Agence de Référencement Montréal SEO Specialist

Cette Agence de Referencement se Trouve Maintenant a SEO ROI.com

2008-01-02T21:06:00.000-08:00

Les billets futurs de mon agence de référencement se retrouveront dorénavant chez SEO ROI services. This SEO specialist is moving his blogging activities to SEO ROI Services, where he sells expert seo services.

I encourage you to subscribe to my new rss feed at SEO ROI.

The reason I won't keep blogging here is that I'm looking to develop a more professional image and because updating two blogs is too time-consuming for one individual.

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Andrew Shotland Explains Yellowbot's SEO Results with Site Architecture

2007-12-16T17:37:00.000-08:00

Andrew Shotland, local SEO extraordinaire (speaking at SMX Local and Mobile in the picture to the right), has a great post on Yellowbot's SEO success.

(Photo credit to Ben Saren.)

What's interesting is that he points out that contrary to many Yellow Pages type sites, Yellowbot didn't structure their site like most directories with very broad top-level categories. Rather, their site architecture cuts straight to the chase with subcategories that people are likely to actually search for.

Andrew gives the example of people looking in a directory for "auto wrecking" as compared to people looking for "automotive." Subcategories like auto wrecking are treated as top level pages by Yellowbot. The benefit is fewer pages to crawl through for SE spiders.

What's particularly great, in my opinion, is that from a user's perspective this also works out. That traditional bit about making everything in your site accessible within three clicks? Site architecture like this makes that alot easier to achieve. What's even better is that here, SEs are really following what humans like.

I had to question Andrew on his assertion regarding local modifiers though. In my experience with my client, the Hotel de Paris, people search for "hotel Montreal" or Montreal hotel. Not "downtown Montreal hotel" or the like. See our discussion in Andrew's comments for more (or comment here ;) ).

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Yulbiz 2007 - Best of Montreal's Business Blogosphere

2007-11-28T08:11:00.000-08:00

Yulbiz 2007 wrapped up last night at Cafe Melies with the Yulbiz November edition, featuring the release of the new book Pourquoi blogger dans un contexte d'affaires (Reasons to Blog in a Business Setting). After the jump (the read-more link), I've got the news, gossip and best of all - some cool pictures and video of Yulbiz November's participants! Plus, a wrap-up of my Yulbiz 07 experience and the people it's allowed me to meet.

I'm writing this from school and have unfortunately left the cards I was given last night at home. So if I forget to mention you, just drop a comment and I'll be sure to update this post.

After saying hi to my friend, expert internet marketer Michel Leblanc, and new acquaintance Mathieu Bélanger, of K3 Media web agency (more on K3 in a minute) who were standing outside (see picture above) I went in and spotted Eric Kucharsky (left), of TechnoMontreal whom you'll recall I met at an earlier Yulbiz. I took a picture, but he was in a conversation so I didn't want to interrupt too much.

To start things off, I sidled over to the cool camera lady from Canoe.ca. We talked about how she came to be working as a camerawoman and it turns out she studied biology and then journalism, with a view to getting into scientific journalism. That said though, she says she's having a blast at Canoe! I can't find the video on Canoe, she had no business cards and my memory isn't working so great on 5 hours sleep. So, if you want to help me out and comment to tell me her name, that would be great.

I caught up with Bruno Bhutto (please correct me if I'm misspelling that, Bruno), who was a panelist at FacebookCamp, where I also spoke on Facebook advertising. We had a fun chat and he told me about this photoshop community he's been with for a good 5 years, called Worth 1000. As in, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Particularly cool are these two aggressive looking plants: Bang Bang and Revenge.

Bruno and I shot a video describing the site. He describes the contests on the site, mentions the mainstream media have picked up on it and more.

Stupid Blogger/Blogspot isn't letting me upload, so that'll have to come in a later edit.

Soon afterward, I caught my buddy Sylvain Carle in a shot with Bruno. Sylvain (and Michel) are co-authors of Pourquoi blogger along with some of the other folks. I picked up my copy last night and it's really looking good and enjoyable, though I haven't read it all yet (so maybe it sucks around Sylvain or Michel's chapters ... not! ;) ).

Sylvain also discussed his chapter of the book with me in a video, but that'll obviously have to wait. Speaking of which, how do you rotate video? I shot it with my handheld camera upright...

Pascal Veilleux of NSI and myself discussed what he and the gang are doing with corporate blogs and all, and it sounded quite exciting. Pascal's on my list of experts on corporate bloggers, so if that's your bag, you should go over and give him a shout. Again, I'll post the video later.

Further in, I sat down for a quick talk with my buddy Andres Restrepo, whom I also met at a previous Yulbiz (if you're no good at reading between the lines, the name of the game is consistency and frequency). He's now working for Ressac (smart move, Ressac!) where Julien Raby, who's now heading up Cossette's search marketing arm, used to work (btw, Julien, you guys need to rank for Cossette search marketing! Let me know when Cossette's at least got a specific page in place and I'll modify that link to SEOmoz's Service marketplace).

Passing by at that specific moment was another friend I made through Yulbiz, popular blogger (and videoblogger!) Philippe Martin, who's the go-to-guy for making and http://www.nayezpaspeur.ca">designing blogs! Notice that the link to his site is a deeplink. I used to just link to the homepage, but his design skills placed a tab to that part of the site above the fold and made me notice it! So there you go, he'll help you do better SEO too!

Following this I was fortunate enough to chat with my friend Nicolas Cossette, who blogs on SMO (aka SMM) and works at NVI Solutions. I also met a couple of new people. For the first time, Guillaume Bouchard, NVI's CEO, showed up as did his new hire, Samuel (don't think you told me your last name, I'm afraid). It was great talking to him and I think it's fair to say we both learnt something from each other (I learnt some tips on closing the sale, he learnt my credit card # ;) ). Here are Nicolas, Samuel, Guillaume and I:

See the FacebookCamp shirt I'm wearing (click the pick to enlarge)? That's from speaking at FacebookCamp Montreal, and the shirt and conference were partly sponsored by K3. Thanks a lot for the generosity Mathieu!

Anyways, if you're looking for SEOs who know the French market, besides Michel, you'd be hard pressed to find a better crew (Michel's not a crew, but you get the idea) than Go Referencement. (If you want something in English ... I'm outranking Guillaume and NVI for Montreal SEO ;). Write me: Gab at seoroi dot c o m.)

Next up I had a quick hello with Etienne Denis, CEO of 90 Degres (who's looking for a French editor for his company's content services). Yet another fellow I'd met at a previous Yulbiz! I've got a video with Etienne too.

About that time I caught up with a recent acquaintance and new friend, Claude Malaison. He's been involved with tech stuff since before I was born - literaly. Besides organizing Webcom Montreal and suchlike (he's the French Canadian Danny Sullivan!), he's President of Emergence Web, a boutique agency focused on Web 2.0 strategy. In any case, I pulled Claude into a pic with Nicolas, Philippe and Stephane Waffo (another new acquaintance and a cool dude :) ). I also got those fellows in a shot with Martin Lessard, a terrific blogger whose first chapter in the Pourquoi blogger book I'm really enjoying - check out Zero Seconde for more Web 2.0.

Left to right: Martin Lessard, Stephane Waffo, Philippe Martin and Nicolas Cossette.

Same order: Stephane (slightly cut out, sorry!), Philippe, Claude and Nicolas.

By the way, please don't read anything into the size of the pics. I'm just playing around with formatting and seeing Blogger's capacities (also trying to speed up load time), as I don't often get to do a post with pics.

As the night began to wind down, I saw my friends Kim Vallee, Muriel Ide, and Jerome Paradis. Muriel's started a jewelry line! Jerome's developing a Facebook App that he's nearly got finished! More info when it's out :). (Speaking of which, Martin's talking about a televised debate about Facebook at ZS.)

Here are Jerome, Kim (far right), Stephane and his friend whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment (Stephane or Stephane's friend, if you read this, please comment to remind me) - but who happens to be a really good communicator. I think I bored his ear off for a half hour and he showed interest throughout!

Finally, I had the opportunity to meet the excellent Tristan Peloquin of Technaute. He's only started blogging since last March's Quebec elections, but as this brilliant fellow can attest, that means nothing. We emailed around the time of the elections on political marketing. Tristan, if you're reading this, Epiar's blog has the Presidential ROI thing I was telling you about. For my other readers, Tristan also wrote a chapter in the book, fyi, and from my previous reading of his writing, I'm sure it'll be great!

Here are some other posts on Yulbiz you might like

http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/10/yulbiz-october-2007.html
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/09/yulbiz-meme.html (lol, this didn't quite work out, unfortunately, but maybe we can get it going now)
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/09/yulbiz-september-2007.html
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/08/local-seo-rfrencement-local-yulbiz.html
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2006/08/yulbiz-montreal-business-blogging.html

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Political Marketing ROI

2007-11-19T23:36:00.001-08:00

Epiar's Curtis Dueck has a very interesting post on the ROI of the Presidential campaigns going on in the US.

Curtis proposes to measure ROI in terms of awareness. It's an interesting metric to track and certainly plays a role in political campaigns. The last federal elections here featured, in my riding at least, candidates who were Marxist, Communist (apparently there's a difference there), Christian Democratic (as opposed to the other, undermocratic Christians who were running?) and more.

Their combined total was less than 1% of the vote. I'd say an important part of that is awareness. By contrast, the Green candidate got a few percentage points of the vote - again, awareness at work, imho.

But it's also not the be all, end all metric. Like I wrote back when the Liberals and PQ were off buying AdWords ads, there's a need for political marketing campaigns to define conversions. Some proposals I made were volunteers signed up, donations made and lawn-signs requested/distributed.

On a related note, did I mention I bought the domain Political Consultant .ca a while back?

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Answers to the Unanswered Qs for Rand

2007-11-07T21:09:00.000-08:00

Rand at SEOmoz recently offered to answer questions people might put to him about SEO, SEOmoz and so on. As I'm an unabashed fan and will proudly admit I look up to him as something of a role model in the SEO world, I'm going to share my answers to some of the questions I felt Rand didn't answer fully.

What does it take to be a great SEO? What are the personality traits and skills that separate the good SEOs from the great ones?

Rand: Sounds like a good title for a blog post to me :-) I think I'll try to address this will a more complete answer in the future.

My opinion (like it matters): I'm going to discuss two aspects of this: the company perspective and and the individual SEO perspective.

This question made me think of the excellent book "Small Giants," by Bo Burlingham, in which he discusses "Companies that chose to be great, instead of big." One of the things I recall about the companies profiled was that many of them were passionate about what they did, as were their employees.

As a matter of fact, while I can't recall what company it was, both employees and management chose to take pay cuts during an economic downturn to keep the company afloat. They did it because they loved working there and enjoyed what they were doing.

Another aspect of being a great company is that the people who work for you are empowered (excuse the buzzword) to make important decisions. Reell Precision Manufacturing, an engineering company, let its employees resolve whether or not to create a hinge that would be used in a cigarette dispensing machine. The CEOs (there were two) left it up to the employeed, trusting them to make the right choice.

Eventually the internal dispute resolution mechanisms decided not to do the project. The story went into the company newsletter. That shows not only that the employees are empowered, but that the company is proud of how its employees handled the situation. That says a lot, imho.

Regarding being a great SEO, I'd say similar rules apply. You need to be passionate, and love the work. When Rand stays up till the wee hours of the morning blogging - that's passion. While I'm not in the same class as Rand, and nowhere near, I spend 15 - 20 hours reading marketing blogs each week to stay current with the latest techniques and ideas. Why? Because I love it.

Another essential aspect of it is that you're good at building links - human links. Look around the blogosphere or even just your favourite few sites and blogs. The external linking goes in an overwhelming majority to people the author is friends with or at least knows personally. See my posts on Yulbiz, for example.

Another essential element is that you should be willing to test different things, even if they aren't part of your specialty, strictly speaking. Look at Dreamhost's homepage. A few years ago, it was a lot more complicated and made several different offers to you. Now it's almost entirely dedicated to one conversion action and it uses an image to that purpose (stay tuned for a post on that trend).

One last point I'd like to mention is that you should know your limits. When you're starting out, it's easy to try and sell your services to everyone around. You need to bring in money, after all. I've made the mistake myself, so I sympathize. But search marketing is just not appropriate to every form of business or every type of website.

For example, a lot of smaller brochure sites are only informational - there's no defined conversion. For branding sake you might want a lot of search traffic. But it'll be hard to justify - especially if you're working with a small business - because the bottom line ROI won't be there in a measurable way. And chances are that if trying to sell SEO/M to everyone and their brother is an issue for you, you're working mostly with small businesses.

Other sites that probably won't benefit from search marketing are purely informational ones. Similarly, those with few people searching for their products (though if the value of a conversion is big enough - think 5 figures - this may not matter) may not be ideal clients.

Can you tell me the SEO benefit or penalties of domain and subdomain relationships? (I heard bad domains can penalize subdomains but not the other way around?) Since they are treated as individual websites, are there any other benefits - like if you have 1000 links to a subdomain, does it have any effect on the root domain? Can you elaborate on any of this?

Rand:
I'm not sure I'd be fully confident that bad subdomains can't hurt you (particularly if you have lots of links from your main domain pointing to it). I'd probably speculate that subdomains and domains can hurt one another if they contain spam and are untrusted or penalized by the search engines.

As for having 1000 links to a subdomain - I suppose it would affect the main domain in that, in the engines' eyes, that subdomain might be treated less like a separate entity and more like a part of the main domain, but we've still seen examples where heavily-linked-to subdomains aren't quite as trusted and fully "part" of the main domain when it comes to search rankings. I'm not sure what you're looking for elaboration on, but my general rule of thumb is that unless there is a truly excellent reason to use a subdomain (reputation management through SERPs domination, for example), stick to just using subfolders.

Yours truly: Check out Blue Hat SEO on using subdomains. His experience is that spammy subs won't hurt the main site - provided they're orphans not linked to from the main site.

Consider this blogspot domain for one. If I cloaked this place and filled it with auto-generated keyword gibberish, I couldn't hurt Blogspot.com or Blogger.com. I can't find the link to the Blue Hatter's post at this point in time, but if somebody does, please post it in the comments.

Is it a good idea to create a page listing sites that link to you, but that search engines haven't found yet? (either on the site, or a different domain)?

Rand: A good idea for tracking or monitoring purposes? Maybe - but your analytics tool should be doing this for you through the referring links/domains sections. If you're asking from an SEO perspective, I can't think of a particularly good reason to create a page with any content that you then hide from search engines. Perhaps I'm not fully grasping your question.

Me: Will Critchlow did a good job answering this in the comments. I'd like to point you to a further source, again at Blue Hat SEO. Eli presents the concept as "Synergy links." Essentially, you get articles posted on third party sites, and then link to those articles from other third party sites. Eli's got the spam approach going on with the third party sites being directories you can automatically get links from, but the technique works for general white-hat purposes too. (Notice that my article on reputation management ranks top 20 at Google?)

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Majors Incompetent In Canadian Local Search

2007-11-01T11:09:00.001-07:00

Being a local SEO specialist, I'm concerned about being able to submit my sites and clients' sites to the major search engines. Yet each of Google, Yahoo and MSN have serious issues when it comes to Canadian local search inclusion!
For starters, and this has been bothering me for a while, neither Yahoo local nor MSN (through InfoUSA...) allow you to submit a Canadian site to their local search engines! Consider these results from Yahoo local in a search for "seo" near "Montreal." They've just been edited to cut the URLs.

* Responsible Marketing s SEM / SEO Code of Ethics
View Responsible Marketing Consulting Services Search Engine Marketing (SEM) / Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Code of Conduct.

* Golden-Arrow.com Lake Placid Hotel, Lodging, Resort - Best Western ...
Lake Placid Hotel & Lodging - the Best Western Golden Arrow Hotel located in Lake Placid, New York offers deluxe resort accomodations in a perfect

* Eight by Eight - Infinite Web Marketing Solutions 1-888-838-1828
How Do You Rank with the Search Engines? Do your title tags contain your most relevant keywords and phrases? Are those keywords and phrases repeated in your content copy? Does your description tag adequately explain what you do? You are not alone.

* Search Engine Optimization or SEO
Web Design Vermont. Vermont Website design, Vermont Website hosting, Vermont Internet marketing. We are located in Burlington, Vermont

* Vermont Multimedia Design Company - Web Design, Search Engine Marketing ...
Emjay Technical Studios is a professional, affordable multimedia design company based in Jeffersonville, Vermont. Nestled in the Green Mountains just minutes from Smugglers Notch, Stowe and Burlington, Emjay Technical Studios offers Web Design, ...

They're all American companies in Vermont! Responsible Marketing's description doesn't mention it, but they're in Plattsburgh. None of the others are any better. I'm glad that Yahoo has an idea what state is closest to Montreal, but the results are pretty much irrelevant if I'm looking for a business in Montreal. Maybe it's because you can't submit a Canadian business/site? (I have to admit that their "Indian-style driving directions" - we use the same type of directions here in Canada, but that's besides the point - are a neat feature.)

Just as nearsighted is MSN Live's Local Listing Center. You can't list a Canadian business, let alone any non-US businesses for that matter. Not to mention that there is some branding confusion out in Redmond because MSN local is officially called the Windows Live Local Listing Center. By contrast, MSN's main search offering is MSN Live, not Windows live. Go figure... Perhaps my friend Susan can help MSN get the branding straight?

Finally, Google's Webmaster Central has a new feature to let you associate your site with a geographic area. Yet, for whatever reason, Quebec isn't a valid province there. Weird... At least their local search submission center is in order.

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Yulbiz October 2007

2007-10-31T15:47:00.000-07:00

"You'll biz it up" with other IT business pros and develop your network of like-minded bloggers. That was certainly the theme of yet another succesful Yulbiz bash at cafe Melies, as dozens of Montreal business bloggers. Here's the low down [and dirty] on the cool people I chatted with at Yulbiz October 2007.

You need to read through to the end to make sure you hear about all the coolest people that matter in Montreal marketing and tech! (And then leave a comment.)

First up I sat down with Sebastien Provencher of Praized, Vincent Barberger of Multiple Media (who have this cool enterprise blogging/CMS solution out) and Pascal Veilleux of NSI.

Sebastien regaled us with the story of how his girlfriend (conjointe gets lost in translation to English, please excuse me Sebastien) and he set up a screen capture movie on Second Life with actors playing out part of her youth/children's book. This genius marketing tactic was apparently a big success at a book fair in Sherbrooke. It's on sale at Mosaique.

Pascal's company has a great name, where I'm concerned: Never Stop Improving - NSI. Pretty appropriate for a company that is in the business of offering reviews and constructive criticism! And I need to give them my compliments for using a blog as the basis for their website!

Speaking of blogs, Vincent's company is selling them big-time! They've come up with a new CMS oriented to banks and conservative companies not at ease with open-source software and that prefer a proprietary solution. Thus, the multiple media content manager. We didn't get a chance to discuss it in much more depth unfortunately, but hopefully next Yulbiz we can speak about it some more!

Around the time I was hanging out with Vince, Pascal and Seba, Claude Malaison of emergence web and I traded a few words. You might recall that I couldn't remember his name from a previous Yulbiz... Well, I got his card this time! Claude is organizing Webcom (amongst others) and is excited as he's bringing in some great speakers!

Edit: I didn't get Jacques's card, but he wrote me his name and specialization in my agenda. Jacques Warren is an analytics expert and former reseller for Web Trends. He's got a handful of blogs, which, when updated, offer some good material. Consider this one (in French) on analyzing visitor paths.

Same Edit: Similarly, I didn't get Julien Niquet's card but what I did get was much more significant: a sneak peak at the future of banking. He's working on Colektivo. I'd say more, but I think it's hush to avoid getting the idea stolen. Julien and his project are absolutely a pair that need to be kept an eye on, because they're doing big things!

Soon afterwards, I was chatting with Olivier Niquet and Jean-Philippe Wauthier of Cent Papiers (a french play on words that I can't translate properly...). Consider it the french equivalent of Gooruze, Squidoo or Youmoz. (If you have no clue what I'm talking about, google those words.)

Another fascinating conversation was the one I had with Sophie Lachapelle of Infopresse. She's working on an article on how Quebec marketing and ad agencies make use of social networks. (I'll have a case study on SEO ROI about my own efforts and discuss other peoples' ad efforts on the site soon enough. Sneak preview: CTR is terrible! Stay tuned...)

Major thanks to Martin Lessard, web strategy consultant, for bringing Mme. Lachapelle to Yulbiz! He's got a post on the CRTC possibly regulating the Internet, the way the US Department of Justice wants to attack Net Neutrality. Scary!

Jonathan Stoikovitch and his friend Nico Stinghe got in a word edgewise (Nico handing a card over: "photographe" lol), but we didn't have very substantive conversations. Jon's got some interesting software for co-browsing available in any case.

And last but far from least (perhaps the most enjoyable conversation on the night) was with Nicolas Cossette. He's joined ranks with the enemy (kidding about the "enemy" thing... what I meant to say was "evil empire" haha - OKOK, relax, I'm joking ) but is nonetheless a very friendly guy. He commented on my SEO ROI blog a little while ago and we finally got to meet and have a chat :). I'd keep my eye on him, fellows, because he's a clever guy and I'm a fairly talent judge.

