been everywhere and is noted to be one of if not the most connected Canadian in the music industry world wide. He spent a decade whoring his band Circuit (as in promoting them to executives, not hussling dirty old men on street corners) online and man to man by randomly knocking on doors and so much more. There are some really inspiring stories in his book. What’s really quirky and the very reason my girlfriend bought the book for me, is that he discloses some of his best industry contacts including himself. The guy actually wants to be contacted, hence “You’ve Got A Friend In The ‘Biz“. I’m actually a little jealous of how witty his marketing is because of that title alone. Kudos to you Michael.

To contact Michael Wood, visit http://citylightsent.com

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