Everyday we are asked to take a look at someone’s website, they all have the same problem, their site can be found in the search engines, but only for their website name eg joesplumbing.com, but they want to be found for what their customers are looking for, eg plumber in Toronto. Joe has spend his hard earned money having a website build it looks great, now he is calling us and we don’t have a great answer. Typically we find that 40-60% of the site needs rework!

The html code is way too bloated, the pages haven’t been optimized, the navigation is using very generic terms and we have to undo what their web guys just finished.

How frustrating, time and money wasting is that!

SEO firms also build websites and build great websites, we know what the search engines are looking for, how to make the search engine spider grab the key phrases and ignore the unimportant information. We understand how to bring the search engines spider back to visit your site on a regular basis, and what information the spiders are looking for so they rank your site for the right key phrases. We know page design, what to present on each web page and how to beat out your competition.

The key to reduce rework is to start with the end in mind, the end result being your website attracting new customers and making you money.

Engage a search engine optimization company at the start, they will build an Internet marketing plan that will have your website found, engage your audience, and be able to give you feedback on what your customers are doing every month on your website.
So don’t fall into Joe’s trap, engage the right people from the start of building your new website.

Aaron Wall illustrates one of the main issues with SEO today. By now, everyone has heard of SEO but how many businesses are really doing it? How many people put in a half hearted effort before calling it a day?  Of course, that is the easy thing to do isn’t it. Throw in the towel and claim that SEO doesn’t work because someone doesn’t have the courage to see it through.

Still, there are those clients/entrepreneurs that have the conviction to make a commitment to SEO and see it through. For smaller sites, it may take a while to see the results but for larger sites, benefits can be startling.

In November, we relaunched a website in Toronto with tens of thousands of products. SEO changes to the site’s architecture were completed a month ago. The result was a 45% increase in organic traffic to the site in the first 30 days. We are talking about thousands of potential new clients for the business.

Keep that number in mind (45% increase in traffic) the next time you think about pulling the plug on SEO before you get started. For every company doing SEO, there are dozens of others saying I could’ve , I should’ve or I would’ve but they won’t. And those are the companies who will be playing catch up for a long time to come.

Google Webmaster Tools now provides a single page where you can adjust the settings on your site.

The new settings page includes:

1. Geographic Target
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search
4. Crawl rate control

Geographic Domain – tell Google if your website is associated with an even more specific area than your .com, .ca or .uk indicates.

Preferred Domain Control – Which domain do you want Google to crawl, the www (http://www.domain.com) or non www (http://domain.com) version.

Opting in to Enhanced Images -Allows you to use tools like Google Image Labeler to help improve indexing and search relevance.

Crawl Rate Control – Usually it is a good idea to let Google determine the crawl rate of your site but for larger, more advance sites you can let Google know if there are specific issues they need to address.

Google’s new SearchWiki allows searchers to promote or eliminate pages from their own personal search results. You have to be logged into Google to personalize your results.

This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

While there is some debate about the usefulness of the tool and a small (so far) uproar over privacy concerns, Google continues to move forward in providing searches with better search results.

Search engine optimization will become more difficult as you will be optimizing across behavioral patterns instead of towards a single search engine. The top SEOs are already aware of how personalized search will affect optimizers and are prepared for the future.

You have to forget about rankings and focus in on return on investment (ROI).

The web site design is done in photoshop and the writing for all the chosen keywords is 90% complete.
We are now into coding the site taking advantage of all the on-page factors search engines like to see.

Having perfected our code over the years, we write it as simple and light as possible. <Table>s got thrown out a couple of years ago, although it’s surprising how many people still use them and weight down their code, plus restrict their creativity to lay out a page. We can predict what is going to happen when the css renders the file each browser, however just to be safe every website is checked in all the major browsers on Mac and Windows to make sure the end user has the same experience regardless of the platform. Each browser has it’s own little quirks that we have to be thoughtful of. Images are only used for pictures or logos, always with alt tags, and never for text or navigation bars. We have also started to replace pixels with ems, so that the site has maximum flexibility. If an end user has his fonts set to a larger size than normal the whole site enlarges, not just the text!