(I also need to mention Philippe Martin and Michel Leblanc, who, as usual, were the cool and courteous organizers of this month's Yulbiz. Also, a cheery-o to Geoffroi and Alain whom I saw but didn't get to chat with.)

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PubCon Rockstar

2007-10-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

Every Pubcon needs its Pimp, and he is I.

Besides writing grandiose openings with questionable grammar, I've got a laundry list of reasons why I'm the biggest Rockstar WebGeek (specifying webgeek, because when you're going to a conference by and for webmasters ... well, Dave Navarro isn't about to show up) and why I should be selected to party with Shoe et co. in Vegas.

If you're totally clueless about what I'm talking about, this is an entry to Shoemoney's Rockstar contest. Warning: there is some adult oriented humour and a liberal dose of sarcasm - if you can't take a joke for what it is, please don't read any further.

Also, for my regular readers, this is a more personal post not quite related to the regular content of this blog, so take it for what it's worth (some young adult type humour) and not as a reflection of my professionalism.

[...]

Why are you still reading?

For starters, I spent a month and a half travelling this past summer in the Middle East. Not only did I not get shot or blown up, I actually took shots and threw up! Err, wait, scratch that. I partied like a rockstar, swam with the fish, charmed the chicks (a little chopped corn will go a long way towards pleasing the little furry future chicken filets... no, seriously). And besides being a pimp and having a damn good time of it, I'm rocking this SEO game like stoning was legal!

Let's have a look at each of those points.

1) I got more partying done this summer than Paris Hilton's done advanced calculus! Or more than Matt Cutts, whoever's smarter/done more. (My $500 are on Paris.)

Here's yours truly crowd surfing at 2 am on his tour bus (in the blue shirt and grey boxers).

Are you ready for some more? (Crowd: "Oh yeah!" Rapper: "Are you ready for some more?" Crowd: "Oh Yeah!" Rapper: "Cuz you know I want to feel it, and you know I need to feel it." Lol, don't know why that lyric just popped into my mind, but I couldn't help slipping it in there.

With a friend, I tamed a bucking camel (while wearing short shorts) and propose to repeat the ride on Jeremy's back in the Nevada desert (harder too, because he's got no hair to hang on to!).

Further to that, I went incognito, Indiana Jones style, through water tunnels wearing what turned out to be a day-glo turban (Did you know white Ts make good turbans? Bet you didn't! Next time you hear someone make a racist "towelhead" remark, call them on their ignorance ... the term is "Tshirthead".)

Did I mention that when I party and get rowdy, the people around me get their smiles rearranged? You contest judges wanted to talk about fighting, well check this out:

OK, OK, so maybe it was a fossilized piece of junk from an archeological dig and not some guy's jawbone that I ripped out. Still, I think hanging out with me would be very beneficial to our judges, each of whom seems to have some issues with their smiles. I mean, consider:

Dax is actually frowning! If I had my picture taken with my pants around my ankles, I'd be doubled over laughing!

It seems that Rebecca, Neil and Shoe also have an issue with smiling, as you can see from them hiding their pearly whites...

Shoe's got his arm around a Hooter's hottie! And he's not smiling! And then he's holding a massive cheque while again, his cheekbones aren't the slightest bit perky!

Rebecca's a little more subtle with it. She's in disguise here with a mustache so she can plausibly deny it was her. But we know she's hiding that grin just the same!

And Neil's slurping on a beer bong. Looks like the social communities of college fraternities is what he's really studying!

Greg ... well, let's just say that with a smile like that he makes a hockey player look good... A for effort at least!

The only judge who does a half-decent job (and has a nice smile - props to your dentist) is Dave Dellanave:

The relation between this and PubCon is simple. ~~By making fun of the judges I'm getting them - by means of reverse psychology - to secretly want to be my friend and invite me to go with them to PubCon.~~ If you're going to socialize and network (and maybe even pick up a girl or two), a little bit of charm is essential - and your humble servant has plenty of that. Which brings us to point two:

2) Picking up the girls. If you're going to party like a rockstar, you're not just going to be getting wasted. You're going to be macking the hell out of a room. In my month and a half of travelling this past summer, I picked up no less than 5 girls and was offered to join the mile high club on my plane back home by a sixth.

Have a look:

Here's your favourite rockstar taking a short break from dancing to smile for the camera with the cute girl he picked up over the weekend. Note also the white pants, like a certain rockstar who's popular in Vegas wedding ceremonies.

And like any self-respecting rock star knows, it's not sufficient to just pick up one girl a night.

Heh, my eyes look so conniving/evil there. Sure sign of a party animal rockstar ;).

Following that, there was another cutie who I unfortunately did not get a chance to take pictures with, and whom you'll have to take my word on. Next up was this delightful young thing from Toronto, which just goes to show that even Toronto can get some things right. Did I mention this was a Montreal SEO blog?

The story here was that I was walking back from a cafe and saw this girl and her friend. I thought they were cute, recognized the uniforms they were in as being from an organization I'd had an interest in and chatted them up. Next thing you know I've got a hot date Friday night! Fun in the [setting] sun, as they say.

Note also the smiling! (This image wasn't cropped, it was just self shot from very close.)

I then met a girl who had an awesome personality and whom I was dating until just a few weeks ago.

We were walking along and saw a harpist and just had to take a picture - I mean, when do you see a harpist street performer around? I thought it was funny that as a harpist, she also harped about getting a donation before she'd let us take a picture with her. If you're keeping count, this is #5. And still more smiles.

The airplane girl I won't post a picture of because it might upset ms. #5. But fyi, I turned her down as ms. #5 and I were still dating at the time. ("How un-rockstarish and boring! How non-controversial!" I know, I know... )

Bottom line: Pick me to go with you to PubCon and not only will we party, you guys will get a crash course on smiling, keeping up the smile as much as possible without getting tired and making smart conversation to pick up girls (or guys, for you, Rebecca). And for you Greg, until you see a dentist, I'll teach you to be a good listener ;).

At the end of the day, most girls and guys aren't expecting to date supermodels (though if you're a self-confident and only occasionally own-horn-tooting, wink-n-a-smile-ing, easy-chatting p-i-m-p like yours truly, you can have that expectation). They want someone friendly, who'll smile and listen to what they have say with interest while making them feel good about themselves. Like your humble servant, moi.

3) I'm an SEO rockstar.

Consider a couple of the things I've written, results I've achieved and some of the research I'm undertaking.

1) Sitelinks research project: What in the algo triggers the attribution of sitelinks to a site?

2) The beginner's Primer to Search Engine Reputation Management.

3) Google stealing search share from right under MSN's nose, which it seems no one in the industry noticed.

4) At the ISEdb, The New Directory. Imho, Seth and the good folks at Squidoo have gotten a good portion of the idea right, and it appears Gooruze will be doing the same.

5) This piece on linkbait at Pandia addressing the essential characteristics of succesful linkbait based on 5 cases. (Rebecca, the Moz is in there, so do check it out.)

6) These articles at Youmoz which are pretty dandy and instructive, imho:

and some others too.

Besides that, I'm #1 and #6 on Yahoo for SEO Montreal (was #1 and #2 earlier in October, but the SERPs have just changed very recently).

My SEO ROI .com referrer logs already show top 50 rankings on SEO consulting, and it's only been actively promoted for a few months.

I'm a multi-disciplinary fellow. I have:

Planned and supervised the design of my SEO ROI site from A-Z this summer, including graphics and code;
Re-wrote the copy and some html code on the landing page for this Montreal hotel which increased their conversion rate, an impressive feat considering it was already above the industry average;
Ranked this blog top 20 for Local SEO and this site often comes up in Map results for Montreal SEO on Google when the SERPs have Maps integrated (it would be awesome to attend the PubCon local sessions!);
Built a domain portfolio that counts awesome generic KW domains including a handful that have 6 figure + Overture results (not to mention LinkBuilding.ca ;) ). Do I care if they're .ca? Not so long as Google etc. don't.
Scored a minesweeper best time on expert of 120 seconds, or ~1.2 seconds a mine.

So if you can excuse the hard-selling, excessive bragging and weak self-deprecating jokes - I may be a rockstar, but I'm a n00b at this contest stuff - I think you'll find in me a fun guy to hang out with and one who's happy to listen to you :). Bring me to PubCon!

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P.s. Did I mention I swam with the fishes? I was being serious about that:

Come to think of it, with $500, I think I'd take the judges with me for a an hour of diving in Cali, which would be an awesome group activity.

I mean, when I'm not trying to discretely sample some earwax...

He never saw it coming! hehe

And then, this guy on the right didn't realize the joke was on him :

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Get Google Sitelinks Research Project Part 1

2007-10-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

Google attributes certain websites "Sitelinks" and at the SEW forums, I found an interesting discussion on what it is that causes this. It's all speculation though, so I've decided to start a research project on what factors in Google's data/algorithms might cause these Sitelinks to appear.

The first thing I've done has been to establish a methodology of possible factors to test for. Second, I've created a sample set of 100 sites that have Sitelinks. Here is the list of sitelinked sites:

Atu2
Kidsastronomy
General Motors
McGill
University of Toronto
Kraft
Omniture
Insurance.com
Sierra Club
MSN
Yahoo
Goog
SEW
SEL
SEObook
SEOmoz
Squidoo
TD Canada Trust
Parliament
DoubleClick
24/7 Real Media
Loblaws
Xbox360 Forum
Loreal
KidsDinos
Biology4kids
CoolMath4Kids
Genealogy.com
Ancestry.com
PlentyofFish
Problogger
Vistaprint
Logos.it
Blue Host
Hostgator
Mortgage101
Tiger Direct
Law.com
Microsoft
Adobe
PlanetPhotoshop
W3C
ScienceMag
Journal of Medicine
Journal of Psychiatry
Journal of Biological Chemistry
American Bar Association
Beckett
Alibris
Digg
Stumble Upon
Media.com
Fox TV
Canada.com
Conservative Party of Canada
Liberal Party of Canada
Green Party of Canada
Food Network
Scholarships Canada
Standford newspaper
London England – VisitLondon.com comes up below news results and below Maps results with Sitelinks.
Toronto Canada – Toronto.ca below maps
CollegeHumor
Download.com
IGN.com
Counter-scipt.net – Counter-strike scripts
Feedreader.com
Newsgator
CTV – CTV.ca comes up after a futher query link to Google finance and stock info
TSX.com for Stock
Berkshire Hathaway
Mohawk College – Mohawk
How Stuff Works
Kids Health
Victoria’s Secret
Myspace
Alexa
Facebook
LinkedIn
Technorati
Sitepoint
DigitalPoint
V7n
Compete
Bargain.com
HaAretz
Yediot Ahronot
Pajamas Media
Vertrue
Consumer Reports
Shareasale
CJ.com
Namepros
Olive Garden
Gardeners – Garden Supply
Shoppers drug mart (but not Pharmaprix)
Creditcards.com
ISEdb
Pandia
WebProNews

It's a pretty prestigious group, I think we can agree. I'll be conducting tests over the next weeks and months to figure out what the Sitelinks attribution factors are. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, try typing in the name of your favourite site into your Firefox address bar. You'll find that those sites that have sitelinks will see their site show up right away; some others will return a Google results page (there's a grey area where sites have no sitelinks but they do get returned automatically in Firefox.

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Black Hat PPC Tips

2007-10-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

Black Hat PPC is an application of the black hat approach - read the rules, test the rules, bend and test the rules then stick with what works - to Pay Per Click marketing.

My first readings on the topic are for a man who, inter alia, is familiar with how the top dogs rank for Poker queries. That is, he is the absolute elite when it comes to ranking for competitive search terms, largely because he's got an in-depth knowledge and understanding of blackhat SEO. I'm referring to Mr. Mikkel deMib Svendsen.

Mikkel wrote The Art of Black Hat PPC Management. I think it was one of the most influential things I've ever read and perhaps one of the best written as well. What's particularly interesting is his point about blackhat PPC being virtually risk free. SEs won't ban an infringing advertiser; at most they'll temporarily remove his ads. The reason is that they want the advertiser's money.

In a more recent bit of reading (Mikkel's article was written for the now defunct E Marketing News, back in 2005), the unnamed author of this PPC blog has written a sort of update/refresher (without saying so explicitly) on blackhat PPC. Some of the ideas are original, some are the same Mikkel was advocating 2 years ago. In particular, his article is geared towards affiliates looking to flaunt network and merchant rules on PPC bidding. His inspiration comes from the SEWatch, apparently.

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Greg Sterling and Local Search

2007-10-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

Greg Sterling is a local SEO with a lot of knowledge, an ability to write heaps of quality content and some good stories on local search to boot.

First things first: Greg is the man behind Screenwerk.com. (Which for some reason he's hardly optimizing? Edit: Correction, he's optimizing Gesterling.wordpress.com just fine but Screenwerk.com is the professional address of the site - just like Montreal SEO .ca for this one. The screenwerk domain gets you slow loading times though, Greg, and is possibly inhibiting less savvy people linking at your individual posts, imho.). It's a great blog with a variety of excellent information on local search marketing (this one on Yodle and co. competing with the Yellow Pages is a pretty good one, imho)

Second, Greg's got some fascinating data up on the percentage of people using local search, according to Nielsen. He's added further analysis at his Locals Only column at SEL. One highlight: 86% of people said they used the Web to find a local business, vs last year's 70%, and 78% say they use it more today than they did before. By contrast, 52% of people use the Yellow Pages less, according to the same data. (Looks like a bright future ahead for Yodle et cie.)

Finally, it's occurred to me that Greg has mastered something that we don't get to see very study in internet marketing - story telling. And I'm not talking about "Let me tell you the story of how I made $10,583 in one day" stories either. I mean stories like you'd read in the local business press. Consider this story on mothers, social media and their influence in the East Bay Area. Or consider this most recent post on a coffee shop telling members of the social media site Yelp to keep away. It makes the whole thing a lot more interesting than when you just read about a social media site or about generic data.

10 points on the originality and quality of your local search content, Greg!

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Expert SEO Interviews

2007-10-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

As part of my regular reading, I've come up on some great interviews with SEO experts recently. I'm also preparing some of my own with local SEO experts, including Mike Belasco, Stoney deGeyter and others.

First of all, I need to link to LinkJuicy's interview with Michael Gray. Link Juicy is a solid blog and the interview touches on some excellent points. In particular, he has some good points on varying your methods for attracting links and discussed paid links as well, in some detail. There's some good tips on linkbaiting, though I heard the Stumble Upon advice from Muhammad Saleem first, who perhaps should have been credited. However, Michael might have known that stuff independently.

Second, SEObook's got an excellent interview with Eli of Blue Hat SEO. I've been reading Eli consistently and he's in my feedreader. There are some juicy nuggets in there, particularly a disagreement between Eli and Aaron on Google's algorithmic focus-du-jour.

Finally, I'm preparing a Local SEO Ranking Factors document, using much the same methodology as SEOmoz's document on the regular Search Ranking Factors. I'll be interviewing some of the top pros in the field. The two above have agreed so far, and both Sharon Odom Fling and Mike Blumenthal have expressed interest. I know this is going to be a huge thing if the other local SEO experts and myself handle the methodology and promotion right! Stay tuned...

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Facebook Camp Montreal, Local SEO Research

2007-10-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

This Montreal SEO's schedule has been fuller than Homer Simpson after a free all-you-can-eat buffet of late, and I've got some great news. First of all, Facebook Camp Montreal (like the Toronto event, but better), is being organized by Sylvain Carle and company. Second, a Youmoz blogger may have discovered an additional local SEO ranking factor. And third, there are some cool local SEO posts I've seen around that I want to share!

First things first: Facebook Camp Montreal is being organized on this wiki. Yours truly has put his name down to speak on the opportunities for advertising on the Facebook platform. I'm fascinated by Facebook's marketing opportunities and hope to give an interesting presentation! If you think you've got something interesting to say, why don't you put your name down too?

Second, a Youmozzer nicknamed Jaz thinks he's discovered a new Local SEO ranking factor: targeting the State-wide keyword to improve your ranking on the city-wide keyword. He's seen some results, but they're as yet inconclusive.

Similarly, I recently rewrote the copy and some of the code on the Hotel de Paris's homepage, which included using a provincial abbreviation in the title. I'm waiting to see what the results are with regards to city search. In the meantime, I've brought up rankings for other keywords we previously weren't on the first page for, which is always nice!

Third, there are some cool posts around the local SEO scene I should share. To begin with, I'd like to thank Mike Belasco, aka Mike the Internet Guy (and a savvy local marketer himself) for helping me find some of these sources. One of them is Matt McGee's blog, who among other solid local SEO blogging, writes about a problem with local search: geography doesn't mesh well with current SEO models. Also, in something of a followup to his discovery of Google Maps spam, Mike Blumenthal reports on some changes in how Google handles bulk local business listing uploads.

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Yulbiz Meme

2007-09-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

Following the fun time I had at September's Yulbiz, I've decided to start a Yulbiz meme. A meme is like a blog version of the children's game tag, except that instead of just saying tag you're it, you have to talk about a specific topic.

So I'm going to tag the different people I've had the good fortune to meet at Yulbiz. I'm talking about Michel, Philippe, Jerome Plantevin, Benjamin, Guillaume, Elise (who has this nice post on search technology), Benoit, Jean-Julien, Philippe R, Geoffroi, Kim, Jerome Paradis, Sylvain and Sebastien. And if I didn't meet or you see you at this past Yulbiz or any others, please do respond to this meme anyways!

And I'm going to ask the following questions:

Name some things that motivate you to blog.

What is your ultimate professional/career goal?

How do you promote your blog?

Describe your personal brand and your blog's brand in 50 words or more.

Why do you come to Yulbiz?

Read on to see how I've answered those questions!

I'm motivated to blog because I realize that it's a powerful promotional tool and also because it's fun to see comments and traffic on your site!

My ultimate professional goal is to have a succesful business allowing me to enjoy life and live comfortably while having enough money to give to charity to have some impact on my environment/community/society.

I promote my blog through - big surprise - SEO! Amongst other things, I rank for Google Sucks, which happens to be Googled often enough, as well as SEO Specialist, Montreal SEO and SEO Montreal. As well, I like to comment on other blogs when I have a moment and other bloggers have written something interesting/intelligent.

My personal brand is outgoing, friendly, a bit mature for my age (20) and generally a fun guy to be around. I tend to smile a lot and crack jokes, partly because it feels good and partly because other people seem to like it. My professional brand, as you can tell by my Bookworm-SEO pseudonym is well-informed on the latest goings-on in the search marketing world. That's why I can offer cutting edge services like Local SEO and Online Reputation Management. Additionally, and particularly where my SEO ROI brand is concerned, the branding is upmarket and professional. You're not buying a discount service, you're investing in your future lead-and-sales-generation. That's what I delude myself into thinking anyways. Check out SEO ROI and tell me what you think!

I participate in Yulbiz because it's an awesome get-together of the local business/tech community. You meet some brilliant people and fascinating entrepreneurs, besides just enjoying a down-to-earth atmosphere amongst like-minded people.

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Yulbiz September 2007

2007-09-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

Yulbiz September 2007 was another classic meeting of business bloggers.

The "incontournable" networking event, as one participant put it to me, saw some fresh faces and also some familiar ones my regular readers will have seen before. Heading that list of friendly faces are of course Michel Leblanc and Philippe Martin, cofounders and organizers of the event. They are, respectively, one of the most respected voices in internet marketing in Montreal and one of the top blog designers in Montreal.

Read the full post to find out about the other fascinating people I met and spoke with, including one awesome entrepreneur who's just raised $1M in VC funding (Round 1)!

To start things out, I'd like to give kudos to the smart team at Les Affaires for coming by to do a story on Yulbiz. This included Mr. Jérôme Plantevin, journalist for Les Affaires, and tech blogger.

He was there with cameraman Benjamin Nantel (couldn't find blog for him, and I don't recall him saying he had one, but he's got videos on Youtube). There was also an editor from Les Affaires but somehow I didn't get his card (if you read this, please leave a comment to tell me who you are and where you'd like me to link!).

But then, I figure some credit should also go to Guillaume Brunet, who's left TD Meloche Monnex (your loss!) to go to Transcontinental (smart move!). Transcontinental, for those of you who don't know, is a Canadian media giant that owns, amongst others, Publisac and Les Affaires.

Mr. Brunet and others were also busily talking about the new Regie des blogues d'affaires - the first French language blog ad network, a la Pajamas Media and Federated Media. It's supposed to be fully operational since the 20th, according to Guillaume, but I can't see a site for advertisers and publishers to sign up. Congrats also to Guillaume for snagging a juicy speaking spot at a Quebec tourism industry conference.

Other interesting people I met included Elise Somers, who is the force behind Emotions au travail (Emotions at Work), and is a business coach. (Like Alain Theriault, another business coach I met at the last Yulbiz.) Welcome to the blogging world Elise! And again, Elise, I encourage you to check out Philippe's Fabrique de Blogues. (Ben's Business Blogs Now is also good, but I'm fairly certain that Ben is focused on his job search startup.)

