Agence de Référencement Montréal SEO Specialist

Cette Agence de Referencement se Trouve Maintenant a SEO ROI.com

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 05:06:00 +0000

Les billets futurs de mon agence de référencement se retrouveront dorénavant chez SEO ROI services. This SEO specialist is moving his blogging activities to SEO ROI Services, where he sells expert seo services.

I encourage you to subscribe to my new rss feed at SEO ROI.

The reason I won't keep blogging here is that I'm looking to develop a more professional image and because updating two blogs is too time-consuming for one individual.

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Andrew Shotland Explains Yellowbot's SEO Results with Site Architecture

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 01:37:00 +0000

Andrew Shotland, local SEO extraordinaire (speaking at SMX Local and Mobile in the picture to the right), has a great post on Yellowbot's SEO success.

(Photo credit to Ben Saren.)

What's interesting is that he points out that contrary to many Yellow Pages type sites, Yellowbot didn't structure their site like most directories with very broad top-level categories. Rather, their site architecture cuts straight to the chase with subcategories that people are likely to actually search for.

Andrew gives the example of people looking in a directory for "auto wrecking" as compared to people looking for "automotive." Subcategories like auto wrecking are treated as top level pages by Yellowbot. The benefit is fewer pages to crawl through for SE spiders.

What's particularly great, in my opinion, is that from a user's perspective this also works out. That traditional bit about making everything in your site accessible within three clicks? Site architecture like this makes that alot easier to achieve. What's even better is that here, SEs are really following what humans like.

I had to question Andrew on his assertion regarding local modifiers though. In my experience with my client, the Hotel de Paris, people search for "hotel Montreal" or Montreal hotel. Not "downtown Montreal hotel" or the like. See our discussion in Andrew's comments for more (or comment here ;) ).

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Yulbiz 2007 - Best of Montreal's Business Blogosphere

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:11:00 +0000

Yulbiz 2007 wrapped up last night at Cafe Melies with the Yulbiz November edition, featuring the release of the new book Pourquoi blogger dans un contexte d'affaires (Reasons to Blog in a Business Setting). After the jump (the read-more link), I've got the news, gossip and best of all - some cool pictures and video of Yulbiz November's participants! Plus, a wrap-up of my Yulbiz 07 experience and the people it's allowed me to meet.

I'm writing this from school and have unfortunately left the cards I was given last night at home. So if I forget to mention you, just drop a comment and I'll be sure to update this post.

After saying hi to my friend, expert internet marketer Michel Leblanc, and new acquaintance Mathieu Bélanger, of K3 Media web agency (more on K3 in a minute) who were standing outside (see picture above) I went in and spotted Eric Kucharsky (left), of TechnoMontreal whom you'll recall I met at an earlier Yulbiz. I took a picture, but he was in a conversation so I didn't want to interrupt too much.

To start things off, I sidled over to the cool camera lady from Canoe.ca. We talked about how she came to be working as a camerawoman and it turns out she studied biology and then journalism, with a view to getting into scientific journalism. That said though, she says she's having a blast at Canoe! I can't find the video on Canoe, she had no business cards and my memory isn't working so great on 5 hours sleep. So, if you want to help me out and comment to tell me her name, that would be great.

I caught up with Bruno Bhutto (please correct me if I'm misspelling that, Bruno), who was a panelist at FacebookCamp, where I also spoke on Facebook advertising. We had a fun chat and he told me about this photoshop community he's been with for a good 5 years, called Worth 1000. As in, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Particularly cool are these two aggressive looking plants: Bang Bang and Revenge.

Bruno and I shot a video describing the site. He describes the contests on the site, mentions the mainstream media have picked up on it and more.

Stupid Blogger/Blogspot isn't letting me upload, so that'll have to come in a later edit.

Soon afterward, I caught my buddy Sylvain Carle in a shot with Bruno. Sylvain (and Michel) are co-authors of Pourquoi blogger along with some of the other folks. I picked up my copy last night and it's really looking good and enjoyable, though I haven't read it all yet (so maybe it sucks around Sylvain or Michel's chapters ... not! ;) ).

Sylvain also discussed his chapter of the book with me in a video, but that'll obviously have to wait. Speaking of which, how do you rotate video? I shot it with my handheld camera upright...

