Search engine optimization Toronto

Free Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:46:39 +0000

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.

In Link I believe

admin — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:38:01 +0000

My story with seo and links started 6 years before when it was enough to get few inbound links pointing to your website with your keyword in the anchor text to rank among the top 10 in the SERP for some highly searched keywords. I was quite happy to find out about that and I saved no time to start building links toward my website and the search engine traffic spiked in a crazy manner.

It didn’t take thousands of webmasters a long time also to figure out that which make it harder and harder to rank well for competitive keywords and the few inbound links stop doing the job for you, it is now about hundreds or thousands. I kept expecting all that time that search engine will reduce its dependency on links as most webmasters are familiar now with the role of links in the SERP, but it looks it was very hard for search engine to find any good alternative (at least for the mean time), what search engines tried to do instead is to put strict guidelines to stop webmaster from manipulating this factor, Google was the leader in that as it changed the TOS page to clearly declare that buying links is a prohibited, it didn’t stop here, Google has added a form to report paid links.

Did that tell you anything? It is clearly tells that Google has failed to reduce the dependency on links in their algorithm (they have done a good job to decide the quality of inbound links) but they are going after those are trying to manipulate this factor. So there is no much changes, links still the most important factor in ranking websites but what changed is the way of getting them.
Google has good success in filtering some artificial link building technique algorithmically like:
1- Link exchange.
2- Blatantly paid links i.e links marked as sponsor, link cloud in the footer or the side bar of website.
3- Links from directories.
4- Links from network websites.

Many other sorts of artificial link building are being filtered by human interference like the report paid links form and other Google employees activities.

How to be ahead in the game:
You don’t need to wait until Goolge being able to filter all artificial link building technique (you can still bet on quick wins if you want), to be ahead in the game you need to go back to a very old seo statement “When it comes to search engine optimization content is king”, I know it is very hard to generate quality content but you can not maintain your good position for a long time without the good content, the good news for you with the internet connection getting faster and the machines/software getting more powerful content now going beyond the text, it is now:
1- Images.
2- Vides.
3- Widgets.
4- Audio
5- Games

ETC

Are you still not sure how will that drive links to your website? Ok I will explain it for #1 images; If you are reading blogs frequently you will see that bloggers are obsessed with images, most blogs will include one or more images and most of those blogger leave a link back to the source of the images with text like “Image Credit” “Image courtesy”.

So for now keep doing the artificial link building but if you think you want to stay in a good ranking for a long time in future then start putting your content strategy soon.

Toronto SEO Expert, How to Find?

admin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 06:34:21 +0000

This is the first Blog in the new year, I need to start this blog with another reminder to all business owners no matter what kind of business they are running, guys spend more time/money on your web presence (may be I am not the first guy that telling you that), day by day people spending more time/money online, they find it more convenience to shop and find services online.

First step is to make sure that you have well design user friendly website the next most important step is to promote this website. Among the most effective way to promote your website is search engine optimization, the reason is that in all kind of promotions you try to reach and find your audiences, but with search engine optimization your audiences will search and find you so you will get ready buyers. Search engine traffic conversation rate rages from 2-5% depending of the usability of the website, there is no other medium can get you this amount of conversions.

Assuming you are totally agreed with me, assuming also you want to hire an seo company to do the job for you (you still can do it in house if you want) and finally assuming that you live in Toronto and like most businesses you like to deal with companies located close to your location then here is one of the most effective ways to find the right seo company for your business:

Use search engines using terms like seo Toronto or search engine optimization Toronto or Toronto seo expert .. you will find different kinds of results

- On the top and right of the page you may find sponsored ads, are they good since they are paying for this ranking, I would say they are good if you want to hire them may be for your paid search and in my opinion they still good even for your organic search needs, I respect any business that seeks more exposer means they are really serious about their business.
- On the top left you may find local results, those come from Yellow Pages listing or form Google Local Center.
- Under the paid search and Local results comes the organic results, those are your best choice if you are looking for organic ranking, simply if they can do it for themselves they can do it for you.
There is another thing that you need to know about the organic results especially for competitive terms (most terms include the word seo are competitive), search engines apply a sand box filter for new websites (mostly less than 1.5 years of age) preventing them form showing for competitive terms, so the company you see in the organic results are mostly well established companies unlike the paid and local results where you can show in no time.

Do not spend too much time to make up your choice, with search engines time matters, you need to start the precess as soon as you can, cause getting good results need time .. Get some Toronto seo expert to work in your website be faster than your competitors.

Google Supplemental Results, Yes They Still Existed

admin — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:10:24 +0000

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

SEO Low Hanging Fruits

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:48:05 +0000

I would like to write this blog for webmasters those have not heard about search engine optimization. I have inspired this blog from my first two month with my seo career.

If you are a webmaster that hearing about seo for the first time but you don’t have enough time to learn more about seo nor more money to hire a company to seo your website then this blog is for you. I will teach you how you can spend few hours going through few steps to get almost instant (less than one month) results in the search engine results, especially if your website is more than two years of age:

1- Make sure that your website is indexed by search engines, you can do that using the search operator site:www.yoursite.com ,if find more than 50% of your pages in the search engine index so you are good go to step 2, if not you may be need more link popularity (I would take about it) or you need to adjust your navigation.; No matter what you are using for your navigation just make sure to have a text link navigation in the footer of your website and a text links site map that linked from all your website pages.

