Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

Someone just emailed me this link and it was pretty shocking!  With so many spammy link sellers buying dropped domains  and re-purposing them - this person either doesn’t speak English or is non-too-bright!  Check-out the domain name he is selling links on, www.AntiSemiteOfTheWeek.org!

When the big banks start looking for SEO experts you know the profession has hit mainstream!  SEO as a profession is quite big in the USA, UK and other countries around the word but Canada has been lagging a bit behind the rest.  But I just noticed heard about a managment position being offered at TD Bank that has lots of SEO expertise requested in the job description:

Job Requirements
Requirements:

. Manage SEO project queue and prioritization list
. Work closely with product and content teams to ensure site navigation and contents are optimized for SEO
. Establish, interpret and analyze critical online KPI targets for SEO/SEM initiatives
. Minimum of 3 - 5 years of online experience, specifically developing and executing SEO/SEM strategies
. Ability to effectively communicate SEO standards and best practices to other departments

This is a great sign and should mean more competition for the few good SEO’s in Canada!

Now that Google is coming to terms (publicly) with the fact that SEO is real and important it seems they released their own SEO Report Card internally.

Very interesting report and you can download the entire thing here.

You know search engine optimization has gone mainstream when it shows up in a Dilbert comic strip!

but sometimes you can be too honest?  Now I should first point out that this SEO has his site hosted on free hosting and has virtually no ranking himself but I do find his ‘tell it like it is’ attitude refreshing.  Please see the below quote from his website:

The following can all affect the price you might pay for organic optimization:

Size & Complexity of Website

Competitiveness of Rankings in the market sector

Personality Issues (if you’re a very controlling personality, expect a generally higher price)

Love the third point!!

Here is a great simple pie chart showing how valuable SEO is in relation to PPC.  This is not to say that PPC has no value but finding the right mix for your company can really help boost the quantity and quality of visitors you receive from the search engines.

Rand has certainly outdone himself yet again, proving why this guys time might actually be worth $1,000 an hour.  I was playing around with OSE today and it is really a great, simple to use tool that gives you a nice quick snapshot of the relative authority and SEO value of a website.  If Yahoo! is really pulling the plug on Yahoo! Site Explorer than this tool will be even more in-demand!  See our screenshot below, looks like I need to work on root domain authority, since this site is relatively new (I made the mistake of using GooglePages for three years prior to starting this site) I think I should hit the mid 70’s by next year.

I received a private message at a forum I have been a member of for many years and it was from a relatively senior member that was promoting some discounted listings reviews in his network of web directories.  The directories themselves look pretty nice, good templates and category structure but I took a quick look through the backlink profile of one of them and I was quite shocked!

I found backlinks from porn, coming soon sites and even from a page that was simply 10k+ links jammed full of porn, gambling and rx - I was going to post a screenshot of the page but it crashed my browser twice so I figured I better not push my luck.

Most good SEO’s always check backlink profiles before building links but there are many ‘cut-rate’ services out there that won’t spend the extra time doing this type of due diligence.  So be very careful or your website might just become part of a ‘bad neighborhood’.

The quote below is taken from a great posting over at www.SeoBook.com and is an interview with Dennis Goedegebuure, aka DonnisG - head of eBay’s in-house SEO team.  Now some of  you might just think the bolded word below is a typo but I think it is more inline with a Freudian slip.  The best way to get decision makers to buy-in to SEO is to embarrass them with how well a competitor is performing, due to using SEO!

What are some of the things you have done which you have found to be most beneficial in helping to evangelize SEO and get buy in from other managers?

Sometimes it pays off to get somebody from the outside who can “embarrass” all the things that go wrong from an SEO perspective.

If I was not a fan of this guy already for the simple fact that he gets $1,000 an hour for SEO consulting, I am even more impressed with his recent post on his experience this year securing additional Venture Capital for SEOmoz.  He gives a ton of great information and even though he holds back some of it (understandably for privacy reasons), the amount of transparency exhibited is commendable.

I think he could have easily released this info as a white paper and charged $200 a download, it is that good!

Just check out some of these images he gives:

Thanks again Rand, great read and super interesting for an SEO like me that one day will be raising capital for a project of my own.   Head over and read this post if you ever wondered what the inside of the VC process looked like, SEOmozs Venture Capital Process.