Archive for the 'SEO Industry' Category
So I have been happy to report over the past couple of years that Canada, in particular my neck of these woods, Ontario has been catching up to the UK and USA by offering good starting salary for valuable Search Engine professionals. But a quick look at Craislist today makes me wonder what is going on. Not only have good paying SEO jobs been a rare occurrence the past few months, there are some really jokers offering peanuts and I can’t image what kind of specialist or professionals they are expecting to get. Just a few weeks ago I saw an ad for an experienced link builder starting at $60k per year plus benefits - then today:
looking for a hard working (very very hard working) individual to help promote our business with twitter, facebook (various social media sites), SEO etc. Compensation: $24,000 per year + stock options
Yikes! And this one:
In-House, Full Time PPC Specialist Position!
You must have knowledge and experience of managing and running multiple PPC campaigns ( AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search & Microsoft Ad Center) , have client oriented approach, ability to manage numerous and changing project priorities, excellent organizational skills, team player, ability to analyze and make recommendations for client up-sells (SEO packages, PPC campaigns, web design, and more).
Compensation: $30-$40K pluse commissions based on performance
Crazy experience and high level duties for $15 an hour? Data entry people at my office make that much!!
I still have faith that Canada is catching up and today’s posts are just a brief setback. Hope everyone is having a great summer!
This is a good paying job for someone with high-end link building and management skills. Link building is one of the hardest SEO jobs and it can also prove to be the most frustrating.
A Toronto Area search marketing firm is looking for a First-Class Link Builder to join our growing team. The Candidate will ideally be located in the Greater Toronto Area and have the ability to work remotely from a home office.
Read the rest here and please reply to this thread if you are interviewed or get this position!
I am all for putting your best foot forward, after all that is what SEO is all about but it seems Google has used some very creative accounting in making claims about how much it contributes to the US economy.
They (Google) claim that in the US they “generated $54 billion of economic value in 2009.” How did they arrive at that figure?
How, then, do we then correctly calculate Google’s contribution to the economy?
The same way we determine the economic impact of other companies: the value of the goods and services produced, minus the value of all of resources consumed. Google generated revenue of $23.65 Billion in 2009 and by their own reckoning, their expenditures were about $17.13 Billion, which means that Google’s worldwide value addition was about $6.5 Billion. Google does just under half of its business in the US, so their US economic impact in the US was about $3.2 Billion, far less than the $54 Billion they claim.
Seth Godin had a really nice post about hourly work vs. linchpin work (flat fee) and I found it very applicable to SEO. I forever see the same questions floating around the SEO message boards, “how much should I charge” - usually it comes from someone who is just starting out but sometimes the replies are quite interesting. I love the example Seth gives:
I had a college professor who did engineering consulting. A brand new office tower in Boston had a serious problem–there was a brown stain coming through the drywall, (all of the drywall) no matter how much stain killer they used. In a forty story building, if you have to rip out all the drywall, this is a multi-million dollar disaster. They had exhausted all possibilities and were a day away from tearing out everything and taking a loss. They hired Henry in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem. He looked at the walls and said, “I think I can work out a solution, but it will cost you $45,000 if I succeed.” They instantly signed on, because if he succeeded, the project would be saved.
Henry asked for a pencil and paper and wrote the name of a common hardware store chemical and handed it to them. “Here, this will work.” And then he billed them $45,000. That’s quite an hourly wage. It’s also quite a bargain.
In my opinion this is the same valuation a good SEO might garner. Read the entire post here.
US Government Recognizing Search Engine Marketing as a Real Job!
Author: SEO Company GeekIt seems the US Government is preparing to classify search engine marketing as a real job and is consulting with SEMPO in working out job titles and descriptions.
n a recent SEMPO newsletter, the organization explained what’s going on:
You can be part of an important and exciting task force for SEMPO, to help the US Government understand and document the job classification that includes search marketing expertise. Among its many uses, it will allow those in the Search Industry to bid more easily on government contracts.
SEMPO has been asked to facilitate participation by at least 500 industry experts to fill out a questionnaire on a new O*Net-SOC Code that will be used by the government to classify professionals in the Search Industry.
SEMPO goes on to explain that they’re looking only for U.S.-based companies and individuals, and preferably those with five or more years of search marketing experience.
If you’d like to volunteer to help with the Labor Department’s questionnaire, SEMPO asks you to respond “Yes” and fill out this online form:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Industry-SOC-Code
That page gives an April 30 deadline, but SEMPO says if you hurry up and respond now, it’s not too late to get involved. The DOL will pay $40 to those it selects to complete its questionnaire. Considering that Canada seems to lag a few years behind the USA in all things search marketing related I don’t think we will see this type of interest in the Great White North for at least a couple more years.
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.
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.
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 vote for April Fools Joke and very funny!
Just noticed my website listed up on www.thedailyreviewer.com and it is a bit of a good news bad news situation. The bad news is we are all the way down on page 7 but that is off-set by having a really cool neighbor right beside us, Shoemoney - skills that pay the bills! I also noticed SEW and Graywolf on the page, so I know I am in good company!