A little later in the night I had the pleasure of meeting Benoît Marcoux, who is a veteran in this computer stuff. He used to program in C back in ... 1987! We're talking about when the Internet consisted of Usenet groups and Al Gore (sorry, Al, I couldn't resist ;))! Benoît registered Marcoux.ca back when you needed a company to register a .ca domain! You know, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth ;) (and when Al Gore was busy inventing the Internet). He is a management strategy consultant.

About the same time I met Phillipe Régnoux. He's working for 2RCommunications, when he's not planning a Quebec - Gabon entrepreneurship exchange. The man has got at least one thing right (and probably many more): it's business development, not charity, that will help Africa develop and solve its economic hardships.

Running through the beautiful cards I collected this Yulbiz I find the names of Jerome Paradis and Kim Vallee. Jerome has a software company and is currently developing some Web 2.0 type stuff and a Facebook app! The specifics aren't coming to mind at the moment, but I recall being impressed at the idea when he told me aout it. Kim is blogging on party tips and advice.

Other people I got a moment to speak to include Geoffroi Garon, whom I'd met at a Yulbiz a while ago, and who's taken his consulting skills in house at K3Media. Also interesting was Marc Snyder, who's a political consultant with the Mayor's office for Le Plateau. You can reach him at marc.snyder@ville.montreal.qc.ca.

I was also fortunate to once again (see my previous Yulbiz post) speak with Sylvain Carle, the popular blogger and serial entrepreneur behind A Frog in the Valley (his personal blog) and Praized Media. A loud congrats to Sylvain, Sebastien and Harry on raising their first round of financing from VCs!

(Speaking of VCs, the VC I told you about (my cousin's best friend) is called Liroy Haddad.)

Interestingly, Sylvain's two partners are both local search experts! Harry Wakefield and Sébastien Provencher both worked at the Yellow Pages Group for a while before moving on to other projects.

I've just gone to add Sébastien as a friend on Facebook and I see he's got a Restaurant Reviews App on his profile ... the man is familiar with local! And wouldn't you know it - Praized "will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust." By the way, though we didn't have a very long conversation, Seb, it was certainly nice talking to you at tonight's Yulbiz!

Did I mention I save the best for last ;)? Once again, great Yulbiz folks!

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Make Money Online Carnival Posted

2007-09-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

The Make Money Online Carnival has been posted.

Knightey Night hosts this week's edition of the Make Money Online blog carnival. It features my interview contest giving you a chance to ask questions to web design business guru Brendon Sinclair, as well as an interesting case study on Elance.

I also recommend this Beginner's Guide to SEO. I think every person entering the internet marketing world has tried to write an introductory guide to SEO, following the "quality content" adage. This piece is nothing new if you've been at this for a while, but it's an excellent overview with even a moderately advanced couple of pointers, including avoiding having content too deep. The author's clearly gone to some effort, so kudos to them.

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Google Stealing Internet Explorer 7 Search Share From Microsoft

2007-09-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

Google is stealing search share on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser from right under Microsoft's nose. Look up Internet Explorer 7 on Google and you'll find a Google ad offering Google's customized version of Explorer - with the Google toolbar.

Normally, the new Internet Explorer should come with Microsoft search in the toolbar. But as you can imagine, when people download Google's improved IE7, the standard search included is Google search. Possibly to include product, blog, video and other search boxes as well.

At the same time as Google is advertising on Internet Explorer 7, Google's page on the topic and Yahoo's own "Optimized for Yahoo" Internet Explorer 7 are ranking for Internet Explorer 7. What that means is that

1. Microsoft are not practicing Search Engine Reputation Management well enough. Yet companies like McDonald's and Facebook seem to have gotten the memo on online reputation management...
2. Microsoft is not attentive to the SERPs when it comes to protecting its brand. Which is kind of odd - this is the company that sued a kid named Mike Rowe for creating the MikeRoweSoft company a few years back.
3. Microsoft's new browser will contribute to giving its competitors a greater share of the searches people do online. As if its crummy reviews weren't doing that already...

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Ranking for Local SEO!

2007-09-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to announce that Montréal SEO is ranking for "local SEO" in all the major search engines!

According to SEO Chat's search engine keyword position tool, yours truly is currently ranking as follows:

Results for: cityseo.blogspot.com

Engine Position
Google 19
MSN 8
Yahoo 2

Nice, wouldn't you say? In large part, I think I owe my success to this post here: Local SEO : Référencement local et Yulbiz

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Local SEO : Référencement Local & Yulbiz

2007-08-31T13:01:00.000-07:00

Local SEO is an increasingly-important service as more and more searchers turn to Yahoo, Google Truelocal and other search engines to get information on local businesses. But this type of SEO requires more than just link-building, it requires knowledge of your locale. Like Montreal, for example, where French-speaking searchers are just as likely to look up référencement local as they are local SEO. A great way to

To optimize your site for local searchers, you need to know what sites they visit and who are the information hubs in your area. For example, my colleague Michel Leblanc runs a popular Montreal SEO blog, and he also talks about other internet marketing issues.

Similar sites in the Montreal scene are Montreal TechWatch and Techno Montreal. I heard about both of them - you guessed it - at a local event, Yulbiz! Yulbiz was started by Michel Leblanc and Philippe Martin.

This month's Yulbiz was a very fun event and I got to meet a whole bunch of new people, and see some old acquaintances again. Amongst other people, I met or saw:

Francois Aubin, of Cognitive Group

Iroi, Priscilla et Alex, of Montreal TV

Pierre Bellerose, of Tourisme Montreal

Sylvain Carle, of Praized

Alain Theriault, formerly of HEC Montreal, now an indie business coach

Steve Carignan, of IPS

Jean Julien, of iPub

Louise Collignon of Play Montreal

Josh Nursing, software engineer (this is an email link)

Eric Kucharsky, of Techno Monteral

Carl and Jason, of Puzzr

Veronique Arsenault, of Morin Relations Publiques (email link)

The reason I mention these people whom I met at Yulbiz is twofold. First, it's to make the point that networking offline is just as important a part of your promotional strategy as online networking. Second, it's to say thanks for chatting, help their SEO a bit and hopefully develop a further relationship online! Local SEO isn't just about mastering Google Maps ... like regular search engine optimization, local seo is about networking (PDF). And knowing the people in your area offline is as important to your search marketing effort as it is to know them online.

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Google's Strange Behaviour

2007-08-27T22:14:00.000-07:00

Google's been acting strange lately, contradicting its' own advice and guidelines to webmasters. (If you're thinking, is he about to go on about why Google sucks, again... you'd be very perceptive.)

First of all, Google's been advertising in Gmail, using all-caps. They've had an ad running that says something like SEARCH Engine yada yada. What happened to no excessive capitalization?

Second of all, Google's got some canonicalization problems going on. Both local.google.com and maps.google.com produce the same content, and one doesn't redirect to the other. It seems from searching Google that they've canonized their maps.google.com subdomain, but you'd think they would redirect the local sub?

Strange, strange behaviour from Google. Like I said, these hypocrites suck.

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Google Maps Reversed = Spam el Goog

2007-08-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

Fellow local search expert Mike Blumenthal has discovered a massive spam attack on Google Maps. A company by the name of Tech Pros had spammed the Google Maps listings to be listed in every major and minor city in the United States for 'computer repair'!

What they didn't reckon with was that a local search and maps pro like Mike would be working in the computer repair biz and notice it!
Well, by the time I'd found the post on Mike's blog, the word had already gotten around and Google had booted the offending company (and another one using the same exploit, which Mike also discovered) from its SERPs (that's Search Engine Results Pages to the non-jargon inclined amongst you).

So how did they do it? Google Maps offers businesses two ways to get listed. One of the two ways is a bulk upload of a list, but which goes unverified (due to the sheer volume). It's a gaping loophole in the way businesses get listed in Google Maps and it's frankly surprising it hasn't been discovered earlier! In any event, this was explained by a commenter on Mike's post.

Two final comments in passing: I referred to Mike as a fellow local seo expert... I'm flattering myself. Mike's way ahead of me in knowledge and as far as my readings have taken me, the leading mind in the field. Besides that, Wouldn't you agree that this is the sort of thing that makes you say: "Google, you suck!" Like the title says: when Google maps gets flipped on its head, it's really Spam el Goog!

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Local SEO and Search Links

2007-07-27T13:06:00.001-07:00

Local SEO and local search in general are healthy and developing rapidly. Here are some fascinating links I found around the SEO blogosphere.

In a follow-up to (or, according to the date, preview of) Mark's discussion of Google Maps vs Google Local's ranking factors, I've found - who else? - Bill Slawski discussing Google local search patentry.

Still at Bill's excellent site, we have word of new Place Rank and Interestingness ranking and scoring mechanisms. It seems that Google's taking more user generated content a la Gmail and Feedburner and using it to mark up maps and Google Earth.

Over at GoodROI we find out that Yahoo has modified their SERPs with some local data. On a search for McDonald's, Greg found a new link under McDonald's main site result that lets you find McDonald's locations near you! Yahoo've also done some other things to their SERPs, so go see what Greg has to say.

Still on the Yahoo SERPs, it looks like they've got more than "locations near you" added. There are also Flickr-based slideshows directly integrated into the results, OneBox style (I know Yahoo won't like me saying OneBox style, but what're ya gonna do, eh? hehe). Try searching for Montreal, Canada or as Yahoo Search's Lingxian Ding did, Phuket, Thailand.

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Google Maps Ranking Factors

2007-07-05T02:16:00.000-07:00

Google Maps' ranking factors and algorithm are being researched very thoroughly by local search expert Mike Blumenthal. Mike's got several posts about the algorithm's factors, including some noteworthy comparisons to Google's OneBox results.

For those of you who like more old-school type SEO, Mike Blumenthal has a great post concerning directories that Google cares about in regards to its Maps algorithm. The directory factor still carries weight apparently, though as in the general search algorithm, that weight has greatly decreased since its heyday.

Another very insightful post of his considers the difference between Google OneBox results and Google Maps results. It appears that the OneBox results are focused towards more established venues with enough reviews to have a star rating (the more stars the better, obviously).

The cutoff to have a star rating, from looking at Mike's data, seems to be roughly 10-15 reviews; any less and no stars will appear. This is likely to avoid skewing the data based on only a handful of reviews.

In any event, I encourage you all to subscribe to Mike's "Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local" RSS feed if you're interested in local search. His blog is a great resource both on optimizing for local search as well as for local search news.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, Google Maps, SEO research , SEO tips.

Here are a few:

Google Maps Reversed = Spam el Goog
Local SEO and Search Links
I'm ranking for Local SEO!

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Google Sucks

2007-03-06T11:14:00.000-08:00

A vocal minority of webmasters largely agree with me that Google sucks.

Pursuant to my post on why Google sucks, I conducted several polls online. The stunning result that I came across was that, in spite of frequent close-minded Google defences, a vocal minority of webmasters hate Google.

Digitalpointers to the tune of one third said Google sucks.

About 10 percent of SitePointers think Google Sucks.

Somewhere in the middle, initially reaching as high a fraction as one third, Earners' Forum members to the tune of 20% said Google sucks.

Unfortunately, many of the people polled who had the courage to criticize Google, did it mainly based on the narrow picture of search and ad publishing. The critiques I levelled at Google were not considered in the debates.

In any event, if you weren't sufficiently convinced by my previous post about Google's suckiness, look at these two searches (the second one concerns a potential client I'm courting).

Do you see that both result sets have duplicate content? No? Visit Larry Bodine's Legal Marketing Blawg. Now, Larry is a friend, and I asked him for some promotion on his blog for that post. His post essentially duplicates my ten reasons. And you know what? Since he paraphrased me, his post ranks. Try handing your friend's essay, paraphrased, to your English professor and see what he thinks of it. For all its talk of imitating human beings, Google still has some pretty obvious shortcomings.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry that Larry paraphrased the post or that it ranks - good for him if it's pulling traffic - my point is just to show the mediocrity of Google's results.)

Second, do you see Chetday.com's charisma.php in Google's SERPs? Well, it just so happens the page is essentially a clone, featuring different copy, of personalcharisma.com. Interestingly, while I'm sure the same owner owns both sites, personalcharisma.com says it's charisma infoproduct is being promoted by Jenny something, not Chet Day.
Anyway, by the use of paraphrasing and some internal link spam (scroll to the bottom), two otherwise identical (and spammy) pages are ranking in Google for the same keywords. (Notice also that the Jeannie Crabtree's whois email is Jeannie health-doc.com, which site is themed on alternative and natural health. Which is coincidentally Chet Day's topic too. ;) )

On a related note, you might care to see what these people have to say about how Google sucks, and their alternative to it. Google Sux, Alternative Search Solution

Incidentally, look for a follow up post as I analyze how the spammy sales pages are ranking in Google. On some forums I read and participate in, I asked about getting landing pages to rank in the organic search results, and this seems like the opportunity to find out. Stay tuned. And remember: if anyone asks, Google Sucks!

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Political Campaigns: Marketing's Slacker Children

2007-03-04T10:33:00.000-08:00

The Liberal Party of Quebec is buying into Google AdWords and search engine marketing, according to a story by La Presse (see also the debate this has raised). The LPQ politicians are setting a bad example to those people who heard about AdWords through La Presse, however.

A friendly acquaintance of mine who happens to be one of Yulbiz's founders (Yulbiz is the monthly meeting of Montreal's blogging community) was cited in the piece. Michel Leblanc, of Analyweb Marketing, found out that Jean Charest's Liberals were paying 8 cents a click for low-profile candidates names, and as high as 47 cents a click for "Jean Charest."

It'll be interesting to see if there will be any practical return on investment. Sure it's only a few dollars in the grand scheme of things, but the principle is important. Will these ads get people to buy Liberal Party memberships? Will they get visitors to vote Liberal?

The absence of calls-to-action and amateurishness of the site (unfinished navigation such as "Survol du premier mandat un peu plus de texte" - Translation: "Overview of the first mandate some more text [sic]"), answers those questions with a resounding no. The Liberals clearly have no measurable goals for the ads and site to achieve. (Note, even if they were using SEO instead of SEM, they would need to have measurable goals.)

From what I can tell, the Liberals are just buying search engine advertising in order to get exposure and to project an image of a technologically inclined party. Hence text like the following:

"En modernisant l’État, notamment par le développement des services sur Internet [...]
Translation: "By modernising the State, especially by developping our online service offerings [...]"

Just before I analyze the marketing and leave the political talk, I'd like to reply to what a PQ member saw as potentially confusing to web users. Google's Quality Score factor ought to place the PQ's ads for its own candidates above those of the LPQ. The higher the ad, the earlier it gets noticed. So people won't accidentally click on the first ad and end up on the Liberals' site. Second, the ads all have their party's URL in them, so users see what site they're visiting. Nobody is being misled.

Anyways, back to the marketing analysis and tips.

Political campaign management is the slacker child of the marketing family. Ads on TV and in the mainstream media have little measurable effect, and when there is an opportunity for tight measuring of ROI as with search marketing, the opportunity is squandered.

Here are my proposals for the political campaigns to do a better job with their marketing spend:

1) Define measurable goals. Are you looking to get a neighbourhood covered with your electoral signs in anticipation of an opponent's tour? Tell people in your ad to come pick up their lawn signs at your campaign office.

2) Track results, and cut short those marketing expenditures that don't provide the return on investment you need.
For example, instead of just insulting your opponents, make a page on your site that analyzes their shortcomings, and encourage people to visit that page. So at the end of your TV ad, the website URL is ourparty.org/theirleaderisawful. When people visit that page directly by typing it into their browsers, you know your ad is succeeding.

3) Engage voters and tell them how they can participate in the campaign. When someone makes a presentation to you on the environment, they ask you to legislate this or that. When you campaign, ask voters to hop on the train and campaign too.

Here's an example: Get an 800 number. Only mention it in your newspaper ads (when people call, you'll know the newspaper ads worked, and how much - see point 2 above). Finally, tell them over the phone what they can do specifically in their riding. When you see more posters favouring your policy proposal go up around town

4) Hire me ;). Email Bookworm.seo at gmail.com for rates and more info.

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Marketing Revolution Carnival is up

2007-02-11T19:56:00.000-08:00

The Marketing Revolution blog carnival is up.
Amongst other uses, a blog carnival can:
- inform you of news in the niche it covers
- teach you if there's an advice aspect to the niche
- give you backlinks and thus improve rankings
- increase your exposure, reach and long-term readership
- help you network with others in your niche

(The flip side is that it's a lot of work to host a carnival. Which is [one of] the reason[s] for grateful posts like this one.)

This carnival I learnt a bunch of things but was a little too late to get any SEO benefit. Nevertheless, I encourage you to check out this edition of Marketing Revolution.
Of particular interest in this edition of the carnival is this post on using business cards.

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The Second Step to Link Building

2007-01-24T19:10:00.000-08:00

Once you've researched who links to your competition, it's time to dig into those websites and find out why they're linking. That's the second part of link building.

All you're really doing in the second part of link building is surfing the web. After you've done your competitive links analysis, and compiled the results into an Excel spreadsheet, you should go visit the sites that are linking to your competition.

When you're surfing these sites, there are two key pages you're looking for: the one linking to your competition and the contact page. Finding the first one will let you understand the reason for the link. For example, somebody checking out links to Sitepoint.com would find that they're linked to for being an authoritative source on PHP coding.

Once you've found the two pages, copy paste the url for each into the spreadsheet. You should have 3 columns side-by-side now in the spreadsheet. The first column shows the domains that are linking to the competition, the second column has the reason for the link and/or URL of the page that the competition's link is on, and the third column shows the linking site's contact page.

Personally, I prefer to write down both pieces of data in my second column (the reason and the linking page's URL). That way, I can easily check to see whether a link to my site has been added. I avoid wasting my time returning the site and finding the linking page all over again.

Another little piece of information to look for if you have time is broken links or links to dead sites. This will let you share a tip and make the other webmaster a lot more open to linking to you.

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Attention Rand Fishkin and the Mozzarellas

2006-12-25T11:06:00.000-08:00

Dear Rand and SEOMoz, I want to create beautiful link-bait with you.

I'm buying adwords on your names for publicity and attention to attempt to break into SEO's elite upper clique, but also because I have something genuinely useful to share. Knowing your interest, Rand, in search engine patents and search technology, as well as those of Orion and the other SEOMozzarellas (I mean that in a fun, friendly sense, by the way), I thought I'd let you in on an idea I had to reverse-engineer some aspects of TrustRank.

What you're probably wondering is
1) Why should I work with you?
2) Why do you want to do this with me/the Moz?

Working with me means a share of the linkbait. The blogposts would likely read something like: "[link:]Rand, the Moz and [link:]SEO Montreal's Bookworm have some great new data on Google's TrustRank."
I'm interested in collaborating with you because while I've got a solid idea, I think your experience and resources (such as programming, site design, etc.) could fill in gaps where I might be unable to do this myself. Besides, you're the one always talking about linkbait and (net)working with others, so now I'm calling you to put it in practice :).

Please email me (assuming you're interested) to find out more. I use gmail with the first part of the account being bookworm.seo (gotta fight those scrapers somehow).

Anyways, while I've got your attention, I figure some self-promotion is in order. So let me draw your attention to the following posts:
1) How to Exploit Regional Demographics in SEO and SEM;
2) Google Sucks: Top 10 reasons why the big G eats my hairy chia pets;
3) How to leverage your web properties to get the maximum amount of one-way inbound links; and while we're on TrustRank...
4) Spammers Bomb .EDUs to dominate Viagra SERPs

Oh, one more thing, Rand, Rebecca, Matt, Gillian et compagnie: Take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter.

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Top 10 Reasons Google Sucks My Chia Pets

2006-12-23T23:34:00.000-08:00

Google Sucks. All of us SEO consultants work our butts off for Google rankings because Google has dominant market share and because Yahoo and MSN are too lazy to prioritize search.

Update: Reading the comments, and from emails, it's obvious that many of you searching "Google Sucks" are frustrated that you're not getting traffic from Google. If you want help getting search engine traffic from Google, (and Yahoo and MSN) then perhaps you might consider buying an hour of my time.

Alternately, if you want to learn SEO and have tools to help you out, I encourage you to read my review of SEOmoz Pro's tools, articles and membership generally. SEOmoz's Pro membership is the most popular in the search industry (over 2000 memberships sold!), so you'll probably find that it meets your needs too.

But Google is much more than a search company now, and while I concede they're reasonably good at search, Google still sucks enormously overall. This is my contribution to the web's massive love-hate relationship with Google: 10 Reasons why Google Sucks my Hairy Chia Pets.

Here are the top 10 reasons Google sucks:

10) Google is fine with spam in certain markets. Look at how spammers are dominating the 'buy viagra' SERPs: .EDUs keep getting hacked, having pages with links or redirects sending visitors to pseudo-pharmacies. Conclusion: Google needs to adjust its TrustRank algorithm! TR's giving too much weight to old domains/seed sites.

