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.

"The difference between professional Search Engine Marketing and no SEM is very simple: high amounts of traffic on your website versus almost no traffic. Alexandre Brabant from Vancouver eMarketing 101 made it easy to understand, to arrange and to maintain. Vancouver eMarketing 101 first endeavours to understand your business in order to realize your specific goals (sales, branding etc.).”

/// Vivian Vilich (PhD) & Dagmar Schulze
Co-Owners
Luxury Adventure Vacation BC
Read more...

Content (Active Content) /// Content that changes from time to time.

/// Read the Glossary

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (Canada)

Read about it on my Search Marketing blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Vancouver BC Canada

"Companies who spend millions of dollars developing corporate Web sites are unintentionally damaging their Web site visibility in search engines, according to a study by iProspect.”

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Definition: (source Wikipedia) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered a subset of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume or quality of organic (aka. free) traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in “natural” ("organic" or “algorithmic") search results. Many site owners and consultants engaging in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site, and the quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting further information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other specific action.

Once the set up is done in pay per click (PPC) search engines and everything is up and running, you quickly realize that search engine marketing (SEM) is the best form of marketing you have ever done, no matter what size your business is or the amount of money you spend per day. You also realize that you need to keep paying for those qualified leads if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. Now, with the reporting system we have in place, you’ll soon notice there are 2 types of traffic that’s coming to your site: paid traffic, in the form of sponsored links or “paid search” and organic (free traffic). Free traffic can be obtained by search through a directory (Yahoo, Looksmart and DMOZ) or from organic search results. As we want to increase the amount of free traffic to your site, we will need to work together to “optimize” (SEO) your site based on your targeted search phrases.

1- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): What is your site “theme”?

To determine your sites “theme” we must first understand the content within its pages. Most sites content display detailed information about their products/services as well as corporate information. By analyzing all the text from every page, we can compile a list of words that are relevant to the site. Before we even submit the site, we need to make a thorough analysis of all the keywords on a page by page basis.

During this process, the meta description tag must be carefully optimized based on the “theme” of every page of your site. The body copy must also be optimized in order to satisfy search engine requirements.

2- Link building – off page factors SEO

As more and more companies know about SEO, they tweak their site with the right amount of keywords so that they can improve their ranking. There is still one element that is critical for good search engine ranking: Link popularity.

Briefly, link popularity is the amount of links on the Internet directed to your sites. Not all those links have the same weight or importance and search engines are now making heavy use of link popularity in their ranking algorithm. Google is a search engine using link popularity as the major factor for its ranking algorithm. To measure your link popularity: see Marketleap.

As link popularity is “unfakable”, there is no shortcut that can be taken here. Link building is a time consuming process but provides long lasting results from which you can obtain free traffic.

To find out more on link popularity, click here.