1- IF you still don’t have a website then you still have time to choose a good domain name that includes your keywords, use free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Tool to get more information about the search volume of your main keyword, assuming your business is doing home renovation in Toronto then the best domain to sign up is www.torontohomerenovation.ca or www.torontohomerenovation.com . If you have a brand name that you need it to be shown in your domain you still can add it after or before your main keywords.

2- If you already have up and running website then you have already register a domain that doesn’t necessarily include your keyword, don’t panic you still can rank we using this domain keep it like it is even if it doesn’t include your keywords, in this case the age of your domain will make the difference in your ranking.

3- The search engine optimization process has 3 main parts:
- The on page factor which is the changes you will be doing on the content of your website like adding keywords to your page, improving your site navigation and optimizing your title tags.
- The off page factor which is mainly the link building process, the more other websites link to your website the more important it will be in the eye of search engines.
- The user interaction/behavior on your website, the more time visitors spend on your website and the less they come back to the search engine before they land on your site the better your ranking will be. That could be done by keeping the visitors engaged in your website through providing then related information to their search query.

4- How to improve your on page factor without hiring an seo company?
I will assume that you don’t have more than 1 hour to spend on this step and you have basic HTML knowledge (You still need to have FTP access or backend access to your website to do that, the worst scenario you can ask your web developer to do it for you).
On your home page change the title tag to include your main keyword and make sure that you have this phrase mentioned few times on your home page.

5- How to improve the off page factor for your website?
This part will need more time, knowledge and experience, being able to do it yourself without getting an seo company involve depends on how much you are involved in web 2.0. Bus assuming you use some social media websites like www.digg.com or any other website then you can submit your website as a story. If you use forums then you can add your signature to your profile and obtain a link, same thing if you read blogs you can comment and obtain a link back to your website, to make it short for you wherever you are browsing and you find a way to leave a link back to your website just do it, make sure to have your keywords in the link text like this Toronto Home Renovation

6- How to improve the user experience and increase the user spent time in your website?
Basically offering people the information that they are looking for with easy to navigate website, incarnating with your visitors using polls, quizzes and blog. Offering your visitors something with value for free is also a good way to keep then engaged with your website, that could be done through articles and free tips like the one I am including here.

7- Is search engine optimization needs all these efforts?
It depends on the competition in your niche, if your niche is not competitive and your are targeting a keyword like “Toronto Cupcake” then the on page factor alone might get it for your (tips #4).
If you are targeting medium competition term like “Toronto Home Renovation” then you will need the on page factor + some inbound links (tips #4 and #5)
If your are targeting high competition term like “Cosmetic Surgery” then your will need then on page factor + a lot of inbound links + killing content and interactive pages (tips #4, #5 and #6).

8- Stay tuned this page is open to changes, I will keep adding more tips and change the old tips, please feel free to use the comment function to ask any question.

At the beginning of this post I will do a quick revision about Google supplemental index assuming that some people those are reading this post don’t know about it. Almost two years before Google has created a supplemental index in addition to its main index but pages in this index:
- Are not crawled as frequently as the main index (when the supplemental index started supplemental pages were not updated for more than once every three months)
- Most likely they will not rank for competitive keywords, Google tends to show them when they don’t find adequate results in the main index.
To make the story short, when your page marked is supplemental it is died (from seo standpoint). In the past Google got use to mark the supplement page so it was easy to know about them:

What happened few month before is that Google turned this mark off, so it is getting harder now to find out about those pages. What happened after is that many webmasters forgot completely about them considering that Google doesn’t have the supplemental index any more.
I want to assure for you folks that supplemental index still exist like before and many of your pages might be affected by this and you don’t know, it is just getting harder to find about them. You need not some manual investigations to know about them, if you see a page on your website that has gone from a good ranking to the pavilion most likely it went into supplemental page. Here is one of my posts that was ranking well for the phrase “SE O Training in Toronto” which is not very competitive one, but a month before it doesn’t shown anywhere for this term.
So if you agree with me that the supplemental pages are still exist, it is time to go through some recommendations to keep your pages away from supplemental index:

- Try to pass link power to you important page using intelligent internal navigation or building inbound links directly for those pages not just for your home page.
- Make sure to have enough text on each pages to make it look unique, avoid also using duplicate titles/meta tags for your pages.
- Don’t use duplicate content on your pages

Most seo (and I am one of them) fight to achieve good ranking with search engines, something like first spot with Google for highly searched keyword will be such a great event to celebrate, BUT the problem is few SEOs  care about the click through rate, CTR might be a term that attached strictly to paid search and it is not a word of the SEOs dictionary.

Why the organic CTR is very important ?

1- Simply, the more clicks you have on your link the more traffic you get.
2- We all know that for Adwords CTR  plays a big role in the position and cost of your ad, the more clicks you get on your ad the better ranking you get for it and the less your cost is, it is a kind of reward from Google since you offer attractive related website for the audience. For organic search the same system is adopted by Google, it is will known now that visitors behavior plays a big role in the SERP, the more clicks your site gets the better ranking it gets, since Google find it good and related.