9) Google's tech support teams have a tendency to want to copy-paste the FAQ in their email responses. Thanks, I can read the q&a myself, Mr. Google-tech-support-bot. If I'm writing you, it's because the FAQ wasn't satisfactory.

8) Google serves all those useless, generic, bid-increasing eBay ads. Plus, it enables people to do arbitrage on AdWords traffic. G, don't you want people clicking AdWords in the long term? Why whine about the small guy trying to make a buck on being an affiliate if you're going to serve all those eBay and arbitrage ads? It's not the small affiliates that suck, Google, it's your hypocritical policies.

7) Google places extreme trust on Yahoo paid links in the Yahoo directory. Then it tells the rest of the webmaster world to put rel="nofollow" attributes on their paid links. FYI, Google: You're still allowed to make a buck even if you're not on the NYSE. If paid links are such a concern, don't get editorial-review and paid links confused, just develop another standard, like a rel="paid-reviewed" and rel="paid-unreviewed" attribute. And ask Yahoo to use them too.

6) Google's expansion into so many different markets and control over such a wide array of personal information is downright scary. And the fact Google has been willing to work with China in censoring information Chinese people may want to find doesn't comfort me one bit.

5) Google AdWords doesn't actually fulfill its promise of letting the little guy compete. Before embarking on an AdWords journey, one has to scour forums for information on targeting, match types, bidding strategies etc. The result is that the main AdWords buyers are eBay, spammers and arbitragers, and big companies. The great equalizer it ain't.

4) On a note related to #6, Google keeps on buying out the little guys. Reminds me of another big tech company that's infamous for the anti-trust lawsuits it's been hit with. Except that Google's engineers tend to solve problems, usually.

3) Google claims to be so concerned about keeping spam out of the SERPs, yet it lets so much garbage be advertised on AdWords. I can't even count the Clickbank get-rich-quick scams people are hawking through your Google AdWords ads (ironically, the scammers present themselves as get-rich-quick review sites that prevent people getting scammed). It's 2007 Google; Western society gave up "buyer beware" in favour of consumer protection last century!

2) Google's Adsense for content matching algorithms are awful, particularly in Gmail. The ads you've served me with when I check my mail are completely irrelevant, making for a sucky user experience and generally sucky "researching mode" rather than "buying mode" leads when people click. (But then, I guess I'd be creeped out if your algorithm was better.) Anyways, before you keep buying out the Jotspots of this world, Google, make sure the ads you can serve on them will be relevant.

1) You're big, arrogant, and your algorithms are such a mess that you're likely to rank this post #1 for "Google Sucks" by the time I'm done promoting this.

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The First Step to Link Building

2006-12-09T22:31:00.000-08:00

The first step to link building is competitive analysis, unless you're the first mover in your market. If your competition's already found sources for links, chances are you can use the same source.

People often ask, "what do I need to do to build links?" Inevitably, they get the same generic answer: build content and make your site worth linking to. What if you're all about e-commerce or something where content isn't really relevant?

The answer then is in the second part of that generic answer, "make your site worth linking to." That means two things:

1) You need to solve their problem. A constitutional law site is never going to link to a casino site, unless there's a convention at the casino. But that won't happen because constitutional law profs are boring old farts who don't gamble. You can get a link if you're some fancy convention center where the old farts will be meeting though. The point is to define problems your company solves and go inform people, so they can share the solution by linking to you.

2) Establish a relationship with the person in question. If they're an SEO or someone who understands the value of links, and you've produced something good, a simple email will usually be opened and responded to. In the non-marketing world, emailing someone about a broken link on their site, bad navigation, typos etc. tends to make you seem friendly and make people more receptive to your link suggestion.

The added benefit of this approach is that you can go to them for more links in the future and ask them for referrals to their friends. Yes the net is impersonal, but networking still exists.

Now the thing is that when you don't have a content site, it's hard to figure out whose problem(s) you can solve. Luckily, you don't need to be so clever and original. You can just copy your competitors. Get the same links and add them to yours, and you'll outrank them. Which is where backlink analysis comes in handy, and particularly this tool from that well-known (and pricey) link-building ninja, Jim Boynkin.

The tool lets you discern which common links your competitors have (and thus which ones you can also probably get). Additionally, it tells you which ones the search engines are looking at, so that if you're not sure where to start, you can go for those at least some of your competitors have (as opposed to one you ran into while doing competitive analysis by Googling their brand, for example).

Next time: Social networking and link building, my ultimate link-bait post.

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Online Reputation Management: Viagra Spam hits US Colleges

2006-12-04T19:16:00.000-08:00

Are you managing your company's online reputation? More specifically, are you managing its search engine reputation to prevent spammers and competitors hurting your brand? These schools didn't.

A variety of American colleges have recently had their sites hacked and are now ranking on Google's top 10 for the popular keyword phrase "buy viagra." Either out of greed or a sense of irony, the spammer also hit a religious order's site (highlighted in yellow). Click the image to enlarge it.

This raises two issues:

Having a secure site that can't be exploited by search engine spammers, and
Dominating the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords, including obviously your company name and trademarks.

While I'm unfortunately not an expert on website and server security, I am an SEO specialist. So I can propose some solutions to the second problem.

First, a corporation (or school or anyone else for that matter) looking to control the first 10 spots for its company name should develop smaller sites. McDonald's kind of gets the idea (click to enlarge):

You'll notice however that sites critical of McDonald's also show up for the search "McDonald's." Criticism is obviously necessary to a free society. But McDonald's could probably acknowledge the criticism while highlighting what it will change. So rather than have a site criticizing its attitudes towards animals, McDonald's could put out a press release acknowledging the problem and naming initiatives it will take to reform. Then, to get the press release ranking, it could link to it from its currently existing sites.

Another way to manage your search engine reputation would be to have employees blogging about work and about the company. Of course, like any other corporate blog, there might be a tendency to keep to the mundane. This is alright for a big company like McDonald's that can probably get any site ranking for its brand due to the strength of its main site and its other branch sites.

For a smaller company that doesn't already control a majority of its search engine reputation though, outside help will be necessary. That means that golden key of SEO: quality content. So the employee/blogger might discuss the work environment (again, legitimate criticism needs to be allowed). He/she can discuss the company's stock, which will likely earn some good links from economic blogs and finance blogging carnivals.

Note: It won't do any good if the blog is hosted on the same url as the main company site. The result then will just be to have several sub-listings like McDonald's does.

Some other ideas for dominating the SERPs include

starting a wiki for staff initiatives,
linking to charities your company supports so that they rank for your company's name (side-benefit of not just showing you in a neutral light but in a positive one),
public relations, whereby you get good [online] press and your company helps that page to rank high (news sites tend to rank well, making things easier).

I've got more ideas on online reputation management, but you'd have to hire me for that ;). If you found this post useful, take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter.

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How to Exploit Regional Demographics in SEM and SEO

2006-11-30T18:32:00.000-08:00

Browsing Google with my nifty SEO extension for firefox (thankyou Aaron Wall!), I decided to look at where searchers were when they typed in a client's keyword. I did it for curiosity, but two potentially great applications immediately came to mind.

First, in writing the copy of SEM ads and in designing landing pages, it might be worthwhile to name-drop the searcher's locality. For example, if most of the people searching for parrots lived in Florida, Texas and the Carolinas, your SEM ad copy could include "Texan looking for a parrot?" or "Want Toucan Sam to brighten your Florida condo?"
I support this idea based on my experience talking to groups. When you ask if 'someone' can do 'task A', people tend to assume someone else will do it, and the result is that it doesn't get done. But if you say "John, will you please take care of 'A', John will usually do A. So this might prove useful to increasing response rates and making your offer seem more targeted.
Note: Google (not sure about Yahoo and MSN, but I think so) enables geo-targeting of your SEM efforts, so you can avoid having your Florida ads shown to Texans.

The second use of regional data is in getting links from the appropriate link neighbourhoods. It's common knowledge that Google and others return different results depending on a user's location. Therefore, it might be an idea worth considering to target a few of your local markets in your keyword strategy. Additionally, you can look for links 'up the feeding chain.'
This idea is derived from a post by someone at SEOMoz (Orion? Egol?). Though I can't recall the post just now, a great technique suggested by one of the Mozzarelas was to go get your potential client's attention on sites up and down the marketing chain. For instance, a car parts manufacturer might get links or place ads on a custom-car garage or on a. This takes the concept one-step further and suggests that you find links on sites relating to clients' regions. Potentially this might improve rankings in region-specific SERPs.

Another twist is to reverse engineer the regional data you have and look for other topics of interest in that region. If you're a shoe-store in Washington DC, perhaps you get some links from politics websites? Or if you're a shoe-store in Toronto, you could try for links from boring, colourless websites... Ok, ok, I'm sorry, boring, colourless and soulless. (Can you tell I'm a Montreal SEO?.)

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Danny Sullivan Moves to Search Engine Land from Search Engine Watch

2006-11-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

Search Engine maverick Danny Sullivan today made the move from Search Engine Watch to Search Engine Land. Search Engine Watch and Danny couldn't come to an agreement on a contract.

Danny posted in the SEW forums about his move to Search Engine Land. There's also a post on the blog.

To date, of the main SEO blogs I read only the roundtable discusses Danny's move to Search Engine land.

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Google's Jotspot Buy: Big SEO Impact

2006-11-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

Google has just bought JotSpot, a wiki hosting service similar to BlogSpot/Blogger.com. According to an email JotSpot sent to its members, Google will be providing free wikis/websites to anyone who desires one.

There are several implications of the Jotspot buyout for Google's business and the effects on SEO will also be significant.

To begin with, in the same way that Google's standard blogger templates are search engine optimized, it can be expected that its JotSpot templates will be optimized. This means that it will be possible to deduce wiki SEO best practices from careful analysis of these templates.

Second, Google's purchase of JotSpot has an impact on keyword research and keyword selection. As many savvy SEOs know, a little controversy can generate a lot of backlinks and interest. By monitoring which pages on a wiki are most prone to editing, to flagging as controversial etc., SEOs can get an idea what topics can likely serve as link bait.

Third, just as it did when it purchased Blogspot, Google will certainly make Adsense integration easy for its JotSpot customers. This means that it will be possible to buy a greater volume of ads via Adsense's content network. The greater supply should also help to control costs to a certain extent. Indeed, some SEOs are turning to MSN's adcenter for the comparatively cheap rates; this move should help stop that drain. (The interest of search engine marketing/advertising to search engine optimization consultants is that SEM helps determine which keywords convert best, saving time and energy in the keyword selection process.)

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Why Yahoo's Share of PPC is Smaller than Google's

2006-10-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

Yahoo is losing ground to Google in the fight for PPC market share, reported the news media this week. There are two important reasons that can explain this lag in relative PPC growth.
First, Yahoo's PPC-publisher program, YPN, is limited to the US. That means that all of the webmasters living abroad who want to publish YPN can't, unless they do so through an American's account. In effect, this means Yahoo isn't competing with Google for publisher-based PPC revenue.

Second, Google has increased its market share of overall searches and the attached PPC by major partnerships and acquisitions. For example, Google inked a deal earlier this year to power social-networking giant Myspace's searches. It already was backing AOL's searches, which account for a little under 10% of world search volume.

Furthermore, Google has bought out the Mozilla Firefox browser. Now, when you download and install Firefox (which Google pays webmasters to refer people to!), the Google search toolbar automatically installs with it! The result is that people who want information as they're browsing are more likely to search via Google. The toolbar can also be downloaded for Internet Explorer, further growing Google's market share of search and PPC.
As an aside, I wonder when Explorer will come with an MSN search toolbar auto-installed?

The corollary is that SEO for Google is going to take on an increasingly important role, as Google's market share of search increases. Furthermore, this will give Google an even more dominant voice in webmaster circles as to how sites should be designed.
On the flip side, with a greater market share of searches and PPC, advertising costs in the PPC/CPC/SEM world are going to increase. Ironically, this might push smaller SEOs who are testing conversion rates of different keywords to do their testing via Yahoo's PPC program.
~
I haven't been blogging for a while as I've recently begun university, and law school is very demanding time-wise.
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Local Search Engine Submission

2006-09-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

Four tips for local search is a new, solid article by one of SES Denver's . She discusses listing your website, promoting your address, and some other techniques.

My thoughts on the article?

First, the fact that the tips focus on being listed shows the basic level at which local search engine optimization is at. It would be interesting to see how to actually improve rankings, rather than simply be listed.

Second, while local search is growing, many more people just use a regular search engine and add their city name to the keywords in their search. For example, many people search for "used cars Canada," rather than go to a local engine and search for "used cars."

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One-Way Links and SMO

2006-09-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

My constant reading's brought some SEO and SMO resources to light recently. First, is an excellent piece by Tyler Banfield (of Digital Point) about how to set up one way links across a network of sites. Second, I've found a series of posts on Social Media Optimization, or SMO, which you'll recall I heard about exactly one week ago today.

Tyler's derived a very simple mathematical formula to find out exactly how many one-way links you can generate across a network of websites. One-way links are those links that aren't reciprocal; their appeal is that search engines weight them more highly than reciprocal links.

The long and short of it is that

"the first half of the sites link to exactly half the amount of sites, while the last half links to exactly half the amount of sites minus one."

Go read Tyler's full post on one-way links now!

The other great resource (or resources, rather) is a series of blog posts on Social Media Optimization, or SMO. SMO means (re-)designing a site to be more linkable and social media friendly, with the goal of obtaining attention from social media websites.

Social media comprises those websites that involve a high degree of networking, relationships, and interaction. For example, Digg is a social media website where users can vote and comment on cool news items (often from those fellow social media websites that are blogs); the most popular items get front-page attention.

Anyways, as I was saying, Rohit Bhargava wrote up a piece offering 5 rules for SMO. This in turn has been followed by rules 6 and 7, 8-10 and so on. The top ranked website for social media on Google are a consulting group offering SMO services (sweet ranking on a tough term, guys!).

My point is that SMO is a nice complement to SEO. Making a site more attractive to what Rand Fishkin terms the "linkerati" (i.e. social media users) is a good technique to improve rankings. Linking is a social activity after all.

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One Way Links: Directory Submissions

2006-09-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves one-way links (also called non-reciprocal links). Search engines give them more weight, and they mean you don't need to send traffic back to the source, but can keep it on your site or network. So here's a little encouragement on submitting to directories and other places you can get one-way links from.

First, I'm adding this to Technorati. I had a link here to Technorati, but have since removed it.

The link was necessary to have Technorati list City SEO. Once they verify it, I can delete the link and have a one-way from Technorati.
Next, I evaluate what type of site I'm running. There are blog indexes, forum indexes, and even directories of directories! Doing a quick Google search for 'your type of site" + "directory" will usually return some good things. Technorati is a "blog directory."
Further to that, I search for directories on my topic. I do the same thing as in the previous point, but change the type of website I'm running to the type of content (i.e. keywords) I have.
Finally, and this is actually a trick I picked up from Ralph Wilson, who himself got it from Bill Hartzer, search for "your topic" + "add URL." Then search for "your topic" + "submit site," and other variations. This will help you find the little places off the beaten path.

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Yahoo Index Updates

2006-09-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

Yahoo's Index has been updating with the result of a "shuffling of the [Yahoo SERPs] deck," as one SEO commentator put it.

Information if available at Yahoo's search blog, under the post Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

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SEO Canada, Canadian SEO, SEO Montreal rankings

2006-08-31T20:02:00.000-07:00

I've bought SEO Canada.org and Canadian SEO.ca, which ought to nicely complement my existing collection of SEO related domains.

Previously, I had bought Montreal SEO.ca in an effort to rank for Montreal SEO. All told, it seems to be working, as I was briefly #2 on Google for Montreal SEO earlier this week with the Montreal SEO.ca domain. I've also improved on the #13 ranking at MSN for Montreal SEO to a #1 ranking, and to a #3 ranking for SEO Montreal.

The reason the Google ranking came and went is some on-site tweaks. I'm playing with my content to re-optimize for other keywords, such as SEO Canada.

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Increasing Email Subscriptions

2006-08-31T19:27:00.000-07:00

In a short period of time (two months), I've earned over a dozen subscribers to my SEO Montreal and Site Flip email newsletters. They go out twice a month (though I may soon switch to feedblitz' daily subs for convenience).

I've found that giving out good, in-depth advice in forums, then politely ending with a suggestion to check your blog/newsletter for more tips gets people joining. It's a lot of work though, because I make an effort to really help. I don't say "Try working on your keyword density. Also, consider subscribing to my blog/newsletter for more advice." (And if I have, it hasn't produced results.)

In particular, I know people are paying attention because they reply to these posts by naming me and thanking me for the help.

Naturally, building a subscriber list is important for marketing. It helps build trust with readers. It allows content to be passed on and republished, meaning you can get links from newsletter content that gets republished, and then of course there are referrals. Important SEO tactic, huh?

Read my full post on subscriptions over at EF.
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Yulbiz: Montreal Business Blogging Lessons

2006-08-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

Yulbiz is a monthly meeting of Montreal business bloggers and people whose jobs are intimately related to the internet. Yulbiz, or Youlbiz as it is pronounced, takes place the last Tuesday of every month at Cafe Melies on St-Laurent. I attended the August Yulbiz meeting and learnt some great lessons, besides having a good time.

One of the most interesting people I met was Guillaume Brunet, of TD Meloche Monnex. Guillaume is a "Project Leader" in TD's "Interactive Marketing" division. That's corporatese for PPC campaign manager. Guillaume handles 2.5 million dollars of AdWords, Yahoo! and other PPC advertising a year. I remember two lessons in particular from Guillaume, who is a keyword research specialist, of necessity.

First, target the long tail. I asked Guillaume if he was using 4+ word keywords in his ad targeting. "I'm up to 6 words," Guillaume told me!
Second, look up and down the buying chain. Let me explain by using the examply Gui gave me. His goal is to get as many insurance leads for TD MM as his budget possibly can. So instead of just targeting "auto insurance," for example, Guillaume also targets keywords like "Mazda RX-8," in order to offer people interested in Mazdas an idea what insurance would cost, before they buy.

I also had the good fortune to meet Jonathan Villiard, who runs Blogues-Quebec.com, a new Quebec blog directory The more I read on business, and on doing business online, the more I find that sticking with something over the long run is key to making money. Jon's blog has been up since 1999, and he's now making $25 a day from Adsense (clicked on a few of your interesting ads, by the way)! It's also a very entertaining blog I recommend you all check out. Another thing I learnt is the power of regular content and promotion through friends and family. That's essentially all Jon's done, and he's up to 1000 uniques a day, which is certainly some nice traffic.

I had the chance to have an in-depth discussion with Phillippe Martin of N'ayez Pas Peur (Don't be Afraid), and to have a few words with Michel Leblanc, of Analytics Web, or AnalyWeb. The two are co-founders of Yulbiz.

From Philippe Martin, I was introduced to the term "social media optimization." The long and short of it amounts to making a website networking and web 2.0 friendly, which in turn helps links and such (which is why it sounds like search engine optimization). Also, I learnt that schools are joining the blogosphere, which makes sense given that they're effectively small communities and that blogging is a very community-oriented technology.

From Michel, I found out that Yulbiz videos are up on YouTube :). Michel's got a great blog on internet marketing I encourage everyone to check out.

Some other interesting people I met included Pierre Bellerose of Tourism Montreal, who analyzes Montreal's branding and reputation online; Simon Law, who is a good photographer and linux programmer recently back from Germany; and Francois Aubin, of Cognitive, who's a kickass usability expert with experience working for Hydro-Quebec and Amazon.ca! Note to marketers: Francois says focus groups suck because they tell you what they think, not what they do.
I also met a lady named Muriel who is starting a new webmaster-type job at HEC Montreal, the University of Montreal's business school. She's excited to be doing a "refonte" of their site, which translates roughly as a redesign. Muriel is also highly interested in "interactive marketing," though I didn't really understand what she meant by it.

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Domain Redirects = Links?

2006-08-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

Are domain redirects being counted as links by Google? I'm new to domaining and domain redirects, so when this is what my analytics program told me about this blog, I was more than a little surprised.

I was looking through my analytics software and saw that MontrealSEO.ca is a major "referrer" to this blog, which is actually hosted at cityseo.blogspot.com. Now, does this actually mean MontrealSEO.ca is being counted as a link by Google? What about the other engines?

I personally can't imagine that being the case, since then people would be just buying hundreds of domains and doing plenty of redirects... Furthermore, Google's opposition to buying links reinforces this impression. If you want content to rank rather than money, then you can't allow domain redirects to count as links, since whoever could buy the most domains would then dominate the rankings.

Incidentally, is there a way to have Google's analytics program "get" that it's not a referral, just someone typing in another address for the same site?

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Content Creation Markets: Blogger Exchanges

2006-08-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

Content is essential to having search engines spider a site regularly. Blogs, as regular content solutions, go a long way towards having spiders return on a regular basis. Now, two blogger markets have opened up in the past week or two making access to content creators very easy.

The first market to open was Performancing's Blogger Exchange. There, people can buy, sell, trade or just plain advertise blogging services, blogs, and other blog-related items, such as post swaps, blog tech services etc. The market currently seems to be offering some interesting, quality jobs. Best of all, registering and joining the market/exchange is free! The layout is clean and simple too (more on this below).

