Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

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!

Does the text color of your link matter?  According to a Google patent granted a little while back it just might!  You can view the document yourself here.

But let’s spend a little time with claim 18,

The one or more server devices of claim 16, where the data associated with the features of the one of the links includes at least two of: the font size of anchor text associated with the link, the position of the link within a source document, the position of the link in a list, the font color associated with the link, the attributes of the link, the number of words in the anchor text associated with the link, the actual words in the anchor text associated with the link, the determination of commerciality of the anchor text associated with the link, the type of the link, the context of words before or after the link, the topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated, whether the link leads to a target document on a same host or domain, or whether an address associated with the link embeds another address.

This claim gives us a lot of good information on how text links might be valued but by color?  It might have something to do with detecting hidden text (for instance if the color of text matches the background color a flag is raised or the link is discounted), but I would bet some serious money it is just a matter of time till we see some quack SEO’s offering Bill and Jimmy’s Rainbow Color Link Building Service, claiming that they will garner you hundreds of blue, green and yellow links for $xxx a month.  Guaranteed to get you to the number one spot or your choice of a full refund or a case of multi-colored lollipops!

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.

Chitika advertising network published some analysis it did of click through percentages based on 8,253,240 impressions.

“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.

The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”

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.