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Hi CaliRay,
The sites you mentioned are usually considered Authority Sites, so they do carry a little more weight in the SERPs (search engine results pages). That said, I've had pages of mine outrank Amazon.com etc. But it's not in the "seo structure" - as in on-page optimziation - but in the number & quality of your backlinks.
If you haven't yet, I recommend you read SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies. It's free, less than 100 pages, and the absolute best (most accurate) information on SEO you can get: http://www.seofaststart.com
Take one of your keyword phrases and pop it into Google. Analyze the top 3 results. Take those 3 links and go to Yahoo.com and use the link command in the search bar, like this:
link:URL
Replacing URL with the actual URL that ranks well for your keyword phrase.
This will open Yahoo Site Explorer, and show you the backlinks (inbound links) for that page. You can use the drop down box to change it to only display off-site links (links not coming from within their own domain, or internal links).
You need to beat them either in number of links, or quality of links, to beat them in the SERPs.
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I use some tools as well, but always double-check in Yahoo Site Explorer. Reason being that I have used tools in the past that don't offer accurate results, so I like to double check using my manual methods before putting stock in any tools/results.
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The nofollow attribute is a whole 'nother fun and interesting subject.
They should have named it something more relevant. Googlebot does in fact follow links tagged with the nofollow attribute... Not to mention it's google-specific.