The second market is popular ProBlogger Darren Rowse's exchange. Many of the jobs are for Darren's succesful b5media blog network, which of course many bloggers will be snapping at. On the flip side of things, advertising here costs $50.
Darren's getting people to pay that, but it might discourage people with good ideas who are short on funds. If I'm using blogspot hosting and only coughing up for domains (which are, after all, assets that can be resold), I'm not putting out $50 to find another blogger.

Some other notes:

I like Problogger's clean individual pages. They need to take care of integrating foreign characters though, as this quotation shows: "Notas de fÃƒÂºtbol follows Spanish soccer and, with a bit less intensity, international soccer."

Performancing allows you to directly message other exchange users, a feature the ProBlogger exchange lacks. I imagine this will be quickly added, as Darren (or Yaro? I can't remember where I read the tip...) is an advocate of making things easy.

I notice that the layout is a little different, with job titles leading to individual pages with more information. I like both formats, though I think each content exchange might be better off using excerpts.

With regards to price, I suppose it's perhaps a matter of direction; Performancing keeping things more indie, with Darren aiming for the corporate market. It might backfire though, with more bloggers populating the Performancing exchange.

Of course, things like this have existed in the past. Internet classifieds have been around since at least Craigslist, and possibly earlier. The difference here is that the target market is more focused, and it's obvious from Performancing's comments that there is interest and a good response to adverts. Having attempted (unsuccesfully) to recruit via Craigslist, I must say this exchange is a welcome addition to the blog universe.

Having said all that, this is going to make SEOs' lives a lot easier. If a customer wants a content solution, you know you can have this outsourced easily. Furthermore, I can easily see SEOs crowding these exchanges and driving up wages for bloggers as they compete to hire the best and brightest content creators out there (and probably some of the mediocre ones too). This is definitely an appendix to my top 10 SEO tools list.

I wonder when the search engines will offer their own blogger classifieds? Given their expansion into blogging (Google owns blogger.com and does search for MySpace; Yahoo owns blo.gs), I say this is an inevitable development. The question is: will they create their own, or just buy out Performancing and Problogger's exchanges?

Update: I just bought some good domains for this emerging opportunity. If anyone is interested in buying, let me know.
I've also just remembered an article I wrote at Site Flip entitled content appraisals, which will likely be interesting for this new market. You can check out the content appraisal tool that this websites for sale site, Website Auction Hub did with my article (the owner purchased the rights from me to do that ).

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Claria's RelevancyRank Brings Behavioural Analysis to Search

2006-08-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

Claria's RelevancyRank is bringing behavioural analysis (read: click-tracking analytics) to search algorithms. The company behind Personal Web has developed a new concept in ranking that determines a website's relevance based on user behaviour.

In Claria's words:

"The relevancy of the results is determined by metrics such as click rates, time spent on pages, number of pages viewed and repeat visits by millions of search users."

Generally speaking, this is a great idea. I have a few reservations though, as I wrote to them on their blog contact form:

Dear Kris/Claria,

I've understood that your RelevancyRank creation ranks sites based in part on how long someone spends there, and on their number of page views. The assumption is that, if I understand you correctly, longer (i.e. more time spent) is better.
Most of the time, that makes sense. But what about sites that serve customers faster? Suddenly, having an easy 1-step checkout means you aren't as relevant. Why use faster servers when it means your Relevancy is less? In short, the assumption of time spent isn't appropriate across all the various markets and niches on the Web.

On the flip side, I once suggested to Google to use click behaviour the way you do, for their algorithms. They never got back to me, but I'm happy to see someone's picked up the ball and is running with it! Good luck!

Best,
Bookworm SEO

Another thing that I forgot to mention is that click fraud is obviousy going to be a major concern if RelevancyRank gains any traction. For example, a bot could be designed that clicked around the owner's website massively and stayed around for hours. This would unfairly increase the site's RelevancyRank.

Of course, humans might easily do this too, and it's quite conceivable that companies in difficult niches could hire minimum-wage "clickers" (the search engine industry of casino shills) across the country to increase their RelevancyRank. So Claria is going to have to work hard to fight click fraud, which, as Google and Yahoo can testify, is no small task.

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Spiders and Indexation: Insights on How Spiders Index and TrustRank

2006-08-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've been reading and researching on search engine spiders and the indexes lately, which has led me to some insights on spidering/indexing, that I'd like to share.

First, many people only consider being indexed in terms of quantity: that is, how many of their pages are currently accounted for in the search engines. There's another very important point to know about indexation, and that is the frequency with which your website is crawled.

I ran an SEO experiment once to try and optimize for the toughest words on the Internet: home, about, and click here. They're the toughest because almost every website around competes for them, since most people use those words on their websites. The reason I bring this up is to highlight what I noticed in the search results. Those sites with constantly fresh content (i.e. those getting spidered something like every hour) were ranking highest, and the ranks often changed according to who had updated most recently/been crawled most recently. It should come as no surprise that news giants such as the New York Times ranked for these words.

Second, over at the Link Building blog, there's an interesting insight into Google's TrustRank. TrustRank, for those who don't know, is a parallel factor in Google's algorithms to PageRank. You can't achieve any success at SEO if your TrustRank factor is in the basement.

At any rate, what came out of the LB blog's analysis was that a thorough indexation was a sign of being trusted. Furthermore, the speed with which Google's spiders (Googlebot et al.) index your site is also an indicator of TrustRank. This is important knowledge, because Google doesn't publicly disclose what a site's TrustRank is, as it does with PageRank. In short, it allows you to monitor the results of your SEO efforts.

There are a few conclusion to be drawn here. Monitoring the depth of indexation isn't sufficient, especially in competitive keyword markets. The frequency of spidering is as important as the depth. That's the main lesson. The second lesson is that depth of indexation is important beyond simply counting how many searches you might rank for. Having 100 pages that could rank for 100 various searches is nice (assuming you only have 100 pages on your site). But if all your pages are indexed, it also shows your website is trusted.

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Montreal SEO MSN Ranking

2006-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Montreal SEO is obviously a keyword I'm targeting heavily, and my latest SERPs check tells me I'm #13 on MSN for the term. Not bad for a brand spanking new website, no?

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Interview with Barry Welford, of Strategic Marketing Montreal

2006-08-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

Barry Welford of Strategic Marketing Montreal has agreed to do an interview with City SEO.

I first "met" Barry by browsing around the net, and coming across his blog, comments on other blogs, and forum participation. The more I read on marketing, the more I came across Barry. So I finally realized that I needed to actually speak to the man of the hour, and see if he and I could talk shop. Incidentally, his wide internet presence is a good example to follow for anyone looking to generate brand awareness.

Barry is an authority on marketing (and on SEO in particular; he moderates Cre8asite's online marketing forum), and his generosity in sharing the following insights shows why. We discussed a wide range of marketing and Montreal related topics, and the interview is really a great source of information.

Bookworm-SEO: How did you enter the world of marketing?

Barry Welford: I started in Marketing Research way before there was any Internet, since by background I was trained as a statistician. However I then spent many years in Marketing and Selling with major corporations both sides of the Atlantic.

Bk: What do you see as some of the most exciting emerging technologies in marketing?

BW: I see much growth in Internet Marketing and I believe that companies are somewhat slow in using the power of blogging to complement what they're displaying on their websites. It's all about customer dialogue in this Permission Marketing world and blogging is ideal for that. The technology that is expanding explosively at the moment is the Mobile Web and all that will develop from that.

Bk: Have you ever optimized a site for local search? If so, can you describe the process?

BW: That's a tough one, since I don't think the search engines do a very good job yet and it may always be a tough challenge for them. I always encourage my clients to have a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) that will make them visible for that in any search including Local.

However, in very competitive markets that's tough. When it's not possible, then clients may want to consider PPC targeted ads. Adword ads for example can be shown only within driving distance of the client's Post Code, which is about 100 miles radius or so. As a minimum, there's nothing to lose and you may well gain by making sure your business entry is correct in the Google Maps database.

Bk: Are there any leaders you're seeing in local search? What do you make of the new AdWords option to advertise on Google Maps?

BW: I'm not sure how many prospective clients are using Google Maps to find suppliers so it may be better to just use the 'within driving distance' option in the regular Adwords.

Bk: You're known as an authority on internet marketing in Montreal. What unique challenges does our bilingual environment present to marketers? Do you have any interesting stories you might share, working in our particular context?

BW: It is crucial that your customers, whether they're English-speaking or French-speaking are greeted correctly and feel in no way second-class. That means good quality language in both so that give a strong impression of credibility.

The SEO aspects of dealing in both languages are too large a topic to handle here. However one aspect that intrigues me are the number of companies who have accented letters in their company name. They are bound to be losing a certain slice of their traffic because of that and it's an easy topic to try to improve on.

Bk: You explicitly mention your presence in forums on your blog, and I see your email signature mentions that you moderate some SEO forums. What SEO forum community has the most savvy webmasters? Where are the members most helpful?

BW: There are several good forums and some of the more savvy webmasters are to be found from time to time in several of them. I believe it's important to look at the total Internet Marketing picture and not deal only with the minutiae of web design or SEO. It also depends on the type of community you want to interact with. Cre8asite Forums, where I moderate, is excellent on all counts with a great community. It's tagline, "Building Better Websites Together", really does capture what it's all about.

Bk: How has the web helped you network? Can you share some useful resources and/or stories?

BW: I think that networking is one of the most important things to do, either physically or on-line. The Internet is incredible for networking since it's so easy to find kindred spirits. It's important to dialogue, either by commenting on blogs or being active in forums or having your own blog(s). The key is to know what is going on. Here RSS newsfeeds are really important. My efficiency in keeping aware of happenings by using a newsfeed aggregator such as Bloglines, which is my favourite, has improved ten-fold at least. If folk are not aware of newsfeeds I would suggest that as the #1 priority above all else.

Bk: What tools do you use in your day-to-day SEO work? Any suggestions for things you'd like developed in the future?

BW: I use a whole variety of tools depending on the needs of the situation. I don't feel any particular lack that would suggest some new tool, but I do stay aware as new tools are put out. One thing I would recommend is using what used to be called the Google Sitemaps website and which has recently become the Google Webmaster Central. That's really good value.

Bk: You own your own business, Strategic Marketing Montreal. Can you describe the transition (if any) from being in someone else's marketing department, to striking out on your own, to finally establishing your own company?

BW: You have to have a very positive and resiliant personality to be able to stand the greater risk in being entirely responsible for your livelihood. Nevertheless the key pressures are less different than might appear. Dealing with clients, whether they be internal clients or external clients, is equally demanding if you want to succeed. Of course the major upsides are that you have more flexibility in how and when you work and you can choose your clients so that you only work with those where you and they will enjoy the experience.

Bk: Can you discuss (without giving away sensitive info) some of the steps that helped you establish your business? Some advice for marketers looking to follow along a similar path?

BW: I don't think anyone should under-estimate the difficulty in starting your own business, particularly if there's a lot of competition. The Internet makes it all very much easier and that's where you should put your priority. Try to establish a unique offering so that you stand out from the crowd. Then market and network as hard as you can. There's no magic bullet. Just work hard and focus, focus, focus.

Bonus question - Bk: It's an oppressive day in the Montreal sun: Bilboquet or Roberto's?

BW: I didn't know either of them without a little Google search but ice-cream is one of my pleasures so I'm sure I would have a great time in either.
~
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Montreal SEO.ca

2006-08-08T16:01:00.000-07:00

MontrealSEO.ca is my new domain name for this website.

Buying a "montreal SEO" domain is something I've been meaning to do for a while now, and it has good justifications for my SEO.

First, owning montrealseo.ca gives me more legitimacy as far as being an SEO consultant goes.
Second, it's good for my own SEO. Obviously, I'm targeting "Montreal SEO," and I intend to be number one for that term soon enough (2-3 months). When people link just using my URL, I'll have the keywords in the link text. Also, though this is controversial, some SEOs consider that having keywords in your domain helps. Can't hurt at any rate.
Third, it's good for branding. The words are real dictionary words, and the address is easy to remember. The domain market uses these points as standard criteria for judging the quality of a domain.

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Links: Directory Submissions and Reciprocals

2006-08-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

Here's where I'll be linking to directories and others requiring reciprocal links, but which don't belong on the front page.

Canada Business Directory

Top Marketing/SEO Blogs

Quick Blog Directory

Marketing Tool

Blog Top Sites

Blogarama

Canada Web Directory.com - Canada Web Directory collect business information and service in Canada

Canada Directory - Canadian directory featuring real estate, travel & tourism, business & services links of all kinds.

Rate Me on BlogHop.com!

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Excerpt Hack Test

2006-08-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

I'm testing an excerpt hack.

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About BookwormSEO, my SEO Rates

2006-08-02T00:45:00.000-07:00

Who I am: Bookworm SEO, a Montreal SEO specialist. I started out posting with this pseudonym for reasons of privacy and security, but I now feel it is safe to let you know that my name is Gabriel Goldenberg. Montreal is a beautiful city in the province of Quebec, Canada.

Why I'm different: Three things separate me from the crowd of SEO consultants.

If it's about SEO, I've read it. That means that your web site will be optimized with up-to-the-minute services.

I'm one of the foremost experts on local SEO. Google "Google Maps Rankings," (with or without quotes) as one recent visitor did, or "SEO Montreal" (again, the quotes don't matter) for proof.

Answers to email inquiries are guaranteed within one business day, so that we can get started ranking your web site as soon as possible.

Here are some of the things and people whose books, articles, blogs, and other publication I read or have read:

Aaron Wall's SEO book

Andrew Goodman's Winning Results With Google Adwords

SEOMoz

write there

Jim Boykin

SEO Forums at Search Engine Watch, SitePoint, WebmasterWorld, SEOChat

Search Engine Roundtable

Barry Schwartz

Search Engine Land

Stuntdubl

Sphinn

Palmer Web Marketing

besides other sources, including the Google Librarian Center, a variety of blogs, newsletters and information sources. I'm passionate about SEO and that passion often keeps me up into the early hours of the morning reading up on new techniques, case studies, events, experiments and so on. The services I render are current with best practices in SEO.

(I also read about domaining, affiliate marketing, email marketing and analytics, and dabble in each of these. However, my greatest strength is in search marketing.)

I also guarantee same-day responses when you contact me by email. That means that if you contact me before 7 pm, Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5), you can expect an answer in your inbox before midnight.

My SEO Experience: Let me tell you a story. My first SEO project achieved a PageRank 5, #1 rankings on Google, and full indexation... within 3 and a half months of starting out. The rankings were for keywords with lots of competitors, albeit keywords that not many people were searching for.

The site has since been re-optimized for higher traffic words and is currently ranking on Yahoo and MSN's second pages, and is in Google's top 20 (with Google's mood-swings, it goes to the 70s and 80s now and then, however). All the while, the previously attained rankings have been maintained.

This page was written a while ago. Since then, I've had job offers in the search marketing business from the likes of Microsoft, Ice.com, B5Media Blog Network and others. Instead of going in-house, however, I've started my own SEO services firm.

SEO Rates: I offer hourly rates and project pricing. In both cases, the rates I charge are in the range of medium sized businesses - competitive, but certainly upmarket. Premium work has a price, and I stand by the quality of my SEO consulting services.

Hourly: My rate for hourly consultations is $97 an hour. You can buy an hour of my time by clicking the button below, following which you'll get a confirmation of your purchase email from Paypal and another email from me within 24 hours asking when you'd like to schedule your consultation.

The bill will be from SEO ROI (link opens in a new window), which is my main SEO company.

Factors I take into account in pricing are:

the competition for and difficulty of the keywords targeted,

what services are being requested or are assessed as necessary,

how interested I am in working with the company in question,

time I'll need to invest in the project,

secondary benefits such as publicity, referrals, networking and other intangibles.

With respect to project pricing, the same factors apply, though here the price can include performance bonuses. For example, a current contract stipulates that I only earn the bonuses if a site ranks for its given terms.

Payment Schedule: My preference is to structure payments as follows: a 50% downpayment before any work is done, 25% halfway through, and the final 25% upon completion of the project. Custom payment schedules are available.

UPDATE: Please see SEO ROI for the latest information on my SEO services pricing.

Local Search Optimization Tool

2006-08-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

SEOMoz discusses a local search tool called the Geolocator. By assessing various factors, the Geolocator helps give an understanding of a website's local rankings. Definitely adding this to my toolkit.

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SEO Tools: 10 Great, Free Tools

2006-08-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of some of my favourite SEO tools. If you have some you'd like to share, leave a comment below. Also, take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter for updates to this and for reviews of new SEO tools.

I'm going to present these SEO tools chronologically according to the steps involved in the SEO process, namely keyword research, competitive analysis, and finally site analysis and progress.

First of all, I want to cover my most-used keyword research tools.

1) Google's Adwords research tool. This is a particularly helpful one because it integrates SEO interest with PPC issues, such as cost and position estimates. My personal preference is to start by looking at what words are getting traffic.

2) Overture's keyword inventory tool. It's got a clean layout, is easy to use, and the results are simple and meaningful. Yahoo has bought out Overture, though I understand results are not from Yahoo's own engine.

3) Hit Tail is a brilliant new product that helps SEOs gain traffic from long-tail searches. Most SEOs, myself included, commit the mistake of only looking at short (one to 3 words) keyphrases. Hit Tail helps suggest longer terms to target. I expect this will make the SEO industry even more competitive.

4) SEOChat's keyword difficulty tool. It provides, at a glance, a rough estimate of how tough a possible keyword selection might be to optimize for. The lower the percentage difficulty returned, the better. Take this with a grain of salt, though, as it isn't some comprehensive algorithm that returns a %100 accurate result.

Second, I want to mention two great tools that modify/adapt the appearance of search results. I use them to research the competition on keywords, which helps determine how much SEO I need to do, and what I should charge.

5) Aaron Wall's SEO extension for Firefox. Displays PageRank, age of site, quantity of links, edu and gov links, del.icio.us and DMOZ links, and more. I appreciate the format and display of the SEO information, in particular, and that it directly links to the source of the info (e.g. Yahoo link: query). It's a free download at Aaron's SEO tools page.

6) Golexa. Similar in nature to Aaron's firefox extension, Golexa displays more information than the SEO extension does. The downside of this is that it's not an extension for Firefox, but is a Google-based engine. This means that you can't use it to find how tough the competition on Yahoo or MSN is. Also, it means a detour to the website, which is an inconvenience. Another issue is that it doesn't display information directly, but requires further clicks. Nevertheless, when I want to get in-depth info, Golexa is handy.

Third, here are a few SEO tools I use to analyze a website and establish its progress.

7) SEOChat's keyword density tool. Again, SEOChat has created a basic, but very useful tool. It returns, with or without meta, alt tags and title tags, the most common words on your website as crawled by a spider. A good indicator your site could use improvement in its keyword density is if, in the first 10 results, there is more than one word of code (such as px, the code abbreviation for pixel).

8) SEOMoz' PageStrength SEO and marketing tool. The beauty of this tool is its holistic approach to marketing that assesses your full marketing efforts. Type in your URL and SEOMoz will let you know how you're doing on Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, Alexa and more than a dozen other factors. It's similar to the extensions mentioned above, but also examines things such as branding, based on how often your site's name is mentioned around the Web.

9) Keyword Position Check tools at Page Rank List and at SEOChat. The first tool isn't as accurate as the second (I think it uses archived results, which means outdated position info on frequently changing keywords), though it provides the benefit of also checking Altavista. SEOChat is more accurate, but only returns results from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

To conclude, a good SEO specialist will include all of these tools in his toolbox, and more. I personally rely heavily on the SEO extension, Google's adwords tool, and SEOChat's tools. Nonetheless, each tool here has a place in the SEO process. Oh, and number 10 ? Try Announce's site submission SEO tool/service, which will suggest you to 30 major engines. Consider also finding out if you've been copied. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO tools, SEO research.

Search Engine News: Yahoo Launches New Spider

2006-07-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has replaced its old spidering technology with a new, more efficient spider.

According to the folks at Yahoo, the new spider is more efficient and will consume less bandwidth.
Here's the official press release on Yahoo's new spider, Slurp.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Yahoo, Search engine news, spiders.

Affiliate Link SEO Experiment

2006-07-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

Will starting an affiliate program help SEO as dozens, if not hundreds of affiliates around the web start linking to your site? Or will Google and the other engines treat this as paid-links that are unworthy of trust?

The idea for the experiment: make a page, set up an affiliate program, get other SEOs who want results of the experiment to link back.

Hypothesis: If no SEO improvement is noticed, it is reasonable to assume the search engines treated links as paid links. If SEO shows, it suggests Google considers links as vouchers, and trust.

The Heart of the Problem: Does Google trust people's referrals when they have an indirect commercial interest in providing the link? How does Google treat that conflict of interests? Also, does it matter what affiliates are paid for? Is it for sales? For unique clicks? CPM?

Obviously, individual links aren't bought directly from affiliates, so they can't be treated in the same manner.

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Alternately, consider some suggested posts (links below) or pick your own reading from the archives.