Pascal Veilleux of NSI and myself discussed what he and the gang are doing with corporate blogs and all, and it sounded quite exciting. Pascal's on my list of experts on corporate bloggers, so if that's your bag, you should go over and give him a shout. Again, I'll post the video later.

Further in, I sat down for a quick talk with my buddy Andres Restrepo, whom I also met at a previous Yulbiz (if you're no good at reading between the lines, the name of the game is consistency and frequency). He's now working for Ressac (smart move, Ressac!) where Julien Raby, who's now heading up Cossette's search marketing arm, used to work (btw, Julien, you guys need to rank for Cossette search marketing! Let me know when Cossette's at least got a specific page in place and I'll modify that link to SEOmoz's Service marketplace).

Passing by at that specific moment was another friend I made through Yulbiz, popular blogger (and videoblogger!) Philippe Martin, who's the go-to-guy for making and http://www.nayezpaspeur.ca">designing blogs! Notice that the link to his site is a deeplink. I used to just link to the homepage, but his design skills placed a tab to that part of the site above the fold and made me notice it! So there you go, he'll help you do better SEO too!

Following this I was fortunate enough to chat with my friend Nicolas Cossette, who blogs on SMO (aka SMM) and works at NVI Solutions. I also met a couple of new people. For the first time, Guillaume Bouchard, NVI's CEO, showed up as did his new hire, Samuel (don't think you told me your last name, I'm afraid). It was great talking to him and I think it's fair to say we both learnt something from each other (I learnt some tips on closing the sale, he learnt my credit card # ;) ). Here are Nicolas, Samuel, Guillaume and I:

See the FacebookCamp shirt I'm wearing (click the pick to enlarge)? That's from speaking at FacebookCamp Montreal, and the shirt and conference were partly sponsored by K3. Thanks a lot for the generosity Mathieu!

Anyways, if you're looking for SEOs who know the French market, besides Michel, you'd be hard pressed to find a better crew (Michel's not a crew, but you get the idea) than Go Referencement. (If you want something in English ... I'm outranking Guillaume and NVI for Montreal SEO ;). Write me: Gab at seoroi dot c o m.)

Next up I had a quick hello with Etienne Denis, CEO of 90 Degres (who's looking for a French editor for his company's content services). Yet another fellow I'd met at a previous Yulbiz! I've got a video with Etienne too.

About that time I caught up with a recent acquaintance and new friend, Claude Malaison. He's been involved with tech stuff since before I was born - literaly. Besides organizing Webcom Montreal and suchlike (he's the French Canadian Danny Sullivan!), he's President of Emergence Web, a boutique agency focused on Web 2.0 strategy. In any case, I pulled Claude into a pic with Nicolas, Philippe and Stephane Waffo (another new acquaintance and a cool dude :) ). I also got those fellows in a shot with Martin Lessard, a terrific blogger whose first chapter in the Pourquoi blogger book I'm really enjoying - check out Zero Seconde for more Web 2.0.

Left to right: Martin Lessard, Stephane Waffo, Philippe Martin and Nicolas Cossette.

Same order: Stephane (slightly cut out, sorry!), Philippe, Claude and Nicolas.

By the way, please don't read anything into the size of the pics. I'm just playing around with formatting and seeing Blogger's capacities (also trying to speed up load time), as I don't often get to do a post with pics.

As the night began to wind down, I saw my friends Kim Vallee, Muriel Ide, and Jerome Paradis. Muriel's started a jewelry line! Jerome's developing a Facebook App that he's nearly got finished! More info when it's out :). (Speaking of which, Martin's talking about a televised debate about Facebook at ZS.)

Here are Jerome, Kim (far right), Stephane and his friend whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment (Stephane or Stephane's friend, if you read this, please comment to remind me) - but who happens to be a really good communicator. I think I bored his ear off for a half hour and he showed interest throughout!

Finally, I had the opportunity to meet the excellent Tristan Peloquin of Technaute. He's only started blogging since last March's Quebec elections, but as this brilliant fellow can attest, that means nothing. We emailed around the time of the elections on political marketing. Tristan, if you're reading this, Epiar's blog has the Presidential ROI thing I was telling you about. For my other readers, Tristan also wrote a chapter in the book, fyi, and from my previous reading of his writing, I'm sure it'll be great!