The site is now bullet proof, works in all bowsers, all font sizes and has maximum searchability, what more can a client ask for!?

The title and meta tags also need to be researched and written, nothing is guessed we do our research and write most optimized title tag and meta tags with the most compelling words to entice the user to ‘click’. After all the end user will scan the title tags in the search engines and will often click on the one that is the most enticing, which is not necessarily the first one!

I need to get more photo’s this week for each landing page and start to shoot testimonial videos, so that can be edited very soon and sent out to all the video sites with tubemogul.

We always tell clients that everything you need to know about search engine optimization (SEO) is already out there on the Internet. Some very good SEO’s make a nice living by providing all the information and resources you need to successfully run an Internet marketing program.

That being said, however, the best research you can bring to the table comes from practicing what they preach. Lisa Barone has a great take on the difference between reading about and practicing SEO.

In fact, most of the information put out there is general, as opposed to industry specific.  Once you start to do your competitive research, that will become apparent to you very quickly.  So, don’t get stuck trying to find out which SEO tactic lead to your competitor’s top 5 ranking, start practicing and let the results guide you to page 1.

Rand Fishkin outed an SEO company last week for suspect search engine optimization techniques.  Since then, there has been innumeral posts regarding the techniques in question and the fact that someone like Rand publicly outs another SEO firm for using tactics that he may be advising his own online community membership.

SEO Book’s Aaron Wall has a lenghtly blog post regarding Rand’s behavior. The post also includes a a video from Shoemoney, who also questions Rands outing of a company for tactics that Rand has used at one time himself and includes his vue on paid advertising.

I follow Rand Fishkin’s at Seomoz blog and I pick up valuable information from Rand’s indepth analysis of search engine optimization and social media marketing. I admire Rand for what he has accomplished but still, I don’t get it. Why would someone of Rand’s stature take to outing an SEO company.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Google will eventually catch up with the company and justice will be served. The real point here is that by the time Google catches up to them, they will have made a samll or large fortune by then and they will take their profits and just start over with a backup they probably already have in the system.

We see this a lot in SEO, clients will show us a competitive website and want us to out their competitors who may or may not be using black hat tactics to rank well in Google.

Its not in our nature to out companies. That is just our way of doing things but that doesn’t mean we are right. That is just who we are.

I would like to hear your opinion on the matter. If your competitor was manipulating the system to take advantage of Google, would you report them?

Okay, we have picked victim #1, a cabinet maker/woodworker who has built a successful company that is celebrating 20 years in business.
Garren Dakessian (Owner) has built his business by giving great service, craftmanship and happy customers giving great referrals. When the chief editor of Style at Home magazine chose Malibu Woodwork to build new cabinets for the basement and lounge of her own home, it shows he is the best in his business.

Over the years he has expanded his skills and offerings from clients requests that he, finish their basement or renovate their lounge. But now he wants to go back to his true skill, cabinet making, and to get the word out that Malibu Woodwork will make custom cabinets for your Kitchen, home office, bathroom, or basement.

Malibugroup.ca has a simple site today, made up mainly of pictures showing the Style at Home spreads, home and contact page.

After doing keyword research we found traffic, and a lot of it, searching for his services as a cabinet maker. Add in his local town and the competing sites in natural search come down to either single digits or none!

After looking at competing websites in this space, we noticed of lot of them have a local amateur feel. We only found three that stood out with any style, content and ease of navigation.
What do we do with these you ask? Knowing that the average web surfer doesn’t just visit one site, we need to stand out and be remembered over the others, even if we aren’t in position #1. So we take the best of each and combine them into the ultimate site. Not only will the site rank well, it will also convert well.

Next steps: refine the final keywords and have content written. Build the new layout. Get video and pictures of happy customers.

