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!

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 have the strangest Adsense bug happening and I am finding it very hard to contact Google customer support.  When I look at the three month view of my Adsense balance I get one number and when I look at the twelve month view I get a much different balance.

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.

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.”

It 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.

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!