How to increase my organic CTR ?

- Backing to Adwords, you have three parameters those you control on your ad so you need to optimize them:
1- Your landing page, which in the case of organic is the page that ranks for a specific term, try to make it as useful/attractive as much as you can, track always the bouncing rate for this page, Google can track how many people get back to search again after few seconds since they land on your website, and this is a bad indicator that Google might take against your website and lower your ranking according to it.
2- The clickable link text (anchor text), in organic search this is most likely the title tag, so tray to optimize it as much as you can to be attractive not just to be keyword rich, “web hosting” is really good one to target the term, but it is not good incentive for clicks, “Affordable Web Hosting  99.99% up time guaranteed” would be a good one (make sure that you really offer what you say).
3- The snippet, this one most likely taken from your description tag, sometimes from your page content, any way always make sure to know where does search engine take it from and try to make it under your control, make sure that it is informative, it can include up to 20 words which is really good amount of text to write some attractive information about your website, make sure to make it full and ended with a period, do not let search engine cut it and take the uncompleted part of  what you do you want to say.

Finally, wish you the best organic CTR

The most important factor in any seo project is the keyword research, you need to do keyword research to choose some high searched keywords for your project. It is also very important to analyze the competition of your keyword to be able to do some estimate about the effort and the money those the project might cost, so if you are  seo company it is good to know that before quoting the customer.

You may ask yourself why do I need that, is not the highest searched keyword is the most competitive one ? And the answer is; not all the times.
So let us assume that you have done your keyword research using Overture and chosen your main keyword (I will assume that it is “search engine optimization“) and it is time to measure the competition of this keyword using Google, I will use this convention; I will ask you a quesiotn and when the answer is yes from your side so it means the keyword is more competitive:

1- Search this keyword in Google and check if you can see Google Adwords on the result page, if yes are they a lot ? Is there “more sponsored ads” link at the bottom of the ad column ? Can you see horizontal ads above the results ?
2- Scan the first two pages quickly, are most pages those shown on the results  home pages ?
3- Check Google PR for the results on the first page, is there a lot of them +5 ?
4- Use Google allintitle operator. allintitle:”search engine optimization“, big numbers (i.e. +10 000) is high competition indication
5- Use Google allinanchor operator. allinanchor:”search engine optimization“, when you see a big number it means there are a lot of seo practices being done for this key phrase, since anchor text is SEOs preferred technic
6- Use Google allinurl operator. allinanchor:”search engine optimization“, this also SEOs preferred technic when you see a lot of results then the guys there for you
7- Use Google allintext operator. allintext:”search engine optimization“, this is good to check how many websites have this key phrase in the body of the page
8- Check the number of results that Google returns are they a lot ?
9- Can you see results from Wikipedia ? this is another indication about competitive keywords since Google tend to show results from WikIpEdia for high searched broad keywords.
10- I am still looking for one, but as you know for promotional reasons you can’t say 9 tips

“I Have a Dream” is the popular name given to the historic public speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke of his desire for a future where blacks and whites would coexist harmoniously as equals.

I like a lot this speech, especially its title “I have a dream”, people or life may prevent you from achieving your goals but nothing can prevent you from dreaming, our dream is a spot light in the darkness of realty. As a seo (search engine optimization) guy what may your dream looks like? Let me share you my dream (I thinks many SEOs have it), it is being on the first spot when you search Google for “search engine optimization” !! Does that look impossible, may be yes but when it comes to dreams it is not a problem, but still if you need your dream to come true (If it subjects to the rules of nature at least) you may need:
- Hard working   (I am working daily on that but I don’t have enough time and budget)
- Time (I am still 33 years old so I hope I still have some more extra years to live and see this dream come true)
- Luck (I am now sure about if I have that much luck)

Any way it is 12 AM now and I have a full stomach and my bottle of beer is almost finished, my bed looks charming for me at this moment .. It is dreams time

When we read about seo friendly website, we always read recommendations about using plain text menus rather than using images in menu and to avoid JavaScript menu, but using dynamic - JavaScript menu is a necessity for some websites, especially those with a lot of categories where it is hard to get all the important part of the menu in a text menu.

- For those website fully CSS drop down menu or optimized JavaScript CSS menu may do the job for them and keep the navigation search engine friendly. The question now is how to indemnify that a site is using Java script menu, best way to check that is analyzing the source code of the menu and most likely you will see some thing like:
onmouseover=”MM_swapImage()” onmouseout=”MM_swapImgRestore()”
In this case the content of the menu is stored in external JavaScript function reside out site the body code with JavaScript format like:
mm_menu.addMenuItem(”News”,”location=’page.php’”);
Many spiders will not be able to read this format, or at least they will have difficulty to read it, CSS menus are the best solution for that or mixed seo friendly CSS-JavaScript

CSS menu

It is easy to identify CSS menu by viewing the source code and you will see something like this:
Pure CSS Dynamic Menu 