Here are some related articles:

Google Creating Unfair Competition
My SEO Ethics
An over-ambitious SEO experiment I tried

Related articles are archived in the topical categories Paid and commercial interest links, research.

Keyword Density Tip and Category Hack for Blogger

2006-07-31T02:35:00.000-07:00

Keyword density is a key issue in SEO. A website needs to show that it is tightly focused around a particular keyword. Category archives for blogs are an easy way to increase keyword density, and I've found an easy way to have categorical archives with Blogger.

What you'll need:
-) Some time to pick your keywords, perform some searches on your blog, and edit your Blogger template
-) Aaron Wall's SEO extension for Firefox (optional). It's a free download and easy install, though, and I highly recommend it.
-) Firefox, obviously, if you're going to do the best research you can, which means using the Firefox extension mentioned above. This is also a free download, and anyways, Firefox is a better browser than Internet Explorer, so you'll be doing yourself a service getting it.
--
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--

1) Choose your keywords.

I could write pages and pages about how to select your keywords. Since that's not really the topic of this post, I'll limit myself to pointing out that you'll want keywords with search engine traffic and little competition. Make a list of these keywords.
To help you out in your research, I recommend Google's Adwords research tool, the Overture keyword research tool, the Nichebot keyword research tool, and Aaron Wall's SEO extension for Firefox.

(Incidentally, the Google tool offers free spreadsheet downloads of your keywords, which is an easy way to save your research.)

2) Search your Blogger blog for each keyword.

For example, search for "Google", and then save the search URL. Do this for each keyword, saving the URLs every time (the excel spreadsheet would be useful again, here).

3) Link to each keyword search on your Blogger subdomain.

First, post the links to your sidebar for easy access to anyone browsing your blog. They'll look something like this:

a href="searchcityseo.blogspot.com for Google" Google /a
a href="searchcityseo.blogspot.com for Yahoo" Yahoo /a
a href="searchcityseo.blogspot.com for local search" local search /a
a href="searchcityseo.blogspot.com for Montreal" Montreal /a
a href="searchcityseo.blogspot.com for SEO specialist" SEO specialist /a

and so on. Obviously, the URLs look different and you need to use proper < > brackets for the html coding. Nonetheless, that's the first part of your category archives done.

Second, copy all the links you just coded into your sidebar and place them in your post template (under Blogger's Settings tab, click formatting). Now, when you post, you just have to choose what keywords the post is about, and delete the rest. An added bonus is that this category hack makes you focus on writing about your keywords, thus increasing the focus of your blog.

Here are some related articles:

Title Keywords Tip for Blogger-Blogspot blogs
Ambatchdotcom SEO contest dominated by blackhat Blogger blog

Related articles are archived in the topical categories Blogger, tips, keywords, SEO research.

Ambatchdotcom SEO Contest Lessons: Blackhat Techniques Dominate Google

2006-07-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

The ambatchdotcom world SEO contest is being dominated by keyword stuffing content scrapers. The #2 person is running a Google Blogger blog, ironically. All his post titles include the words "ambatchdotcom seocontest". The posts themselves are mostly thin material covering new participants in the contest.

Other participants aren't any better of course. I've seen people writing outright gibberish such as:

"From my point of view a new ambachdotcom seocontest is almost always uncommon further more I have written before the ambachdotcom seocontest is always blatantly valued."

A previous entry by the same clown stated,

"Function 1: adjective
1 causing wonder or astonishment ambatchdotcom seocontest to behold>"

Now, this is mostly harmless stuff, because ambatchdotcom is obviously a gibberish word itself. These blackhat SEOs with their keyword stuffing are simply competing with each other, not pushing down real companies' websites about 'ambatchdotcom's SEOcontest'. However, there's a negative influence that comes out of the contest that is a real problem.

Namely, the ambatchdotcom SEO contest is encouraging people to use negative SEO techniques. People are competing in the contest by means such as keyword stuffing, writing for the Googlebot (i.e. the randomly bolded and italicized words above) and so on.
The problem is with the superficiality encouraged by such a contest. Prizes are awarded based on SERP results, rather than a more holistic, integrated approach. Consider what would happen if non-SEOs searched for "ambatchdotcom seocontest" on Google and came to any of the top sites. The result would be dissatisfied customers leaving in a heartbeat when they found some nonsense website designed to be read only by search engine robots.

On a related note, I'd like to take the opportunity to point out just how important on-site optimization can actually be. The top-ranking site as of this writing has less than a hundred backlinks going to it, yet it ranks above a site with close to 400 links, as per Yahoo's count. The second place blogspot blog mentioned above has less than 50 links. James Martin of Work Boxers has a great little analysis he put together of the top ranking sites and what they're doing to dominate Google for "ambatchdotcom SEO contest."

You'll have hopefully realized by now that this post is optimized for "ambatchdotcom seocontest." In all honesty, I'm doing it partly for the money - first place nets 4 thou. But I'm also doing it because as a marketer who likes to take an integrated/holistic approach to things (go read Marketing Sherpa now!) I'm opposed to sketchy blackhat SEO practices. (Which is why I'm providing a search engine legible 'follow' link to James' post, even if it means it'll help him to my detriment. He's provided some useful content that deserves promotion.) If you'd like to help promote proper SEO practice, link to this post using the words "ambatchdotcom seocontest" as the link text. You can also help by bookmarking this in del.icio.us, Digg, or other social bookmarking tools.

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Articles related to this one on the ambatchdotcom SEO contest are archived in the topical categories Google, SEO news, research.

Search Engine News: Yahoo and Google Lose

2006-07-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

Big news was taking place yesterday in the search engine world.

Yahoo postponed the introduction of a new Pay-per-Click model to the fourth quarter, losing $7 a share on the stock markets. That's a loss of over 20%!

Meanwhile, Google's blogspot domains are being banned in India. Yesterday, I found out at Earner's Forums (which I encourage everyone to join) that my Site Flip blog has been banned. Apparently though, Pakistan is also joining in the banning. Look at me! I'm a dangerous subversive sharing knowledge on dominating Google rankings and the website market. Ooh, ooh, danger, danger!

The BBC has more on the blog censorship.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, Yahoo, news, research.

Is a Google Dance Underway?

2006-07-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

Is a Google Dance underway? Some webmasters seem to be indicating Google's servers are dancing and updating PageRank, over at Warrior Forums.

Update: Earner's Forums' webmasters are noting this too.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, tips, research.

Title Tip for Blogspot Bloggers

2006-07-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a little tip for Blogspot bloggers to use to improve their SEO.

< $BlogPageTitle$ >, used within the head of an html document, specifically in the < title > tags, will generate smart titles for a Blogspot/Blogger blog. The homepage/index will be titled with the blog's name, while post pages will be titled according to the post's title. In fact, this tag is used right here, on City SEO, and you can how to implement it by clicking view - page source.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories tips.

SEO Code of Conduct & Ethics

2006-07-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

Any SEO can and should be held to a code of conduct, an ethical code if you will. I adhere to the SEO code of conduct written by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy.

Here's an excerpt:

"In the area of General Ethics, the SEO shall not:

* Engage in any behaviors that will intentionally harm a client or a competitor. This includes performing black-hat techniques that may get that client's site banned from the search engines, or purposefully interfering with a competitor's site as to try and get their site dropped from the search engine in order to get their client's website into a better position.

* Intentionally engage in activities in direct violation of a search engine's guidelines. Again, these types of behaviors can impose penalties by search engines, or banning from the search engine indexes altogether.

* Purposefully engage in behavior that breaches a client's confidentiality or privacy. An SEO many times has access to your sensitive materials on your website, including documents, logins, passwords, product information and other items. It is not acceptable for an SEO to make this information public, nor is it acceptable for the SEO to discuss your account with other SEOs that are not particularly working on your account. It is in your best interest to include a clause in your contract with the SEO that specifically protects your confidentiality and privacy.

* Deliberately violate any laws, including but not limited to trademark or copyright laws. SEOs that use copyrighted names, like Google or PayPal or Sony or even misspellings of trademarked names, in order to inflate a site's ranking is considered illegal, and punishable by law. It won't be the SEO in trouble, but rather you and your site will take the fall. Make sure there is a clause in your contract that addresses this issue.

* Falsely claim another's work to be their own. SEOs sometimes do this in order to make their portfolio look impressive, especially when they know a client probably can't or won't follow up on their portfolio examples. It is a good idea to ask the SEO for specific references, and outline the exact work that was done for the client, and ask for permission to contact that client to corroborate the SEO's claims.

* Intentionally mislead, harm, or offend a consumer. This includes bait and switch tactics intent on bringing traffic to the site, or making a visitor believe the site is something it is not. An example of this is to use terms like "Disney" or "Teddy Bear" in order to get a visitor to come to their website, when in actuality it is an illegal warez site or a porn site.

* Disparage other SEO consultants, SEO companies, or former and current clients in public, even if you know they have engaged in unethical techniques, or treated the SEO badly. It is never professional for an SEO to bad-mouth another SEO or SEO company to you or anyone else. It's just bad business practices, and should make you wonder if the SEO will talk about you in the same way.

* Fail to stay current on search engine updates, changes, news, training or education. It is in your best interest that your SEO know what's going on today in the search engine world, due to the fluid nature of search engine changes which occur very frequently."

Head over to SEOChat for the rest of the SEO code of conduct written by Cassidy. Note: I also adhere to the remainder of the code of conduct. The reason I haven't copy-pasted the rest of it here is that I feel the quality of the writing/code deserves for traffic to be sent to read it in its original location.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO ethics.

The Importance of SEO to Local Businesses

2006-07-04T21:37:00.000-07:00

The Outthinker has a great post on the importance of a web presence to local business.

I'd like to add to that and point out the importance of an SEO strategy to local businesses.

First, the importance of Search Engine Optimization to local business is the same as it is to other business. SEO enables potential customers to find your local business through search engines.

It's the online equivalent of a brand-awareness campaign. There's no point for a store to exist if customers don't know about it. In the same way as being part of a shopping center helps people "know" about a store, having an SEO strategy increases your visibility and quantity of sales.

Second, the importance of SEO to a local business is similar to putting a road-map on flyers. The backlinks gained via SEO direct traffic to the website.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO strategy, local business, local search.

Optimized and Ranking! - City SEO Archives

2006-06-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

Optimized and Ranking is the name of the City SEO archives, which you'll find here. If you enjoy the reading, take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter.

Articles are archived in the topical categories:
Google,
Yahoo,
MSN,
local search,
local SEO,
link building,
Montreal,
SEO news,
SEO tips,
Case Studies,
SEO Review,
SEO Strategy,
SEO research.

Adsense Spam Scam Exposed! Photo Editorial

2006-06-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

Ever see those adsense ads promising Adsense ready websites with plenty of content? I hate Adsense spam scams too, so I'm flaming out an Adsense spam website that looks to me it was founded on the idea that a sucker is born every day! This is a photo editorial.

The irony of this all is that these Adsense spam professionals advertise through Adwords, Adsense's twin where people buy Ads that display on the Adsense network! Of course, Google doesn't reward these websites with rankings, so they don't mind letting the ads continue, but I think it would be great if they just stopped these ads in the first place, since they only exist to exploit the uninformed.

I came to the Adsense spam kings through Gmail. Here's the ad in my gmail account, and again on Google:

So, of course, I don't hesitate to have the Adsense scammers pay Google for my click, and I look into the scam. Here's what I find after clicking through the Adwords display to understand what's being sold:

The value pack links to a broken internal link, which helps indicate this is a sketchy site. Look at where it was supposed to direct me to (highlighted).

When I clicked the value pack (read: duplicate content) spam link, I found this lovely, rather familiar page:

Any website can have a broken link, you'll tell me, even reputable ones. That's true. But broken links are an indicator of a "bad neighbourhood," (look at the quality guidelines) as Google likes to call them.

Here's the kicker though, which tells you that what you're buying isn't unique content, but rather duplicate content that Google and other search engines will ignore. Duplicate content, you'll recall doesn't get indexed and may even lead to having your site penalized. It's counter-productive to SEO. The SEO would really suffer if the site is entirely composed of duplicate content, as with this Adsense spam scam. This is the equivalent of splogging, which Google (and other search engines) hate. I think some people reading this might enjoy clicking these losers' ads to make their Adwords bill go up (you pay per click). I'm not advocating it per say, but it might be fun for people with a little free time to show these kids who the real suckers are...

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, case studies, Adsense, SEO Scam.

Experiment: Optimize for Home, About, Click Here

2006-06-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Home About Click Here SEO experiment.

Home, about, and click here are the three most difficult keywords / keyphrases to optimize for. I've started an experiment in an attempt to optimize for them. I've registered homeaboutclickhere.blogspot.com and am attempting to get the sites listed on the search engines first page.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO experiment, research.

City SEO: Site SEO Review of Work Boxers

2006-06-27T03:45:00.000-07:00

To help build backlinks for City SEO, I'm offering prominent business blogs free site SEO reviews, and one lucky beneficiary is James Martin's Work Boxers. Take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter to follow more site SEO review case studies and learn how to perform SEO reviews, or better yet, consider fellow specialist Danny Wall's SEO seminar.

Last week, I posted about how to conduct a site SEO review. Now, following those principles, I'm going to conduct an SEO review of Work Boxers. There are five areas that any basic SEO review will cover, and they are:

backlinks and inbound links,
keywords,
external links and link structure,
content analysis,
current SEO effectiveness.

Backlinks and Inbound links

Backlink Quantity
Like I mentioned in explaining how to conduct a site review, Work Boxers (WB) has 449 incoming links, 133 of which Google counts (the others are repetition it doesn't give much weight to).

Backlink Quality
The first site I click on is a page 404. The next is a subdomain of some sort with PageRank of 0. I find WB in the code, but the external link doesn't show up to human eyes.
The third site is a Dutch-language business blog's page with PageRank 2. It discusses WB's move from its Big Money Tips original home.
#4 seems to also have changed since Google last indexed it, because it no longer has a link to Work Boxers but is rather a 9 rules network page saying "it's probably here," and mentioning that you've arrived at the equivalent of a 404 not found page. Google thought it was taking me to a page saying "Odeo" is pretty, whatever that is.
#5 is James' Jamsi website/blog. Ironically, it contains links to other websites but not his own.
#6 is a PageRank three website, Marlene Jaeckel, who... actually has a functioning link to WB! Hurray!
#7 is a Problogger page! We're really getting somewhere here! Unfortunately, this is mitigated by the fact the link is one of 60 to Underblogs, or business blogs that deserve a wider readership than they have. The large number of links dilutes each one's value (as is also the case with #6).
The next few pages are low PageRank sites with blogroll and similar links that are good for search engines but don't really get much human attention.

So generally, my assessment is that while there are a few decent links to Work Boxers, many of those that existed in the past have moved and are gone. Contacting the sites in question might help. In addition, the backlinks generally aren't prominent (except for #3) and/or are buried below the fold. The anchor text isn't great either, mainly because the site is linked to by name, and the name isn't so focused for SE keywords. On the other hand, the branding benefits of this are likely good, but as I'm a search engine specialist and not a branding specialist, I'll leave that to someone else to comment in depth.

Note: reinforcing what I've said in the past, buying links is not an effective SEO tool. The link James bought from Steve Pavlina's business related PageRank 6 website didn't come up in the first page of Google's link query results. If Google were counting it, surely it would have turned up ahead of the PageRank 2 websites!

Keyword Review

James keyword selection isn't really apparent, other than perhaps the term "work." From this I would imagine that he can target phrases such as "work from home." When I look at the page source, however, I am proven wrong. The site's keywords, according to the meta tag, are: "SEO, web 2.0, web chat, web news, making money online, blog tips, Affiliate Marketing, [and] Affiliate Programs."

Now, given that the blog only gives some SEO advice and isn't exclusively dedicated to the topic, and that the same situation exists for web 2.0, web chat and web news, my personal recommendation on keyword selection would be to drop these. The other keywords are more focused, though their competitive nature and WB's weak backlink network suggests it might be better to target related but more specific keywords.

That said, what's keyword density like, here?

Keyword Density
Making money online (without meta): barely on the radar. With meta: 4 times, for 0.22% density. Either way, this is well below what SEs allow.
Dense two word keyword phrases without metas (occurrence and percentage):
june th 10 0.58%
it s 9 0.52%
home base 8 0.46%
i m 8 0.46%
i had 7 0.40%
don t 6 0.35%
personal thoughts 6 0.35%
i have 6 0.35%
http feeds 5 0.29%
is a 5 0.29%
feedburner com 5 0.29%
feeds feedburner 5 0.29%
i ve 5 0.29%
money online 5 0.29%
have a 4 0.23%
adsense case 4 0.23%
work boxers 4 0.23%
me time 4 0.23%
thoughts comments 4 0.23%
ul links 4 0.23%

Obviously, keyword density is not what it's supposed to be.

Keyword Visual Presentation
This is much better, because Work Boxers has its topical categories (with keywords in them) prominently displayed above the fold, and has the word advertise in its top level navigation. Having some top posts links to the right of the ads recent comments would allow for some more prominent displays.

On the other hand, the categories aren't bolded or italicized. Furthermore, they're just in internal links. Linking out to sites who have keywords in their names might be helpful too. Additionally, keywords in post titles would be a good idea to prominently display what the site's about. I get the feeling it's not about Duncan, cowboys, or generic "lessons to be learnt."

Keyword Placement
Keywords were absent from introduction and conclusion paragraphs. As mentioned previously, the keyword strategy is really poor on Work Boxers meaning that there is no focus in title, heading and alt tags, or in other places.

Unfortunately, Work Boxers keyword strategy gets a failing grade. While it does have a few good points, notably the prominent keyword rich categories box, there is much more to be done. The meta tags just don't cut it as a keyword strategy nowadays, especially when a third of them aren't even relevant!

External Links and Link Strategy

The fact of the matter is, there aren't that many external links on Work Boxers, though there are a fair number of internal links (categories etc.).

External Link Functionality
The first thing to test about external links is whether they are functional. This wouldn't necessarily improve a site's rankings, but it would definitely make it look unreliable and drop rankings if they were broken. So I went around WB, clicking links at random and found that James' external links are in good working order.

Anchor Text
WB's anchor text is descriptive for the most part, though it could use some improvements. For example, James links to "David Krug," and Paul Scrivens, who might both better be linked to with keyword related text, such as Paul Scrivens, 9Rules Blog Network. In a recent post on a blogging dispute between Yaro Starak and Duncan Riley, James wrote: Yaro (link:)"launches a post" entitled 'How to make money with blogs + Adsense + free ebook." Uh, how about having the link's anchor text be "how to make money with blogs?"

The point here is that links are considered in the same way as bold and italicized text, that is, spiders weigh their importance to a page more heavily. Using keyword rich anchor text can improve SEO, and it's something James needs to work on for WB.

Another important point to understand here is that the anchor text needs to be descriptive. That's why click here anchor text is total nonsense, since it doesn't tell the reader what they're going to find. This also relates to spammers who might intentionally use inaccurate descriptions in anchor text to send people to view porn or to send them to casinos.

Internal Link Structure
In terms of internal linking, James' categories box function well, and his category tags at the end of his blog posts also serve to enhance keyword density and provide proper internal link structure. A way to improve this area of his SEO would be for James to link - using descriptive anchor text - to related posts within the main body of his text. For instance, when I wrote about how to conduct a site SEO review, I linked to my analysis of why external links and link structure are important. Problogger Darren Rowse uses this technique very well.

Note: renaming the "online money" category "money online" might be helpful, as SEs consider the order of words, and for searches on how to make money online, well...

Content Analysis

Here, James helps me out very much via the coding of his website, which shows how many posts he's written on any particular topic. I notice that James' "personal thoughts" posts total more than all he's written on "webmaster tools," "web tips," "web news," and "SEO" combined - yet those are all keywords of his while personal thoughts is not! Clearly, focus is a major problem here.

Content Update Frequency
Work Boxers is updated regularly, though not on a fixed schedule. Generally, James averages two or three posts a week. This is good, though naturally it could be better.

Content Quality
While the content isn't as focused/categorized as well as it could be, for the most part, the content is informative and helpful. Some how to guides and pillar articles would be well appreciated too, though, as it appears the site's content is mostly in the reporting, 3-5 paragraph range. Perhaps James could write some tips on writing copy for affiliate marketing would be of use, or how to evaluate an advertising program or agency that will sell your adspace inventory.

Breadth of Appeal & Link Magnetism
It's obvious by his comments that James has an established readership on WB. The content is interesting, even when it's off-topic, and many business bloggers can learn a thing or two from James' site. In addition, the topic is sufficiently broad, popular, and well-covered at WB that the content scores well.

However, in order to get backlinks coming in, he'll really need to write more in-depth articles that offer some particular value to readers that can't be had elsewhere. James' article on anchor text was good, for instance, but nothing that couldn't be found elsewhere.

