Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

A friend of mine just emailed me some social circle results that came up when he was doing a search for Toronto SEO – while I think these are interesting I am worried that Google is going to make it very hard for new companies in any industry to breakthrough in the search results.

Everyone knows you can pay cash in the form of Google Adwords to show up above the regular organic results but how about showing up above them for free!!

For the term ‘cool logos’ my site occupies the first two image spots, which show above the number one result!!  The first one actually goes to my category page which is extra nice!

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Just announced today over at Google Webmaster Central Blog – this is something you should already have been tweaking for user experience but knowing it will effect rankings in a small way (as one of over 200 factors) this should wake up some sleeping webmasters, SEO’s and designers.

Ok, most of you are thinking that this is a really odd question?  It has been a long known online marketing secret that the first and second spot in paid search is not always the best but has anyone ever thought of any circumstances it might be better for your website to rank second instead of first organically?

I am not crazy!  I swear!  Check-out this scenario:

The first result for this long-tail traffic term is a really popular local forum and the specific post it goes to was made back in 2007.  It just happens to be a list of local businesses in a specific industry and the number two listing is at the top of this list.

So what would you rather have, people going to a third party source and seeing your company at the top of a trusted list and have them come to your website that way or would you rather have the top spot  yourself and get them to your website through that route?

One part of SEO that many people have trouble with, even professionals – is data-mining. I wrote a Google Knol titled : Website Analytic Tips for SEO a few months back and received good feedback on it.

The truth is, that data-mining can be very time consuming and a bit boring but it is essential! There is so much great information hidden among your website statistics that you are really missing out on good opportunities if you don’t leverage this data. Here is an example of an opportunity I recently discovered:

March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 Google sent 13,4xx non-paid visits via 2,8xx keywords
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 Google sent 10,8xx non-paid visits via 2,2xx keywords

23.xx% increase in visits

http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxx.com/xxxxxxx.htm – Pageviews 97x Previous: 9x (+914.xx%)

xxx xxxxx xxxxxx – rank 5th in Google.ca

March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 67 visits
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 0 visits

xxxxxxxxx – rank number 2 in Google.ca

March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 54 visits
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 0 visits

Almost all the visitors are finding this page by searching two keywords, so optimizing further for those should increase our ranking and traffic to this page.

Through data-mining we find opportunities like this and the goal here is to follow the natural trend of this page garnering more visitors, so I will build some backlinks and authority directly to the page to increase its traffic. I might also tweak the on-page content to help with relevance and to make sure I get conversions.

Generally speaking I have gradually changed many inner page title tags so they are more unique and contain appropriate keywords to match the content of those pages. In the long-term this should increase the long-tail traffic to inner pages and offer us more opportunities like this to rank and receive high quality visitors to these pages.

I have heard from a few potential clients before that even though their own website does not rank for many searches they are OK in the SEO department because their various directory listings rank, so people will find them anyways….

This is a really bad decision and will most certainly guarantee a long-term unsuccessful foray on the web.

Even the high quality listings typically offer multiple chances for a potential customer to veer off to another competitors website.  Then there are some like below that just post your company info with the intention of making money by NOT sending a customer to your website.  In the sample below, note the two ads before company info and then there is not even a link to the destination site listed.  No where to go but directly to one of your competitors I guess!  If you are located in Toronto and need a quote on SEO please give us a call at 416-671-3114, we also help international clients across the world wide web.

I vote for April Fools Joke and very funny!