Here are some other posts on Yulbiz you might like

http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/10/yulbiz-october-2007.html
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/09/yulbiz-meme.html (lol, this didn't quite work out, unfortunately, but maybe we can get it going now)
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/09/yulbiz-september-2007.html
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2007/08/local-seo-rfrencement-local-yulbiz.html
http://cityseo.blogspot.com/2006/08/yulbiz-montreal-business-blogging.html

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Political Marketing ROI

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:36:00 +0000

Epiar's Curtis Dueck has a very interesting post on the ROI of the Presidential campaigns going on in the US.

Curtis proposes to measure ROI in terms of awareness. It's an interesting metric to track and certainly plays a role in political campaigns. The last federal elections here featured, in my riding at least, candidates who were Marxist, Communist (apparently there's a difference there), Christian Democratic (as opposed to the other, undermocratic Christians who were running?) and more.

Their combined total was less than 1% of the vote. I'd say an important part of that is awareness. By contrast, the Green candidate got a few percentage points of the vote - again, awareness at work, imho.

But it's also not the be all, end all metric. Like I wrote back when the Liberals and PQ were off buying AdWords ads, there's a need for political marketing campaigns to define conversions. Some proposals I made were volunteers signed up, donations made and lawn-signs requested/distributed.

On a related note, did I mention I bought the domain Political Consultant .ca a while back?

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Answers to the Unanswered Qs for Rand

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:09:00 +0000

Rand at SEOmoz recently offered to answer questions people might put to him about SEO, SEOmoz and so on. As I'm an unabashed fan and will proudly admit I look up to him as something of a role model in the SEO world, I'm going to share my answers to some of the questions I felt Rand didn't answer fully.

What does it take to be a great SEO? What are the personality traits and skills that separate the good SEOs from the great ones?

Rand: Sounds like a good title for a blog post to me :-) I think I'll try to address this will a more complete answer in the future.

My opinion (like it matters): I'm going to discuss two aspects of this: the company perspective and and the individual SEO perspective.

This question made me think of the excellent book "Small Giants," by Bo Burlingham, in which he discusses "Companies that chose to be great, instead of big." One of the things I recall about the companies profiled was that many of them were passionate about what they did, as were their employees.

As a matter of fact, while I can't recall what company it was, both employees and management chose to take pay cuts during an economic downturn to keep the company afloat. They did it because they loved working there and enjoyed what they were doing.

Another aspect of being a great company is that the people who work for you are empowered (excuse the buzzword) to make important decisions. Reell Precision Manufacturing, an engineering company, let its employees resolve whether or not to create a hinge that would be used in a cigarette dispensing machine. The CEOs (there were two) left it up to the employeed, trusting them to make the right choice.

Eventually the internal dispute resolution mechanisms decided not to do the project. The story went into the company newsletter. That shows not only that the employees are empowered, but that the company is proud of how its employees handled the situation. That says a lot, imho.

Regarding being a great SEO, I'd say similar rules apply. You need to be passionate, and love the work. When Rand stays up till the wee hours of the morning blogging - that's passion. While I'm not in the same class as Rand, and nowhere near, I spend 15 - 20 hours reading marketing blogs each week to stay current with the latest techniques and ideas. Why? Because I love it.

Another essential aspect of it is that you're good at building links - human links. Look around the blogosphere or even just your favourite few sites and blogs. The external linking goes in an overwhelming majority to people the author is friends with or at least knows personally. See my posts on Yulbiz, for example.

Another essential element is that you should be willing to test different things, even if they aren't part of your specialty, strictly speaking. Look at Dreamhost's homepage. A few years ago, it was a lot more complicated and made several different offers to you. Now it's almost entirely dedicated to one conversion action and it uses an image to that purpose (stay tuned for a post on that trend).

One last point I'd like to mention is that you should know your limits. When you're starting out, it's easy to try and sell your services to everyone around. You need to bring in money, after all. I've made the mistake myself, so I sympathize. But search marketing is just not appropriate to every form of business or every type of website.

For example, a lot of smaller brochure sites are only informational - there's no defined conversion. For branding sake you might want a lot of search traffic. But it'll be hard to justify - especially if you're working with a small business - because the bottom line ROI won't be there in a measurable way. And chances are that if trying to sell SEO/M to everyone and their brother is an issue for you, you're working mostly with small businesses.