Overall current SEO effectiveness

On Backlinks, James' WB gets a C+. He has some good links from relevant sites, and obviously a fair number of them, but many are also gone, moved, or from sites where the link quality isn't great.
On Keywords, James gets a juicy red F! Keyword density is terrible, the images and code aren't optimized, keyword prominence and placement are poor.
On External links and link structure, WB earns a B. They're all functional, but much of the anchor text could be rewritten in a more descriptive way.
On Content Analysis, I grade Work Boxers a C+. The frequency is decent, the content is average to slightly above average, and it's got reasonable appeal. The challenge is now to optimize it with keywords in the right places, write pillar articles, and exploit his writing skills to earn backlinks.
On PageRank, James gets a resounding A- for his 6. The trick is for him to exploit that ranking now in order to rank for keywords he'll select.

Now, it's time to consider if James ranks for any of his keywords or phrases. It's possible that his PageRank, decent content and good link structure get him ranking in spite of his non-existent keyword strategy.

For 'Adsense case studies', Workboxers ranks number 9 on Google, out of a million sites. That's a start. He gets another 9, out of 10 million sites, for 'fine fools'. However, for the terms James is really competing for, such as affiliate marketing, affiliate programs and so on, WB is nowhere to be seen.

Thus overall, I give WB a D on SEO. The main problem, as I see it, is the keyword issue, and the dissapearing backlinks. Working with other affiliate marketing blogs and promoting his content will get James' WB to have much better SEO.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO review, SEO strategy, keywords.

City SEO: Site SEO Review - Business Opportunities

2006-06-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

I recently reviewed the Business Opportunities website's SEO strategy. If you find this review helpful, you'll want to take 30 seconds and subscribe to my free newsletter.

As I explained in the two posts I wrote on site SEO review, there are 5 basic points that must be covered in any site SEO review. They are backlinks, keywords, link structure, content analysis and current SEO effectiveness.

Here's what I found in conducting my review of the Biz-Ops site.

Backlinks

Backlink quality: Dane Carlson can be very proud of his site SEO strategy in this area, because Google, which doesn't show all the links to a website that it has indexed, returned 6,260 links for Business Opportunities!
Like I mentioned in my first post on how to conduct a site SEO review, it's important to know just how many of those links Google considers important, though. The number suddenly becomes less impressive: 313 links are taken into account by Google. This is still great however, indicating a highly developed backlink and inbound link network.
The next thing I did in reviewing B-O.biz was to look at the first page's results for the link:domain query. Here's a sampling of what I found, which should help explain how Dane has a PageRank 7.

The first page that shows up linking to Dane's blog is an About.com PageRank 6 page! It only links to a handful of related blogs, including his, which is important to search engine optimization.

The second page is a blog in Dane's network of PageRank 5. Unfortunately, it isn't clear if Google values the sidebar link, or the link from the comments...
The third page is the ever-weighty Yahoo directory presenting a PageRank 5 link to Dane's website (though here the numerous links on the page suggest each link isn't valued for standing out as in the About case where only a few other blogs had links to their websites).
The fourth and fifth page have PageRanks of 3 and 5, respectively. This may be surprising at first glance, but this can be quickly explained when one looks at other attenuating factors (which I'll leave up to Dane to disclose if he wants to; he's getting a more detailed version of this review).

Keywords

Keyword Density was not great at first glance on the Biz Ops blog. The most common two-word keyword phrase was 'June Comments'. 'Business Opportunities' was second best, but topped out under 1% density, well below what search engines tolerate. On the other hand, 'business' was at 3.52% density, which is great. Also, 'business' was part of two other common phrases on the site. Keyword density looks good.

Note also that this assesment of Dane's keywords ignores meta tags, because I want to consider how Google sees the site. MSN still considers meta tags, but they're likely on the way out there too.

Keyword visual presentation was pretty solid. Business opportunities is in the title (the words that display in the blue band at the top of the window), the words "business opportunities" are dead center in the site (it's an image, but the image's alt tag reads "Business Opportunities"), and link to the homepage, reinforcing their importance. Business and related words are elsewhere above the fold (the line below which content can only be seen by scrolling down) too.

I noticed business and bizops bolded in sidebar header text. The words business opportunities are part of the anchor text of a link above the fold that goes to Dane's archives. Strong marks overall in the keyword presentation department.

Keyword placement could have been a bit better. For instance, Dane mainly quotes stories for his blog content (a practice he should rely on much less, but more on that later), and his lead sentences aren't all that great, as they mainly consist of saying "John X, of YZ magazine, wrote: '...'" On the plus side of things, Dane's quotations cut off at the right time, with the effect that his concluding paragraphs frequently have the words 'entrepreneur' and 'business' in them.

Another issue I had with keyword placement was the navigation. It's a lot of code, highly placed in the page... but none of the navigation has "business opportunities" in it, nor any related keywords (entrepreneur(ship), small business, etc.)!

External Links and Link Structure

The functionality of the Business Opportunities blog's links is excellent. External links I clicked on were all working, as are the internal links.
External links' anchor text aptly described where you were being taken, but could have been better. For example, many personal names were used for blog authors, when in fact linking to their blogs by their names would have been better. This may have been intentional, though, to avoid having an excessively high keyword density (many of the external links go to business blogs).
As mentioned above, the navigation is a questionable use of valuable real estate. Better use might be made by the blog's well-optimized content. So internal Link Structure was okay, with room for improvement.

Content Analysis

As mentioned above, Dane's content is mainly quoting sources, and mentioning press release type stuff. I understand that's what gives the blog focus, but a little extra time writing would be time well spent. Consider:

Post Titles rarely have keywords in them. That's a HUGE missed opportunity. Covering more business to business opportunities might help with this. Besides, they're listed in the sidebar, so it's a double opportunity for keyword optimization that's being missed.
The introductions aren't much to speak of. They don't grab you, and that would likely be an easy way to get people reading quoted stories more, besides getting comments and links back. Even the original content I saw (about Dane's children watching "educational" tv for toddlers) wasn't so strong in the grab-my-interest-and-do-seo department.
The relative shortage of original content means Dane isn't getting as many backlinks as he could. Ideas for content might include favourite biz-ops, what makes a good franchise op, how to market franchises, and so on.

However, the sidebar (yes, this is content too) has massive amounts of external links to relevant sources, which is probably a huge help for SEO. Additionally, Dane updaes the blog several times a day, which is great. There may be some duplicate content penalties risk, though, because of the excessively high percentage of quoted content.

To summarize:

Content updates several times daily. Excellent.
Content quality: variable from below average (quoted) to above average (original posts) to ordinary (biz-ops). It's helpful though, overall, so it's a passing grade for content quality.
Breadth of appeal/link magnetism is hard to establish. Dane's traffic is huge, but I doubt he has much link magnetism. Rather, many of the links he's built up seem to come from link exchanges, though I do see some people frequently mentioning the opportunities. Anyways, there's potential to broaden the appeal and get more links, especially considering the wide audience which means huge potential for link love.

Current SEO Effectiveness

The site SEO review I've conducted has led me to grade Dane's SEO strategy as follows:
Backlinks: A-: They're plentiful, and come from great sites. However, a little more diversity would be nice, as many of the links are similar and thus ignored. 500 counted backlinks is probably achievable by year's end.
Keywords: B+: Business is plentiful, but opportunities could be more so. The blogroll needs work, as do intro paragraphs, post titles and navigation.
External Links: B: Functional, but text isn't as descriptive as it could be in the blogroll. Dane gets it right within posts, though. They're all relevant, too.
Content Analysis: C-: Too often unoriginal, too often from USA Today, too often with a so-so leader that doesn't grab readers or spiders.
SEO effectiveness: B+: Dane's obviously got a lock on his top keyphrase, but he could do much better and move to dominate other phrases. Look up 'Small Business Opportunities' on Google, and B-O.biz isn't even top 10! Home business opportunities: Neither, though he is #12 for both (I doubt #12 gets much traffic in such a competitive market, though). That said, Dane is number one on Google for Business Opportunities. He's number 2 on Yahoo behnd the Small Business Administration and some sponsored links. Overall, the strategy is very strong, but the content could really be improved, and certain coding concerns (which I'm emailing Dane about privately) are a problem.

Tomorrow I'll be posting the results of the site SEO review I conducted on Work Boxers.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories Seo Review, Seo Strategy, Research.

Search Engine News: Google SketchUp

2006-06-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

In search engine news, Google has released a new product, and it isn't targeting search! Presenting Google SketchUp.

Actually, the product doesn't seem to have been Google's own development, but rather a purchase of a pre-existing product (and the company that built it). The product is entitled SketchUp.

Google SketchUp is a 3d modeling program. You can design houses, buildings, video game graphics and more. It also works with lighting effects, so you can see where shadows are going and such. It's also got a nice little demo of two models created with, namely a city, and a playground set; when you hover the mouse over them, the image zooms and moves around.

My deep thoughts on this development in the search engine industry:
1) It would be funny if someone called themselves Tomato and made some Tomato' Sketchup forums... Google already has forums, but it's still pretty cool.
2) The forums have a weekly challenge which is going to be a massive marketing success, because the challenge lets people get really interactive with the product and build a community around SketchUp. I already see 43 replies to the first weekly challenge, which is to design a chess board. If I participated, my King would be a tomato, and the other pieces would be other vegetables/fruit. The pawns would be sliced olives like those on a pizza. The queen would be one of those plants that eat insects, though.
3) Google is looking to diversify its revenue beyond the world of search. A "pro" version of the software is being sold, as are hard copies of the freely available PDF guide.
4) This is going to help Google index new formats of information and stay ahead of its competitors. They'll have access to the product's coding and to its file format in particular, so...
5) This is bad news for companies already in the graphical modeling business!

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, search engine news.

SEO Review of Business Opportunities Blog, Posting Schedule for the Week

2006-06-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

The SEO review of the Business Opportunities blog is nearly done and will be posted tomorrow, for those of you who were wondering. Tuesday I'll be posting the SEO review of the Work Boxers business blog. On a related note, Ben Bleikamp has agreed to have his site's SEO reviewed, so hopefully I'll have a site SEO review of his College Startup published Wednesday or Thursday.

Besides that, I've had ideas for some terrific SEO experiments, and my aim is to present them later this week, around Thursday or Friday.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO review, SEO experiments, SEO research.

How to Conduct a Site SEO Review - 2

2006-06-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

I'm continuing my explanation of how to conduct a site SEO review. Yesterday's post considered how to review a website's SEO strategy concerning backlinks and keywords, and today your favourite SEO specialist will be looking at

external link analysis and link structure;

content analysis; and

current SEO effectiveness.

This is all in the context of my conducting site SEO reviews of business blogs to help publically establish my credentials as an SEO specialist. If you enjoy the post, take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter.

External Links and Link Structure

The importance of external links and link structure is twofold. Firstly, for your human audience, external links and link structure are a key way to establish your site's focus. For instance, if you look at Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Blog, you'll find that Dane's got plenty of links to various business opportunities and small business turnkey operations. Additionally, his blogroll links to plenty of other small business consultants and mavericks:

"- Business 2.0 Blog
- Business Blog Consulting
- Business Opportunity Classifieds
- Buying & Selling A Small Business Blog
- Carnival of the Capitalists
- Chris Pund
- Chuck Huckaby
- College Startup."

Secondly, for your search engine spider audience, having lots of links to related websites and within your website on a particular theme (such as archival links and site navigation links) expresses the same thing: relevance to a particular niche. This makes sense when you consider that search engines work to approximate human behaviour, which, in the case of website surfing, starts by determining relevance.

That having been said, we're ready to consider the methods involved in reviewing a site's external links and link structure. Luckily for us, this part of a site's SEO review can mostly be conducted without resorting to outside resources.

Link Text
First and foremost, to review a site's external links and link structure, one has to be literate. That is, simply read from top to bottom every link that is posted on the page, taking note of the words used to link to other websites. Making an Excel spreadsheet or Google spreadsheet to keep track of this would be useful, as with compiling yesterday's review data.

In Dane's case, the external link review quickly shows he could do a better job. As the section of his blogroll cited above shows, Dane mostly links to other business writers by name.

Considering most of them have websites titled with keywords relevant to Dane's Business Opportunities site, Dane's own SEO would likely benefit from linking to them using more appropriate, keyword sensitive text. For example, Des Walsh's link currently reads "Des Walsh." It could be more beneficial to have it read, "Thinking Home Business," which is the name of Walsh's site.

When I review Dane's link structure (the difference between this and external links is that it also considers design, and not just keywords), I find that he has clean, concise navigation links across the top of his blog, as well as links to his most recent "biz ops" in the sidebar. While the presentation is nice, there are a few missed opportunities here too to increase the keyword density (see part one of how to conduct a site SEO review). For example, I would write "Archived Opportunities," rather than "Archives."

Link Destination
While the text of a link is very important, there's another important aspect to links and that is their destination. There are two things to consider when reviewing a site's external and internal links' destination.

Firstly, does the link accurately describe the site it'll bring you to? For instance, trying to get entrepreneurs to see your poker site by linking to "Dane Carlson" but in fact having the link destination go to some poker website would be bad for SEO as the link description does not match the destination.

Secondly, are the links' destination functional? Imagine going trekking around the rain forest and seeing your trail come to a dead end. Not only would you be miffed with the person who suggested the trail, but you'd have to go back. Obviously, this hurts the suggester's reputation. Websites move, so if you're linking people to a dead end, you could be hurting your SEO - and your reputation in human eyes. (The link goes to my analysis of Google's partnership with librarians in the new Google Librarian Center; a librarian wrote that her group's index of sites checks websites' external links for functionality.)

Content Analysis

The importance of content analysis to a site's SEO strategy can be summarize thus: frequency of content updates are a factor in ranking websites, the quality of the content is a factor in ranking the site (think keyword density but also how helpful the content is), and the quality of the content acts as a link magnet because it has broad appeal. If you want to master the techniques of site SEO review, this area of an SEO review should be familiar to you like the back of your hand.

Frequency of Content Updates
That having been said, daily content updates are the best you can do, unless you want to post more than once on a daily basis. For review purposes, most blogs post, if note the time, at least the date something was uploaded. If you see that people are posting in the morning in time for people to read at work on their coffee break (which starts when they get to work at 9 am, statistics show), you're reviewing an even better site.

Content Quality
The next issue to consider in your review of a website's SEO strategy is just how good the content is. Take a good half hour to an hour to go through some of the front page material, then bounce around the archives and see if in fact the quality of the content has been consistent. By this I mean the general characteristics of the writing, including of course grammar, which is paramount (and which Google is developing algorithms to evaluate).

In terms of quality, there are a few genres that you want to look for when conducting the review. During your content analysis, Tips, guides, "how to"s, breaking stories are all examples of useful material. Material on topics with high-paying Adsense, Chitika, affiliate or other revenue ads is another thing to watch out for. This is personal though, so what you look for is really dependant on your goals for the site. Perhaps the content generates lots of newsletter subscribptions. If your goal is to build up a direct marketing database, this is good. If that's irrelevant (though that would be pretty strange), well, you wouldn't value the content as highly in your site SEO review.

Breadth of Appeal or Link Magnetism
Generally speaking, there's an easy test of how broad the appeal of some content is. Ask yourself if there's a particular demographic being targeted who would enjoy this. The first rule of content is to know your audience, and if you're trying to sell hair gel to marketing professionals, well, you're not going to get very far.

Another way to research this is to use Technorati.com to find out what topics (by keywords/tags) people are talking about. A third method is to go blogroll-hopping and just read the titles (possibly the intros) to posts.

If you're talking about something hot, chances are it will help draw links. As mentioned above, useful content is a perennial favourite, and if you can find posts that people can use as a reference (such as tips, guides, and other materials), then you should know that the site whose SEO you're reviewing has quality content.

Current SEO Effectiveness

It's fun to save the easiest for last. Current SEO effectiveness review is composed of two, easy to conduct bits of research. The first is to compile the analysis you've made so far in your review and grade the site's SEO strategy. Try and include comments and rational justifications, just as teachers do when grading assignments in school.

The second element is to make a shortlist of perhaps 3-10 keywords/phrases the site is/should be optimizing for, and see how well they're actually ranking in the search engines. You just plug in the phrases and see if the site is in the first page or two of results. If not, use SEOChat's ranking tool to find if the site places in the first 100 results. Grade this. In Dane Carlson's case, the grade is 100%, because he's number one for Business Opportunities.

Combine the two grades and you've just finished conducting a site SEO review.

That having been said, I hope it's clear how to conduct a basic site SEO review, and what methods I'll be using to review Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Blog and James Martin's Work Boxers blog.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO strategy, how to, SEO review.

How to Conduct Site SEO Reviews

2006-06-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

I'm going to explain how to conduct a Search Engine Optimization review (SEO) in today and tomorrow's posts.

To build a name for myself as an SEO specialist, I'll be reviewing the SEO strategy of James' Martin's blog on making money online, Work Boxers as part of a series of reviews of important business blogs. The five areas of search engine optimization I'll be covering in these basic reviews are
Backlinks,
Keywords,
External Links and Link Structure,
Content Analysis, and
Current SEO Effectiveness.
The following is a description of the methods used to evaluate the websites' search engine optimization strategies. After having read today's post, covering backlinks and keywords, and tomorrow's post, covering external links and link structure; content analysis; and current SEO effectiveness, you should understand how to conduct an SEO site review. The five factors being considered are the meat and potatoes of SEO, which explains their being selected for these basic reviews.

Backlink and Inbound Link Review

Backlink definition
Strictly speaking, backlinks are one-way links to a website. Search engines figure that if one website links to another, inviting its visitors to go to that site, then the link can be considered as a voucher for the site receiving the link. That said, we're going to consider all inbound links. The only condition is that they aren't tagged as "nofollow" (this tells a search engine that in fact, the link is not a voucher and should not be counted as such), and are not preceded by words such as "sponsored links", which also tell search engines not to consider the link as a voucher for the site.

Backlink assessment
There are several ways to evaluate backlinks when performing a website review. Of course, links are important to SEO only if the search engines take them into account, so to find that out, we'll be using the "Link:" query with Google. This allows you to search Google and find how many links there are to a specific page. Other search engines such as Yahoo offer this services, but the Google search results are most effective for this.
Google doesn't display all the links to a website when a "link:" search is done. A "link:" query on Google shows the principal links that Google gives weight to, ignoring repetitive/similar links. On the other end of the spectrum, Yahoo shows all incoming links to a page (and sometimes more, as their tool doesn't appear to be as refined as Google's).

For James' Work Boxers website, a "link:" query would look like this:
"link:workboxers.com" (without quotation marks).

Backlink Quantity
Once the search has been performed, the next step in reviewing a site's SEO strategy is to determine just how many of the inbound links Google actually considers important. (That's my theory on it; I can't certify if this is accurate 100% of the time. It has been in my experience, however.) To figure this out, you would then keep clicking as deep into the results as possible until Google returned a page not completely filled by results.
This would tell you how many of the inbound links Google considers worthwhile, and how many of them are similar and unworthy of consideration. Let me give an example to demonstrate how this part of the review works.

In reviewing James' WB case, I click on page 10 of the results and find that a full page of results is listed (i.e. there are 10 results on the page). I only need to click on page 19 of the results to go as deep as I can, which is to the 132nd link to WB. I now know that Google considers 132/456 links to WB to be important, and the remainder to be more of the same, and thus less important. Click the image below to see what I mean.

Backlink Quality
This having been done, the review continues by assessing the quality of the first 2-3 results pages of inbound links to assess their quality. It doesn't help your SEO if your backlink and inbound link network is composed of poor quality links. To review link quality, three principle notions must be kept in mind: the PageRank (PR) of the site giving the link, the anchor text of the link (the text of the link), and the prominence of the link.

PageRank can be determined by looking at the PageRank meter in the Google toolbar that goes in your browser. The link can be found on the page using a browser's find/search feature, and then simply needs to be read.

Finally, the prominence of a link is considered in light of many factors. The very rude, spammy, and annoying people at Blog Explosion (I won't link to them as I'd prefer search engines don't think I'm vouching for them, nor will I use a nofollow tag and still send them traffic) are leaders in poor design given that they have so many links on a page it's quite impossible to find what you're looking for.
As this example demonstrates, a link's prominence needs to be considered relative to how many other outbound links there are on a site.

Additionally, the position of the link itself above or below the "fold" (the line below which content is only viewable if one scrolls down the screen), is important. Further factors to consider are the link's size, differentiation from other links, and surrounding content (i.e. links to other website, paragraph of related text, ugly design that encourages eyes to avoid the link, etc.).

I'll be giving the data I compile in conducting the backlink and inbound link part of the SEO review to James in spreadsheet format.

Keyword Review

The area of keywords in search engine optimization is so broad that there should be a separate post explaining how to conduct a review of the keyword aspect of a site's SEO. For the purposes of a basic review, I'll limit myself to considering keyword density, keyword position and placement, and the visual presentation of keywords.

Keyword Density
To asses a site's keyword density, SEOChat offers SEOs everywhere a nifty little tool, aptly named the Keyword Density Tool. The tool reads ("parses" in technical terms) a website's code and text and finds keywords/phrases that have been repeated. You can modify what it will parse, choosing to drop meta tags for example. The tool is also flexible enough to offer you one, two or three keyword/phrase results.