2- Do keyword research to identify the keywords those people use find your business, you can use free tools for that like overture.

3- Choose the highest search volume keywords in step 2 and try to find pages in your website includes those keywords, try to target no more than two keywords per page and use your home page to target the most competitive keyword.

4- When you finish step 3, make sure that the title for each page you have chosen to target your keywords include those keywords, if you don’t know what is the title tag, it looks like this in your HTML code:

The four steps mentioned above should not take you more than few hours to be implemented, but the traffic that you will get upon implementing them will defiantly pays off for your time.

Should SEO Companies Stop Submitting to Paid Directories?

admin — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:16:37 +0000

Paid directories submission is on of the most popular technique that many seo companies and use for build links, it is affordable easy and doesn’t fall latterly under buying links even if it is.

If you are good seo and try to keep your self updated with the new industry news you should noticed that Google has penalized many paid directories last week (i.e Aviva directory, Alive directory and more), does it mean Google is trying to kill the link building technique? My be.

While I tried to figure out what has pulled the trigger for this penalty I have found out that most of those directories are involved in kind of link building for the sake of PR/inbound links number and all of them offer packages like if you want your anchor text to be keyword rich upon your choice not the name of your company then you need to pay almost double amount, unlike other directories like Yahoo and BOTW where you don’t have this choice, actually anybody sees this choice will know that this just for the sake of getting some search engine love, in other words manipulating search engines, Personally I like this choice but I cant see it is totally clean. Most of those directories are less of 3 years of age which means they are almost new comparing to other directories like Skaffe, Joeant and BOTW etc.

Finally what I am trying to say is that this technique has not died, it just has new rules now, you need to care about the quality and authority of paid directories before you do any submission, I will try to list few directories those I think they would not penalized buy Google in future and they will keep passing link love to website listed on them:

http://botw.org/
http://dir.yahoo.com/
http://www.skaffe.com/
http://www.joeant.com/
http://www.business.com/

Link Building With Zero Budget

admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:39:57 +0000

Inbound links upon their quality/relevancy/quantity still the main factor that control you site’s ranking with search engines, hover link building is the nastiest job in the seo process, it time/money consumer, you can spend as much as you want of time/money and still no guarantees for the results.Assuming you are new for the web and you still in the faze of investing your money on the web, you are building new websites to monetize or to promote your business, and you don’t want spend extra money on your link building campaign, here is some ways to do effective link building with zero money spending:

1- Assuming you do know about the business you are running, so you can write useful article about it, well then write 400+ word articles and go syndicate it on www.ezinearticles.com .. don’t waste time to syndicate it on hundreds of articles websites, you don’t need more links from duplicated document, besides many websites use www.ezinearticles.com content, so you will get your article distributed on hundred of websites just when you syndicate it on www.ezinearticles.com , take use of the contextual linking possibility and use some keyword in the third part of your article to link to your website. To check how many people publish your article on their website search Google for the exact title of your article (use “article title”), do that 10 days after www.ezinearticles.com approve your article.

2- Forums threads/signature, almost for any niche you will find a popular forum, in forums you can post links in your thread, you can also use your signature to include link to your website, relevant forum is good source for inbound links, just remember to be useful in your contributions not spammy.

3- Free directories, they still have some value, have a list of quality ones and start submitting your website, you can take use of some offers on forums to people offer free directory listing for free with a high approving rate such as the announcement category in Digital Point Forum

4- Links exchange, it has not died yet as many people telling, just be selective, mind the quality and relevancy and you will find good benefits in terms of traffic/ranking.

5- Ask for link (link begging), to do this you really have to have good content on your website this many webmasters on the web might be willing to link to it cause it really add value to their website, if your content is super good most likely you will get the links without asking for them, if they are just good it doesn’t harm to ask some webmasters to link to you, just remember to be polite, don’t use canned messages and finally don’t spam them.

If you do the five previous techniques on continues basis you will definitely witness an improvement in your ranking/traffic and the will work for you for competitive keywords not just for low competition ones (I hope you are not trying those techniques for terms like “car insurance” where nothing will help but spending hundred of thousands buying links)

Google Indexes New Domain in a Week with no backlinks

admin — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 13:37:40 +0000

I have signed up a new domain

Domain Name: FOR-BETTER-HEALTH.COM
Created on: 08-Jul-07
Expires on: 08-Jul-08
Last Updated on: 08-Jul-07

A few days later I have created a blog for that domain, no link building after that, and I havent submit it to any search engine.
Yester day 22-Jul-07 I went online to do sum link building for the new domain and it stroke on my mind to check it in Google catch and I was surprised to find it in the index.

I know that the website will not rank for any keyword but still get it in the index that fast with 0 efforts is a good thing
and while asking my self how did Google know about the domain .. there is 2 possibilities:
- Google is using the toolbar data to index page .. so may be in future Google will use the tool bar in a similar way to Alexa tool bar to rank and index pages
- Google is a domain register and they might use their data to add new domains to their search index.
Finally quick indexing has many benefits especially for those who provide good content, it is easy for them to be identified as the source of these content

SEO, It is Not Just About Ranking

admin — Sat, 19 May 2007 02:25:23 +0000

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

10 Tips to Use Google For Your Keyword Competition Analysis

admin — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:32:27 +0000

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