<div id=”midlink”>
   <ul id=”main_menu”>
   <li><a accesskey=”A” href=”../menu/index.html” mce_href=”../menu/index.html”>Demos</a></li>
<li><a class=”chosen” accesskey=”M” href=”../menus/index.html” mce_href=”../menus/index.html”>Menus</a></li>
<li><a accesskey=”Y” href=”../layouts/index.html” mce_href=”../layouts/index.html”>Layouts</a></li>
<li><a accesskey=”B” href=”../boxes/index.html” mce_href=”../boxes/index.html”>Boxes</a></li>
<li><a accesskey=”Z” href=”../mozilla/index.html” mce_href=”../mozilla/index.html”>Mozilla</a></li>
<li><a accesskey=”E” href=”../ie/index.html” mce_href=”../ie/index.html”>Explorer</a></li>
<li><a accesskey=”O” href=”../opacity/index.html” mce_href=”../opacity/index.html”>Opacity</a></li></ul>
   </div>
All links included within HTML code the spider will easily go through them, you will not see any interfere from JavaScript

Mixed CSS-JavaScript

Search engine friendly JavaScript menu,  if you check the source code you will see

<div class=”chromestyle” id=”chromemenu”>
<div id=”dropmenu2″ class=”dropmenudiv” style=”width: 150px;”>
<a href=”http://www.cnn.com/”>CNN</a>
<a href=”http://www.msnbc.com”>MSNBC</a>
<a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk”>BBC News</a>
</div>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
cssdropdown.startchrome(”chromemenu”)
</script>

The upper piece of code is plain HTML the class “chromestyle” function to form the drop down menu, this smart way kept the menu search engine friendly as the links still shown in HTML format controlled by CSS
The second piece of code is the JavaScript function that will called by CSS

I know it is too much, a lot of internet marketing shortcuts but finaly as an internet markter you need to know about all of them and practice them, I have collected some iformation about different marketing strategies that you may need to practice along with you seo practice:

Social Media Marketing  (SMM)
internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, it simply trying to market your content through these existing shocila networks, and the social network book marking bar in our Blog is an example for that.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)
 (SMO) is a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites. For example allowing RSS feeds, easier linking, incorporation of third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos.
 
 
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
It is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). The three main methods of SEM are:
• search engine optimization attempts to improve rankings for relevant keywords in search results by improving a web site’s structure, content, and relevant backlink count.
• Pay per click advertising uses sponsored search engine listings to drive traffic to a web site. The advertiser bids for search terms, and the search engine ranks ads based on a competitive auction as well as other factors.
• Paid inclusion can provide a guarantee that the website is included in the search engine’s natural listings

Word of mouth (WOM) , aka Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

 Viral marketing and viral advertising
This is the online term for word-of-mouth advertising You provide something that encourages others to spread the word
about your product, quickly and inexpensively with little
effort on your part.
1. Write articles
2. Create a free e-Book
3. Set up an affiliate program
4. Getting sites to link to your site
5. Send out news releases - create a free service or
product that is available on your site. The most important
aspect is to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free
service, or digital download. If your news release is
carried by just 5% of the media you send it to, you could
have your URL in front of tens of thousands of readers
quite inexpensively.
6. Viral software - offering a free download of a script,
e-book, calendar, etc is an effective method for gaining of
new subscribers to your ezine. You can also market your
product by including your logo or marketing message with
your download.
7. Create an e-course - give your visitor numerous chances
to respond to your offer by creating an email course or
courses. You accomplish this by writing a series of small
articles outlining the benefits of your product, then
distribute them automatically over several days or weeks
with an auto responder. This can be set up automatically
for the product or ezine you are promoting.
8. RSS Feeds - this is a relatively new viral marketing
method. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It was
originally used by news organizations to syndicate their
news stories. RSS Feeds are now used to automatically
distribute content to blogs. They can also be used to
distribute articles to web site owners and ezine publishers
throughout the web.

Buzz marketing.
refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can often be word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it can harness the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

is a subset of guerrilla marketing where consumers do not realize they are being marketed to. For example, a marketing company might pay an actor or socially adept person to use a certain product visibly and convincingly in locations where target consumers congregate. While there, the actor will also talk up their product to people they befriend in that location, even handing out samples if it is economically feasible. The actor will often be able to sell consumers on their product without those consumers even noticing it

Gorilla Marketing  - Undercover marketing

 (also known as buzz marketing, stealth marketing, or by its detractors roach baiting) guerrilla marketing where consumers do not realize they are being marketed to.
Another example occurred in August 2002 where Acclaim, a computer game company, offered people £500 plus a free gaming console to change their name to ‘Turok’: the title of a forthcoming computer game release. The response was massive with over 3,000 applicants. However, only five people would win the prize.

Similarly, in the early days of the Internet when there was lots of venture capital around, an on-line American company offered $5000 to those who named their child after one of their products. The scheme generated a healthy response.

Such promotions are sometimes designed so that the target audience is left unaware they have been marketed to and may therefore be a form of undercover marketing (also called stealth marketing).