Mark your calendar! The main event of the year in Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto is coming back again soon on June 16-18 2008. I will be there representing SEMPO Canada along with all representatives of the Canadian Search Marketing Industry. During SES, Ken Jurina & I will host an evening session to present the latest accomplishments within SEMPO Canada. For those who may not know, Search Engine Strategies is the premier event about Search Marketing (SEM) technologies and tactics and we are proud to have this show coming to Canada once a year.

“Alex’s presentation on e-marketing was timely and relevant for those attending, and was generally well received. His presentation style encouraged active participation by the audience, who had ample opportunity to have their questions and concerns addressed. Despite the presentation being during dinner, audience attention was very high, probably given the relevance of the topic to the industry at this time.”

/// Kevan J. Ridgeway
President & CEO, Vancouver Coast & Mountains Annual General Meeting, Powell River, (BC)
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DMOZ /// Directory MOZilla is a human reviewed directory, the contents of which appear on many sites, including Google. A listing in DMOZ is said to assist boosting rankings in in Google's general search results.

/// Read the Glossary

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (Canada)

Read about it on my Search Marketing blog

Search Engine Marketing FAQ

Q: Am I proud of my site?

If you are proud of your site, you will want to invite everyone to take a look at it and buy from you. If not, then you might not be ready to invest into Search Engine Marketing (SEM). We can work with you into finding the right partners to build a better site before you start optimizing it for search engines.

Q: How much do your services cost?

If you are not prepared to invest, say $2,000 or more, there is not much we can do to get you better positions in search results.

Q: How long does it take before I start seeing results?

In a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) only program, it might take up to 6 months to a year, before results are becoming tangible. SEO is a long term effort and it takes some time to achieve the positions we want in the organic side of search results. A plan that involves Pay per click gives near-immediate results, which explain why so many companies start there.

Q: What do I need to get started?

In order to get started, you need a search engine friendly website, a great hosting plan, the motivation & serious to bring your business online and some investment.

Q: My site is made in Flash, What do I do?

We don’t optimize Flash sites. In this case, we will need to refer your business to our partners and they will build you a search engine friendly site before we can optimize it.

Q: What is my hosting requirement?

Most companies that start doing Search Marketing nowadays have not taken a close look at their hosting service (server). You will need a reliable hosting service as more online users will visit your site as time goes by. Some companies have a transfer quota which might create a problem if you get a lot of traffic. Make sure your website is always live 24/7and the content is up to date. Make sure you ask your hosting company to provide you with analysis of the log files in the form of a statistics report (user sessions, unique visitors, page views). The most widely known web analytics software are: Google Analytics, Webtrends and LiveStats. Each Search Engine is now offering free hosted solution for web analytics, which are all great & equivalent.

Q: I submitted my site to search engines / directories, is this sufficient?

No. Most companies submit their site to search engines and directories before it is properly optimized. They soon realize they have poor search engine ranking and poor resulting traffic and they simply conclude that the Internet does not work! (commercially speaking). Having a store front on the web is much like a brick and mortar business, it takes a sustained effort in marketing and networking to make a success with it. Success involves much more than submitting to search engines.

Also, the most important ingredient for high search engine ranking is link popularity, also known as link analysis. To lean more on this subject, click here. 

Q: Is it possible to buy ranking ?

Fortunately for search engine marketers like us, we can now buy a position at the top of search engine results. They are called pay per click search engines and there is a bidding process involved. The highest bidder gets the top position. They use money as a ranking filter. We have developed a technique with pay per click search engines that creates an unbeatable Return on Investment (ROI) and an excellent retention rate. Ask us for a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) proposal to get more information. We also offer a few packages that include a Pay per click component. To find out more on pay per click search engines, click here. 

Q: I have 1,000 hits per day, is this good ?

Definition: A hit is a single file request in the access log of a Web server. A request for an HTML page with three graphic images will result in four hits in the log: one for the HTML text file and one for each of the graphic image files. While a hit is a meaningful measure of how much traffic a server handles, it can be a misleading indicator of how many pages are being looked at. Instead, advertising agencies and their clients look at the number of pages delivered and ad impressions or views.

As far as I know, the best measurement of online traffic should be calculatedin user sessions (also known as visitor sessions), unique visitor and page views. As an example, 1 unique visitor can generate 4 user sessions and 10 page views. A hit is an old and misleading measure that was used at the beginning of the web.

Q. What kind of result can I expect?

Most search engine optimization companies would guarantee improvement on search engine positions or traffic. We guarantee an unbeatable Return on investment. When you start with Pay per click search engines, since you only buy for targeted leads, this strategy pays for itself very quickly as it generates more sales. Usually, with $10 invested you can expect $100 of new business. This is our focus. Our clients quickly realize that search engine marketing does work. More money is usually thrown in the marketing of your site on improving your traffic on the free side of search results. It all pays for itself in the long run.

Q. How do we monitor results?

As soon as we get started, we monitor the results (traffic, cost and sales) on a weekly basis. You’ll be amazed with the quantity of information we analyze and be even happily surprised to see what we can learn from these reports. You will receive these reports (Excel spreadsheet) on a monthly basis and you will see that there is a lot of information to analyze. This is a very important component in the process.

Q. I want to know more! What do I do?

For more questions on search engine marketing or Internet advertising or to set up a meeting and get started, just .

Alexandre Brabant BComm
Search Marketing Specialist
Phone: 778-371-9988