5 Compelling Reasons to Attend IMC Vancouver October 3-4, 2011. And if you are SEMPO Canada members, save an additional $100 to attend IMC Conference. Get in touch with me to get your promo code: . 

SEMPO Vancouver SEM Meetup: September 13, 2011 at REVEL Room in Vancouver

Announcing a new SEM Meetup for The SEMPO Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Group on September 13 2011 in Vancouver!

“Alex is so passionate about what he does, his enthusiasm is contagious! I can honestly say that I had some doubts about what Alex suggested. I did not see the need and was concern about costs. Alex took the time to patiently educate me on the subject of Search Engine Optimization, Website Ranking and Link Building. I did not even know what these were a year ago and now I even have my own blog!”

/// Odette Morin
Founder & Senior Financial Planner
YOU FIRST Vancouver Financial Planning
Read more...

XML Feeds /// XML is a data format similar to CSV or a spreadsheet. XML feeds are a form of paid inclusion by which a search engine is "fed" information about pages. If a marketer is concerned that the search engine will not be able to crawl a site or get the right information about a page, marketers can pay to have their pages included by submitting an XML document.

/// 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.