Other sites that probably won't benefit from search marketing are purely informational ones. Similarly, those with few people searching for their products (though if the value of a conversion is big enough - think 5 figures - this may not matter) may not be ideal clients.

Can you tell me the SEO benefit or penalties of domain and subdomain relationships? (I heard bad domains can penalize subdomains but not the other way around?) Since they are treated as individual websites, are there any other benefits - like if you have 1000 links to a subdomain, does it have any effect on the root domain? Can you elaborate on any of this?

Rand:
I'm not sure I'd be fully confident that bad subdomains can't hurt you (particularly if you have lots of links from your main domain pointing to it). I'd probably speculate that subdomains and domains can hurt one another if they contain spam and are untrusted or penalized by the search engines.

As for having 1000 links to a subdomain - I suppose it would affect the main domain in that, in the engines' eyes, that subdomain might be treated less like a separate entity and more like a part of the main domain, but we've still seen examples where heavily-linked-to subdomains aren't quite as trusted and fully "part" of the main domain when it comes to search rankings. I'm not sure what you're looking for elaboration on, but my general rule of thumb is that unless there is a truly excellent reason to use a subdomain (reputation management through SERPs domination, for example), stick to just using subfolders.

Yours truly: Check out Blue Hat SEO on using subdomains. His experience is that spammy subs won't hurt the main site - provided they're orphans not linked to from the main site.

Consider this blogspot domain for one. If I cloaked this place and filled it with auto-generated keyword gibberish, I couldn't hurt Blogspot.com or Blogger.com. I can't find the link to the Blue Hatter's post at this point in time, but if somebody does, please post it in the comments.

Is it a good idea to create a page listing sites that link to you, but that search engines haven't found yet? (either on the site, or a different domain)?

Rand: A good idea for tracking or monitoring purposes? Maybe - but your analytics tool should be doing this for you through the referring links/domains sections. If you're asking from an SEO perspective, I can't think of a particularly good reason to create a page with any content that you then hide from search engines. Perhaps I'm not fully grasping your question.

Me: Will Critchlow did a good job answering this in the comments. I'd like to point you to a further source, again at Blue Hat SEO. Eli presents the concept as "Synergy links." Essentially, you get articles posted on third party sites, and then link to those articles from other third party sites. Eli's got the spam approach going on with the third party sites being directories you can automatically get links from, but the technique works for general white-hat purposes too. (Notice that my article on reputation management ranks top 20 at Google?)

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Majors Incompetent In Canadian Local Search

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:09:00 +0000

Being a local SEO specialist, I'm concerned about being able to submit my sites and clients' sites to the major search engines. Yet each of Google, Yahoo and MSN have serious issues when it comes to Canadian local search inclusion!
For starters, and this has been bothering me for a while, neither Yahoo local nor MSN (through InfoUSA...) allow you to submit a Canadian site to their local search engines! Consider these results from Yahoo local in a search for "seo" near "Montreal." They've just been edited to cut the URLs.

* Responsible Marketing s SEM / SEO Code of Ethics
View Responsible Marketing Consulting Services Search Engine Marketing (SEM) / Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Code of Conduct.

* Golden-Arrow.com Lake Placid Hotel, Lodging, Resort - Best Western ...
Lake Placid Hotel & Lodging - the Best Western Golden Arrow Hotel located in Lake Placid, New York offers deluxe resort accomodations in a perfect

* Eight by Eight - Infinite Web Marketing Solutions 1-888-838-1828
How Do You Rank with the Search Engines? Do your title tags contain your most relevant keywords and phrases? Are those keywords and phrases repeated in your content copy? Does your description tag adequately explain what you do? You are not alone.

* Search Engine Optimization or SEO
Web Design Vermont. Vermont Website design, Vermont Website hosting, Vermont Internet marketing. We are located in Burlington, Vermont

* Vermont Multimedia Design Company - Web Design, Search Engine Marketing ...
Emjay Technical Studios is a professional, affordable multimedia design company based in Jeffersonville, Vermont. Nestled in the Green Mountains just minutes from Smugglers Notch, Stowe and Burlington, Emjay Technical Studios offers Web Design, ...