Look for a resurgence in organic search engine optimization and a move away from SEO “trickery” as search engines move to place more value on what a Web page is about rather than how it is linked to other pages and sites on the Internet. The ideas and information on a page – a Web page’s “content” – are going to matter more and more, rather than the page’s architecture and the links that connect it to the wider Internet, as search engines vie to better “understand” what a Web page is about and rank its relevancy to the end user.

The big push is on to understand the “semantics” of a page, trying to digitally comprehend the keywords and concepts of a Web page’s content and ranking them in their relevance to the end user – the person behind his or her keyboard or phone pad keying in search queries.

The debut of Cuil.com, the newest search engine and would-be challenger to industry leader Google, underscores the shift in how search engines now, and will, search and understand a page’s content. Specifically, the team of world leading search engineers that banded together to build the new Cuil search engine claim not only that Cuil (pronounced “cool”) will index a much bigger portion of the individual pages on the Internet, but that they will emphasize the content on the pages rather than the links on the Internet that point to a specific page. (The link structure pointing to a specific Web page indicates its popularity, and hence the reasoning goes, its relevance to the end user. The number of inbound links is a critical part of industry leader Google’s PageRank methodology.)

“Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics,” according to the new-kid-on-the-search-engine-block, “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

“In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships – grouping similar results under different menus.” Grouping different results under different concept-specific search result menus implies a much deeper understanding of the concepts and interrelationships on the individual Web page, rather than a mere ranking in terms of a “relevancy” that is determined in large part by a page’s popularity based on its links to other pages.

For businesses engaged in online marketing, the move toward a more “semantic” understanding of their Web page content will mean that their search engine optimization strategies will have to focus more and more on finding an SEO company that will help them produce the quality content that will make their organic search engine optimization strategy a success. Using so-called “ethical” search engine optimization techniques and building relevant pages with quality content and information for the end user will increasingly distinguish companies whose SEO and online marketing campaigns are a long-term success from those who look for the quick-fix and short-term boost in rankings brought about by using SEO techniques that are less organic to artificially boost the relevancy of their pages to their target audience.

You may be able to “game” the search engines for a while, but ultimately you cannot game the end users who always know whether the results a search engine displays are relevant to what it is they are looking for. The ability to “game” the search engines will, of course, decrease as they are better able to, and rely more upon, a semantic understandings of the Web’s content. To the extent that new search engine Cuil is better able to conceptually understand and sort the content of the hundreds of billions of web pages that are on the Internet – a number that grows by several billion each day – they may have a shot at making a dent in goliath Google’s market share.

There is no quick-fix key to online marketing success. Yet, with time and effort utilizing ethical search engine optimization techniques will improve your web site’s ranking and drive more web traffic to your company’s web site. But, the concept to stress here is ethical SEO techniques.

Search engines are all premised on providing their users with the information and web pages that are most relevant to the search query that users type into the search interface. Google’s famed “Don’t Be Evil” corporate ethos restated for SEO-types is: “Don’t rig the system to rank less relevant pages.”

There are a number of “quick-fixes” for web pages and web sites that do not rank well for keyword terms on Google and the other search engines. The downside of such “quick-fixes” – keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, paid and dubious links etc. – is that sooner or later (most often, sooner) the search engines will clue into such well-known “Black Hat” SEO tactics, resulting in a permanent banning of the offensive website, or at least a temporary de-listing until the offensive and misleading tweaks are removed from the site. And Google, Yahoo! and the other search engines reserve a contractual right to de-list a site in their Terms of Service.

The Internet is the much-touted “Information Super Highway”. The price for claiming your roadside frontage is creating relevant content that users are looking for online. There are a raft of “White Hat” techniques that will attract web traffic and users to your website, but each of these requires a sustained effort to create relevant content and link structures. While such “White Hat” or ethical SEO techniques – blogging, article writing, participation in relevant forums and directories – take more effort and time to build a site’s relevancy, their effect is much longer lasting and you do not run the risk of having your site shut down peremptorily as a result of trying to game the system. In a “Don’t be Evil” world, “Content is King”, and the creation of quality content and relevant inbound links to your site is the hallmark of ethical and effective SEO and online marketing.