The next Vancouver SEM meetup will be on Tuesday September 21, 2010 at the Four Seasons Hotel, as part of the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver. For this special edition of the SEM Meetup, Ken Jurina, Co-Chair of SEMPO Canada and CEO of Epiar.com will be presenting on negative keyword and how to maximize ROI from paid search. At SEM Meetup, we talk about Search Marketing, PPC, Social Media, CMS, SEO tools and so much more. If you want to learn about Search, this is the place to be, especially this month. I will be there along with the official organizer, Jose Uzcategui, from The Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Group:

Announcing a new Meetup for The Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Group on September 21 during IMC Vancouver!

What: Vancouver SEM Monthly Meetup. Mark The Date: Presenter: Ken Jurina on Negative Keywords (Paid Search Management)

When: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 6:00 PM

Where:
Four Seasons Hotel
791 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC V6C 2T4

Learn more here:
Meetup.com/VancouverSEM

On September 21-23, Alexandre Brabant, Co-Chair of SEMPO Canada Search Marketing Association will be attending the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver (BC) Canada. Look for the SEMPO Canada booth and drop by to ask us your questions about search marketing. You will find everything you need to know about starting your own search marketing campaign from people who eat, sleep and breathe search marketing. Many members from the local search marketing community and members of SEMPO Canada will be there including Co-Chair Ken Jurina, who will be presenting during IMC about negative Keyword List and how to maximize your ROI through the use of Negative search terms. The Internet Marketing Conference Vancouver will be held at the Four Seasons in Downtown Vancouver (BC) Canada, 791 West Georgia Street. in Vancouver (BC) Canada.

Details:
Internet Marketing Conference Vancouver
Date: September 21-23, 2010
Where: Four Seasons Hotel, 791 West Georgia Street, Vancouver
Investment: Starting from $395, see InternetMarketingConference.com/Vancouver for details

“Alex Brabant was my colleague and we met through the advertising industry.  He is passionate about Search Marketing, determine to increase everyone’s knowledge and the use of SEM in Canada.  See how visionary he is.  He has a talent when it comes to teaching and talking about SEO and SEM, it is probably due to his great ability to make it sound so simple.  Alex is a great teacher and one of the best in his field in Canada.”

/// Tania Stiperski
Advertising Industry
Vancouver (BC)
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Keyword-rich /// When a given page or bit of text is chock full of good keywords rather than a bunch of meaningless words (e.g. "welcome", "click here") or irrelevant words (e.g. "solution").

/// Read the Glossary

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (Canada)

Read about it on my Search Marketing blog

Search engine marketing vision and challenges

Vision in developing an online presence: The market is fractured. Invest or abandon your site!

A long time ago, I had a similar conversation with the people at Intrawest, my first job in search marketing in 2000. At the time we came up with a formula where every Intrawest partner had to participate financially in the development of their website with content and promotion through search marketing tactics.

Because of the cost involved in performing these activities individually, it was a good option for these small business owners to work together.

Your challenge might be similar. Most business owners do NOT have enough resources to build and promote their site effectively. Do your chances of success increase by abandoning your site and putting the content into a consortium of businesses that will attract more visitors?

You might also think that there are too many Web sites on the Internet. But consider that 90-percent of Web sites are poorly design and not marketed at all. And 94-percent of them are not getting traffic from major search engines. Many, if not most do not generate sales. There is lots of opportunity for you to take the lead position.

I am continually surprised by sites that haven’t been updated in a decade. What’s gone wrong here? We all know that it is important to update a website, keep the content fresh, and so on. The problem is obviously the dollars to feed the site with appropriate resources.

Search engines including PPC search engines are forcing small businesses with poorly designed sites to abandon them. They do this by by raising their fee. As an example, it now costs $299 US annually to have a listing in Yahoo. What used to be free is now getting expensive.

Why? Search engines are in the business of providing relevant search results. Lucky for us they are pretty good at achieving these goals. They also know that if they raise their fee, some businesses will bail and this is precisely what they want. If your site is not relevant it gets left behind.

Don’t be surprised if Google, for instance, drops your website from their search engine when they realize it has not been updated in months. Most search engines are becoming more and more intelligent and it becomes impossible to achieve a top ranking with a poorly marketed and rarely updated website.

So if you don’t allocate the resources to achieve a decent search engine ranking, and you have a poorly designed site that doesn’t have much traffic anyway, what is the point of keeping it?

As the search engine shakeout continues, what revenue models will survive? Are the days of commercial-free searching over? Out of the 10 billion Web pages on the Internet, not every single site is going to survive. Most business owners only hang on until they find a solution to their online marketing challenge.

Here is the solution:

Invest in your online presence seriously or form a group. Considering the cost of promoting a site, I think small business owners should abandon their site, save their money and put that amount into a group of businesses promoting the same subject. For instance, if an American is searching for Victoria travel, it is obvious that this online user will not scroll through the 100 B&B sites in Victoria or the 200 Tour operators online, and so on.

But if 100 companies about travel in Victoria get together for a search marketing plan and build a site about their common interest, and where every company drops $2000 the end result will be a well-designed website with tremendous marketing power. The combined forces are greater than the sum of its parts.

There are only a few positions in search engines that actually drive traffic to a site. If you can’t afford the search marketing effort necessary to show up in the first page, or the top 10 results, you won’t get much traffic on your subject.

Be smarter about how you organize your resources. Teaming up may provide the best chance of survival.

Make the assessment whether or not you want to allocate more than $20,000 per year to market your website. If you cannot compete with major players in your market, than form a group of companies in your industry and market one well-designed site.

If you can allocate those marketing dollars for online promotion, than go for it.

For more information on the actual search marketing challenges, do not hesitate to contact me: Alexandre Brabant BComm