For WB's site review, given that it's a midlevel site that isn't a Google powerhouse yet, I'm going to limit my research to two and three word phrases. It's extremely unlikely WB could top Google for any single keyword, so those aren't important (at least until James' SEO strategy improves). In addition, since Google doesn't consider meta tags in its ranking of websites (too easy to spam the tags and fill them with keywords), I'm going to exclude meta tags from the keyword density evaluation. To the best of my knowledge, MSN is the only search engine of the big three engines that still considers meta tags, and they're probably on the way out there too.

Visual Presentation of Keywords
Keyword presentation works much the same as backlink prominence. In conducting your site review, you should be looking for keywords above the fold. Ask yourself if the keywords are contrasting with the rest of the page (bold, italics, underlined)? Are they in both internal and external link text, in headers, and in the title? The rule of thumb here is that the greater the visibility of the keyword(s), the better is the search engine optimization.

Keyword Placement
A related topic to keyword presentation is keyword placement. Besides the tips mentioned above, introductory and concluding paragraphs are good places to position keywords too. Prominence is obviously the order of the day, as is human behaviour. Therefore, think of how an essayist is going to present his man ideas and where. For example, the use of topic sentences at the start of a paragraph is a common writing technique, so keywords are probably best placed in a topic sentence.

In evaluating keyword placement, priority is given to human-visible keywords before keywords embedded in code. The reason for this is simple: search engines are a mathematical approximation of human behaviour, and since humans are firstly going to read what's on your site before (if ever) looking at your code, it is only logical that search engines will weigh human-visible keyword text more heavily than keywords only present in the site's code.

However, as opposed to keyword presentation, keyword placement also includes tags and code. During your SEO site review, conduct a code review by right clicking anywhere on a page and select view source. Alternately, you can see the page's code by clicking View > Page Source. Look for keywords in a site's title tags, in its header tags, and in its alt tags (image description tags). Other important places are in the site's navigation links and in its urls.

Finally, as a precaution, try highlighting everything on the page, especially towards the bottom. This would reveal "hidden" text written in the same colour as the background of the website so that they would only be visible to search engines. People have used this trick to stuff keywords into their websites to improve keyword density, or have done this accidentally, as was recently the case with a Sierra Club of Canada webpage. Luckily, this is not an issue on Work Boxers.

The second part of my guide on how to conduct a review of a site's Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, will be posted tomorrow.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, tips, research, SEO Review, How to.

Business Blog Review

2006-06-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

I'll be reviewing the SEO strategy of Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities blog, as well as the SEO strategy of James Martin's Work Boxers, another business blog with a good reputation.

The SEO review will cover five points. They are: backlinks,
keywords, external links and link structure, content analysis, and
current SEO effectiveness.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories SEO, tips, review, SEO strategy.

Is Google Creating Unfair Competition?

2006-06-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Is Google creating unfair competition?

That's what many in the SEO world argue when they complain of Google's dominance over other search engines, but the unfair competition I have in mind is something entirely different. I'm talking about Google advertising through its own Adsense networks. Strange as it may sound, Google's Portuguese (Spanish? I see some Spanish I'm familiar with, but other words look Portuguese to me) BlogSearch is advertising on Adsense for the phrase "Business Blog" (without quotation marks; for some reason, including the quotation marks drops the ad out of the results entirely).

Now, you may be thinking, "So what if Google advertises through Adsense?" There are two main problems with this that I can discern, namely that such advertising places Google in a position of conflict of interest, and Google's ownership of the ad system means it can unfairly "buy" top rankings.

Unfair Competition Dilemma 1
First, Google advertising through Adsense puts it in a position of conflict of interest. Google needs to serve advertisers and allow for the market to determine which ads climb to the top of Adsense, yet Google itself is competing for that same top spot. This might encourage questionable practices, such as tampering with the Adsense ranking algorithms to place its own ads above others.

The fact that Google's ad is indeed in the top spot compounds the issue and creates an extension to the problem. This ranking indicates that Google's advertising strategy is indeed to compete for prime advertising position (and no, that isn't the only strategy around). While it might have been possible for Google to dismiss the notion of a conflict of interest with regards to high ranking if its ad were ranking last, the top ranking eliminates this defence.

Unfair Competition Dilemma 2
Second, Google's Adsense system ranks ads from top to bottom partly according to a bidding system. The more you're willing to pay per click, the higher your ad will rank. Thus advertisers set a bid ceiling for what they're willing to pay, and Google's system ends up having them pay only five cents more than their next competitor.

Now, since Google obviously need not pay for the advertising on its network – this would be akin to taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another – it can get top ranking for any term or phrase it wants. The current most expensive keyword on Google (keywords actually: mesothelioma lawyer) costs $50. Google could bid $1000 on its own system.

In a more sinister use of this advantage, Google could use its knowledge of competitors' bids to get them to pay their ceiling bid. For example, if Google knows A has a bid ceiling of $5.00, Google could bid $4.95 to ensure A pays $5.00 every time his ad is clicked. This isn't what is currently taking place, with Google at the top, but it's a possibility. Indeed, while there is a conflict of interest with Google ranking at the top of its ad display, ranking lower would simply create another conflict of interest.

The conclusion is that regardless of where its ads rank, Google is in a position of conflict of interest when it places ads for its own products on Adsense.

So where does Google go from here?
First and foremost, Google needs to immediately cease advertising on its own network. Even if none of the issues named above were actually an ethical problem, the fact that there could be perceived problems hurts Google’s reputation just as much. This in turn puts its future revenues in doubt as advertisers think twice about using Adsense, and obviously would make shareholders, employees and others nervous about dealing with Google.

Once the ads have stopped running, Google needs to identify what caused them to display in the first place. If it was a machine error, the software/hardware needs to be repaired or replaced. If the error was human, the employees in question should be dealt with according to whatever system Google has in place for dealing with disciplinary questions. If such a system shouldn’t exist, Google will need to give the employees responsible a stern warning, some continuing education in ethical guidelines, and of course establish a system and explain it to all employees.

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Related articles are archived in the topical categories Google, ethics, Adsense, competition.

SEO Inc. Offers Press Release Copywriting Service

2006-06-15T00:47:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization Incorporated, or SEO Inc., is offering a brilliant new spin on an old service. They're offering an SEO copywriting service... for press releases.
Imagine: you're a business making sound systems for cars, and you've just designed and produced the first model of a revolutionary new sound system. Instead of just having your Press Release through normal PR channels, this will also help the press release get around through search engine optimization. In fact, Search Engine Optimization Inc. issued a Press Release for the new service.

Nod goes to SEO Bill Hartzer for the "SEO Inc. Offers Press Release Copywriting Service" tip.

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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P1

2006-06-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

Google's latest strategic move in search engine development is a new program that they've had the good sense to keep out of the media. This has kept it relatively under wraps and given Google a head start on their competitors in this new field. Read on to learn about Google’s new program, and how you'll need to adapt your SEO to the trends that are emerging from it.

This isn't any ordinary program. In fact, it's not even a computer program. No, when I say program, I mean a little production of Google's that is involving people who have traditionally searched for information through the use of vast indexes and systems: librarians.

I had long wondered why the apparent parallel existence of search engines and librarians wasn't being put to productive use. To understand what I mean by parallel existence, consider what a search engine does: it indexes information and retrieves it when someone comes looking for it. Consider what a librarian does: they index information and retrieve it when a person asks for it. It would only make sense to exploit the overlapping competencies between the two.

It appears that someone at Google had the same thought as I did, and so the behemoth of search has moved.

So what am I teasing you readers about? I'm teasing you about Google's latest stroke of genius: the BackStroke! Err, sorry, make that the Google Librarian Center!

Weak jokes aside, here's how Google describes the Center:

"Librarians and Google share a similar mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We support librarians who work each day to further that mission. This site is a first step toward improving and expanding that support."

Read page 2.
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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P2

2006-06-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

Now think for just a moment: what's the quid pro quo for Google expanding its support for librarians? What do basic social and business principles tell us about doing something for others? We are told that others will reciprocate. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the brilliance of the Google Librarian Center: through it, Google is aiming to become the friend to librarians and thus to corner the librarian demographic. If librarians have ideas for indexing and retrieving information, who do you think they will come to? Their friend Google, of course.

I see further proof of my theory [on Google's interest in supporting librarians] in another little-known social reciprocation experiment of Google's: the Google Pizza Program. It is common knowledge that Google is looking to hire engineers. Who do you think engineers will consider working for after college, given that Google sponsored their college pizza breaks? I think you can answer that one yourselves.

In fact, the Librarian Center is publishing a newsletter - which I encourage any self-respecting SEO to sign up for - that is already showing signs of productivity for Google's relationship with librarians. A beautiful little essay in the newsletter, written by Karen G. Schneider, Director of the Librarians' Internet Index (LII), is entitled: "Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust." Not coincidentally, a newsletter piece written by Google engineer Matt Cutts explaining PageRank to librarians is entitled: "Followup: How does Google Determine Which Websites Are the Most 'Trusted?'"

I don't think anyone who has read to this point can be in doubt any longer as to the purpose of the Google Librarian Center from Google's point of view (to have librarians help them improve their search techniques). The social reciprocation idea seems likely to catch on. Consider this library-blog post: "Way to go... I was hoping for something like this from Google, a sign of their support to work together with librarians... they like us."
Now, I'll get on with what most of you who are reading this likely came here for: the 4 SEO trends you can apply in your own search engine optimization affairs. In fact, the title of this post is a lie: there are actually 5 trends that are developing from this partnership. I just wanted to happily surprise those of you who actually had the patience to read this far and not click out.

Start learning about the trends and get tips on how to adapt: read page 3.

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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P3

2006-06-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

The SEO trends that I have been able to discern come from the newsletter. They are based on the piece from the Librarians' Internet Index head. In her article, the LII's director mentions how her staff make judgements for the LII about what sites are authoritative and trustworthy. They are guided by 5 points. "We rely primarily on what we call the 'big five show-stoppers': availability, credibility, authorship, external links and legality."

From here on in, I'm going to quote and explain what Schneider has written about each of the 5 elements. More interestingly, I will then comment on how I think SEOs should adapt, given the developments Google will naturally make in their algorithms from the LII's insight. Of course, developing your SEO strategy means you believe the premises of my argument, namely, that Google is working with librarians to improve its own searching. If you don't think I've proven that point sufficiently though, then by all means, stop reading right now.

1) Availability – "Is the site up and running? Is the information freely available?"

Schneider is referring to the level of accessibility of the information on a site. Considering that spammy sites often try to make a buck by offering access to their content for a "subscription fee" that "automatically renews" the charge on your credit card if you don't cancel, this is a policy partly aimed at fighting spammy sites. It takes a characteristic of theirs and uses it to block them.

The catch is that some sites with limited access to content that aren't spammy might get hurt if this becomes too black and white in Google's algorithms. The LII's director herself recognizes that not all sites with limited content are spam: "Of course, this isn't a hard-and-fast rule. We don't reject a site just because it has some information behind a wall." I trust Google's engineers will be able to figure out the programming.

I just want to digress for a moment here. As is common knowledge, the Internet's oldest industry - the porn industry - commonly offers content for sale. So in the LII's opposition to content-for-sale websites, I see a bit of a Victorian undercurrent, an undercurrent that disdains pornography and treats it accordingly. While I'm not taking a position on pornography, I think it's a caveat worth noting that part of this policy may be motivated by non-objective factors.

That's just my interpretation of things, though; Schneider writes that "we [the LII] pass along only freely available sites because our working assumption is that when you're hunting for information, either for yourself or for a library patron, free access is good." Incidentally, Schneider's comment is further evidence of the quid pro quo I mentioned above, in that a librarian is endorsing Google's mission statement. Recall that Google's mission is to make the world's information freely available.

Read Page 4 to see how to adapt to trend 1.
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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P4

2006-06-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

Anyways, getting back on topic, "availability"'s importance for SEO purposes translates to a few concrete practices.

Make sure SE spiders can easily crawl your entire web site without hindrances.
That includes avoiding

problematic robots.txt files,

password systems,

messy code

and anything else that might conceivably cause problems in what Google founder Larry Page describes as linear surfing: someone navigating the web from one link to another. While this may previously have been an issue in SEO, with librarians reaffirming it, you can be sure Google will give this issue more weight in the future, if they aren't already.

Sitemaps are another good idea. (I'm currently working on one for City SEO/M, if you're wondering where mine is.)

The easy rule of thumb here is to make content freely available, easily accessible (i.e. not buried in some forgotten sub-sub-sub-sub-subsection), and equally legible by humans and spiders. More on this later.

2) Credibility - "Does the web site contribute current, accurate information? Is the site author(s) qualified to present the content provided?"

There are two issues in Schneider's view that establish credibility: quality of content and author credentials.

The applications for SEO are as follows.

Review your content to make sure it is accurate and on the mark. Statistics should be cited properly, and context must be given. If you don’t feel you have the time for this, have someone proofread it for you.

Make sure you have an About page. Include professional certifications and whatever else qualifies you to write about your topic. Furthermore, if you are affiliated with any organizations in your industry, display a badge or link of some nature that shows this, while making sure they link to you.

Give notice as to how current the information is. Note that Google's Blogger includes timestamps that indicate when a post was published (and also serve as permalinks).

You need to show that you are, if not an expert, at least someone who is knowledgeable about the field. Someone that can be trusted both because of their expertise, and because their information is accurate and up-to-date. Currently, Google assesses authoritativeness via PageRank and backlinks from other authoritative websites.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their "Anatomy of a large-scale Hypertext Search Engine," noted that human maintained directories were generally reliable. (Anatomy is another recommended read for my fellow SEOs.) For Google to devise and implement algorithms to integrate human generated assessments of authority therefore makes sense to be consistent with what its founders have written in the past, besides being necessary to keep up with the competition (i.e. Yahoo's Del.icio.us). Based on past experience with PageRank, we can expect Google to take into account authority, likely based on a credentials approach.

Read Page 5 for the more trends and tips.
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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P5

2006-06-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

3) Authorship: "At LII we're very skeptical of web sites with more than a couple of typographical or grammatical errors."

Grammatical verification is the logical extension of trend number 2. If you're someone with any expertise, you should have acquired some basic communication skills along the way to becoming an expert. Those skills ought to include grammar skills. If you don't have the skills or the time for this, I again recommend you hire a proofreader to edit your text.

For more technically minded SEOs, this is the human equivalent of not having sloppy code. You wouldn't talk gibberish to a spider, so why talk gibberish to humans? After all, humans are your target audience. They're the reason you're optimizing to begin with. What good would it do to rank high on Google only to have SERP referrals quit your site in an instant when they see an unprofessional page loaded with grammatical errors. Note also that "bad neighbourhoods" are notorious for their poor grammar. For instance, experts say that spam email is easily identifiable by typos and poor grammar.

Are you trustworthy?

Here are a couple of proofreaders who might help you out: proofreaders and editors Better-Edit (owned by one of the first people to teach me about SEO, web entrepreneur Yaro Starak), Hyperlife.net, http://www.wordsru.com/, and whatever else you might find on Google for editing services. (Note the varied ways of obtaining backlinks and their quality, as determined by order listed and nofollow tag usage: relationships (first, nofollow not used), topping SERPs (second, nofollow used) and topping Adwords (third, nofollow used).)

Read page 6 for still more trends and tips.
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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P6

2006-06-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

4) External Links

Schneider's concern here is to find out about the care that is put into a site, which she considers to be a good indication of its quality. To help assess this, he LII investigates whether a web site's external links are functioning properly. She also mentions something that seasoned SEOs will already know: "Beware of student project web sites and personal web pages with many, many links!" Links from poor quality website and websites with hundreds of links in which your own gets lost aren’t all that valuable.

Luckily for SEOs, this particular trend in Google's development is not a major one, meaning that little additional work will be required to adapt to it. (Unless you're doing SEO on contract for others, in which case this small augmentation in workload is a dissapointment.)

The reason is that some of this is already integrated within Google. For instance, Google engineer Matt Cutts' blog, in discussing Google's recent Big Daddy update, considers the cases of some websites that suddenly found much fewer of their websites indexed. He suggests that the cause of their woes was external linking to unrelated websites. This is a quality issue, but it reflects the idea that Google's on-site considerations include external links.

The trend in SEO is therefore, in the main, a continuation of previous trends. As Schneider said, the care that is put into a website is important.

Proper coding in link structures (and of course linking to what the anchor text actually describes) should be paid specific attention to.

Check your links on a regular (once every two weeks feels sufficient to me) basis in case sites have moved, and if they have, update your links.
As always, avoid sneaky redirects.

Read Page 7 for some bonus tips, the conclusion, and more tips.
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Google Program Means 4 SEO Trends - P7

2006-06-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

5) Legality

The LII considers legality in the framework of copyrights, trademarks, and intellectual property law. As Schneider writes: "The author of a legitimate web site will ensure that she is legally entitled to publish the content on her site, working within copyright and fair use guidelines."

She also considers the topic of fair-use, which is a legal defence that argues that the reproduction of a work is legitimate because of extenuating circumstances. Schneider cites critiquing a work as an example of this, and encourages readers to check out a website busting 10 popular copyright myths. Schneider recommends avoiding reproducing something that would mean using the fair-use argument in court. It's a hassle and highly subjective, so why bother? It only takes a moment more to attribute something properly.

SEOs can use Creative Commons copyright licenses to indicate to readers that their site is operating within a legitimate legal framework. Placing the CC marker in an easily visible place would reinforce arguments of due diligence in court, and so locations above the fold (i.e. the portion of a website immediately visible upon loading with no scrolling) might be considered. It might even reassure someone providing a link that their own external link is going to a quality website.

Additionally, it's an easy way of showing that you're credible and trustworthy, which is what this all comes down to. For example, Marketing Sherpa (another great newsletter that each of you should subscribe to) recently published the results of a marketing experiment by Petco.com showing that prominent display of a security certificate boosted sales. It is therefore likely that prominently displaying a badge that reflects trustworthiness on you would have similar effects.

There are a few other questions Schneider posts afterwards that hint at other trustworthiness points. I'm not going to quote them, though, because I want you to absolutely go and check out the Google Librarian Center and sign up for the Google Librarian Center's Newsletter right now.

Here are a few quick steps to immediately implement what has been discussed in this article.

1. SEOs will have noticed that sloppy code has been mentioned a few times. Check that your code is valid. This is known in technical jargon as "validating" code. Try W3C’s free html validator: W3 Validator.
2. Go and edit your template file. Make sure your site's content is available and trustworthy, as determined by the criteria of credibility, authorship, quality of external links and legality. Refer back to each section of this article as necessary.
3. Contact your professional association and get their website to link to yours.
4. If it does not already exist, create an About page.
5. Join a site review forum community like www.Sitepoint.com to get outside opinions on your availability, credibility, authorship, external links and legality.
6. Finally, and probably most importantly (again something for those of you patient and perseverent enough to read through to the end), go submit your site to the Librarians' Internet Index (the link is on the upper right). Something tells me that Google respects librarians.

If you enjoyed the article, take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter. Or maybe you want to again savour the information on Google's Librarian Center and the algorithms and SEO trends that are its results, starting from the beginning.

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Google Spreadsheet

2006-06-11T17:43:00.000-07:00

Google has introduced a new spreadsheet product, as I have just learnt from the good folks at Gadzooki.

I get the impression that this tool isn't just around for kicks, the way Google Earth is. This spreadsheet program is going to be integrated with Google's core business, search.

Here's the comment I had at Gadzooki on the issue, which will help you understand what I mean when I say Google is developing this for search.

"Google's latest development in indexing information. I think they expect this can help refine search the way Yahoo is using Del.icio.us, namely social networking. If the sheets are in the public domain, well... [it is reasonable to assume they can be indexed and used to help make numeric-related searches more accurate].

I think Google's motivation for doing this is also as a counterattack on Microsoft. They want to force Microsoft to devote time and energy to maintaining its spreadsheet software market share and developing its product, so that it can't focus as much on search."

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About our Newsletter

2006-06-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

The City SEO newsletter saves you time by bringing you the latest in search engine optimization, with of course my emphasis on local SEO.

You can just subscribe and see what's been posted by checking your email. There's no need to detour to the site unless you're sure you want to read something.

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It is sent out approximately every two weeks, both to ensure quality and avoid spamming your inbox.

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Email bk

2006-05-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

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Go back to City SEO's homepage

City Search Engine Optimization and Marketing: Location-Specific SEO

2006-05-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

The challenge: provide specialist search engine optimization (SEO) tips to people interested in location-specific SEO. Hence the name of the blog: City Search Engine Optimization.

The means: research on search engines, writing tips, how-tos and guides, and of course testing via the scientific method.

Note: Search engine optimization isn't the same as search engine marketing. The former refers to the practice of giving a website prominence in the search engines and their results pages, or SERPs, while the other refers to the use of search engines to market one's website to humans. At least, that's what it should mean.

In practice, people refer to search engine marketing to mean search engine optimization, or marketing to the search engines. But what good is it to market to the search engines if you don't use the search engines to market to real human beings?

Join me, Bookworm, as I develop the field of search engine optimization for local search, or location specific SEO, and present you with my specialized findings and tips.

You may also be interested to know that I live in Montreal, Canada area, and in reading other info about myself and my SEO prices.

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