They're all American companies in Vermont! Responsible Marketing's description doesn't mention it, but they're in Plattsburgh. None of the others are any better. I'm glad that Yahoo has an idea what state is closest to Montreal, but the results are pretty much irrelevant if I'm looking for a business in Montreal. Maybe it's because you can't submit a Canadian business/site? (I have to admit that their "Indian-style driving directions" - we use the same type of directions here in Canada, but that's besides the point - are a neat feature.)

Just as nearsighted is MSN Live's Local Listing Center. You can't list a Canadian business, let alone any non-US businesses for that matter. Not to mention that there is some branding confusion out in Redmond because MSN local is officially called the Windows Live Local Listing Center. By contrast, MSN's main search offering is MSN Live, not Windows live. Go figure... Perhaps my friend Susan can help MSN get the branding straight?

Finally, Google's Webmaster Central has a new feature to let you associate your site with a geographic area. Yet, for whatever reason, Quebec isn't a valid province there. Weird... At least their local search submission center is in order.

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Yulbiz October 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:47:00 +0000

"You'll biz it up" with other IT business pros and develop your network of like-minded bloggers. That was certainly the theme of yet another succesful Yulbiz bash at cafe Melies, as dozens of Montreal business bloggers. Here's the low down [and dirty] on the cool people I chatted with at Yulbiz October 2007.

You need to read through to the end to make sure you hear about all the coolest people that matter in Montreal marketing and tech! (And then leave a comment.)

First up I sat down with Sebastien Provencher of Praized, Vincent Barberger of Multiple Media (who have this cool enterprise blogging/CMS solution out) and Pascal Veilleux of NSI.

Sebastien regaled us with the story of how his girlfriend (conjointe gets lost in translation to English, please excuse me Sebastien) and he set up a screen capture movie on Second Life with actors playing out part of her youth/children's book. This genius marketing tactic was apparently a big success at a book fair in Sherbrooke. It's on sale at Mosaique.

Pascal's company has a great name, where I'm concerned: Never Stop Improving - NSI. Pretty appropriate for a company that is in the business of offering reviews and constructive criticism! And I need to give them my compliments for using a blog as the basis for their website!

Speaking of blogs, Vincent's company is selling them big-time! They've come up with a new CMS oriented to banks and conservative companies not at ease with open-source software and that prefer a proprietary solution. Thus, the multiple media content manager. We didn't get a chance to discuss it in much more depth unfortunately, but hopefully next Yulbiz we can speak about it some more!

Around the time I was hanging out with Vince, Pascal and Seba, Claude Malaison of emergence web and I traded a few words. You might recall that I couldn't remember his name from a previous Yulbiz... Well, I got his card this time! Claude is organizing Webcom (amongst others) and is excited as he's bringing in some great speakers!

Edit: I didn't get Jacques's card, but he wrote me his name and specialization in my agenda. Jacques Warren is an analytics expert and former reseller for Web Trends. He's got a handful of blogs, which, when updated, offer some good material. Consider this one (in French) on analyzing visitor paths.

Same Edit: Similarly, I didn't get Julien Niquet's card but what I did get was much more significant: a sneak peak at the future of banking. He's working on Colektivo. I'd say more, but I think it's hush to avoid getting the idea stolen. Julien and his project are absolutely a pair that need to be kept an eye on, because they're doing big things!

Soon afterwards, I was chatting with Olivier Niquet and Jean-Philippe Wauthier of Cent Papiers (a french play on words that I can't translate properly...). Consider it the french equivalent of Gooruze, Squidoo or Youmoz. (If you have no clue what I'm talking about, google those words.)

Another fascinating conversation was the one I had with Sophie Lachapelle of Infopresse. She's working on an article on how Quebec marketing and ad agencies make use of social networks. (I'll have a case study on SEO ROI about my own efforts and discuss other peoples' ad efforts on the site soon enough. Sneak preview: CTR is terrible! Stay tuned...)

Major thanks to Martin Lessard, web strategy consultant, for bringing Mme. Lachapelle to Yulbiz! He's got a post on the CRTC possibly regulating the Internet, the way the US Department of Justice wants to attack Net Neutrality. Scary!

Jonathan Stoikovitch and his friend Nico Stinghe got in a word edgewise (Nico handing a card over: "photographe" lol), but we didn't have very substantive conversations. