Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

It seems SEO’s are fairing well these-days, even in a bad economic environment – salaries for SEM/SEO related positions were up in 2008 and that just shows that decision makers are continuing to see the relative value we bring to the table.

2009 yearly salaries for an individual contributor with 1-3 years relevant experience range from $40,000 to $80,000; senior manager salaries range $70,000 to $120,000; and vice presidents with responsibilities for large SEM campaigns or a team of specialists earn from $160,000 to $250,000.

While the salary range for those with 1- years experience is quite wide I think that the majority of those getting the low range, $40k – $50k are in the 1-2 year experience range.  Once you have 3 years plus under your belt I don’t think you would even consider a position for under $60k.

It seems the spending on SEM will continue into the distant future and that is sweet music to anyone that is involved in this industry!

It is official, Yahoo! is not longer considering the ‘keyword’ tag when ranking websites in their search results.  Google stopped paying attention to these many eons ago but it seems Yahoo! has finally followed suit.  It was just too easy to manipulate so I am not really surprised.  This tidbit of info came out Tuesday during the  SMX East conference.

For a long time, the industry some what made fun of Yahoo for using it (at all) for ranking purposes. Then, during the Q&A period of the session, Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo said at 2:09pm (EST), that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for rankings. In fact, Yahoo stopped using it a “few months ago,” said Pierry.

I was kind of funny when Danny asked Cris, why didn’t Yahoo announce this?  Cris basically shrug his shoulders.  He then asked Cris, “are you sure?” Cris gave me a look, the look like, that was a dumb question, since he is the man now behind Yahoo Search.

So don’t bother optimizing (stuffing) your keyword meta tags anymore because none of the search engines really care!

After some SEO testing proved this to be incorrect Yahoo! stepped in with an explanation.

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words.  Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

The LA Times is reporting that the judge in the MySpace Mom’s suicide killing case has overturned his decision about the ‘criminality’ of breaking the Terms of Service of a website. And that is really good news for all those SEO’s out there that have ever purchased a link.

I know a few SEO’s that were considering leaving the country because a few of their paid directory submissions were in the ‘gray’ area. Now they can remain in the USA and Canada and live out their lives not fearing the long jail term that should be associated with breaking the ToS of companies like Google.

In 2008 it is interesting to see that paid search efforts outspent organic optimization 10-1, my thoughts are that this will drastically change over the course of the next 5 years because many competitive industries are hitting extremely high costs on a pay-per-click basis and even though SEO can be harder to measure and can take a longer time to show results.  Those results are so impressive that they can mean the difference between ‘making-or-breaking’ a business.

I was recently involved in doing SEO for a company that had a cost per acquisition of $47 through traditional style advertising and that cost went down to $3.85 for those aquired though search engine optimization.

I find the biggest problem with SEO continuing to grow at the pace it deserves is twofold, first there is a lot of resistance from traditional marketing folks because SEO is a much different animal.  With SEO you are spending considerable resources on something your company ultimately has no control over, the search engines.  And to make matters even more complicated the search engines keep their algorithms and methods of ranking a secret.  Secondly, most business owners and traditional type marketing managers don’t really understand SEO and that makes it very difficult for them to justify the expense and risks involved in switching over their traffic acquisition methods to organic vs. paid.

But there is hope and I do see a pattern starting with the largest and most progressive companies as they give SEO a try.  It has even reached  a point where many of these companies are bringing SEO in-house where they can learn, track and enjoy these advantages up close and personal.

-We had a quick page rank update a couple of days ago and it pretty much surprised everyone. Even though page rank does not seem to mean a heck of a lot these days every update still seems to get the webmaster and SEO community up and jump’in! Personally I am wondering if my weird news site will ever see some green juice again but the PR0 does not seem to be hindering the steady flow of traffic – this week it was extra busy averaging around 1,100 visits a day.

-Finally the ‘SEO’s are criminals’ buzz is calming down. After Matt came out and said that SEO’s will be held to higher standards and Google is tracking them there was a long and painful cry of foul across the entire industry. Myself I don’t really think it is such a big deal and the SEO playing-field has never been level anyways.

-As far as the ‘page rank sculpting’ episode I will simply say I feel sorry for the SEO firms that sold this to their biggest clients and now have to figure out a way to get their foot out of their mouths.

What will next months buzz bring….no idea, maybe a new conspiracy theory about Google and Yahoo! planning to buyout MSN to stop BING from conquering the world?

Craigslist seems to be a potpourri of bad SEO’s – take a gander at this advertisement:

Affordable SEO – 1 WEEK TO THE TOP (Toronto and area)

I have been wondering how SEO’s that don’t speak or write English are able to do a proper job optimizing for it?  I know you can pretty much learn most SEO skills in any language but since much of SEO is reading, writing and optimizing for the English language I just don’t see it being worthwhile regardless of how cheap the service is.  Here is an example of an obvious non-native English speaking SEO advertising on DigitalPoint:

Im offer offsite optimization service for only $120

What includes on the package?
-Article writing + submission
-press release writing + submission
-directory submission
-rss submission
-forum post backlinks
-blog commenting

I have posted a reply asking who will be writing all this content, and I seriously doubt he has a native English speaker/writer on staff.  This same service might be two or three times as expensive from an English speaking/writing SEO but the value your website recieves from it will be tenfold or more.  I just don’t see the value in hiring an SEO that does not speak/write the langauge your site is developed in.

I will briefly touch on one of the most important things to look for when hiring an SEO company.  Look for a company that includes a portfolio or case study section on their site.  It is important to have at least a glimpse into the type of work the firm has done in the past.

Here is a perfect example of a company that is probably a complete waste of money.  Besides their obviously poor English skills and the fact that they offer search engine submission as part of their service.   The portfolio page, http://www.bluedelightconsultant.com/portfolio.html is just a collection of barely recognizable images with no live links and no mention of what terms they achieved ranking for.

This fad started a few years back and it seems there is no end in sight.  As long as ‘pretend’ SEO’s and newbie webmaster chase the ole might ‘green bar’ I guess the business of buying dropped domains with page rank will continue.  Here is one of my favorites that I just found on DP with links for sale, it is a health site btw…..http://ColumbiaWomensLacrosse.org/

This question has been floating around the web for years and the myth still looms quite large.  Does a high page rank help me get a high search engine ranking?

The simple answer is a big, fat NO!  But it gets much more complicated.  A high page rank could be representative of many other high quality backlinks or it could just be one not-so-good high page rank backlink.

Here was a post on DigitalPoint which hammers home this point.

Tried everything to improve google ranking but didn’t work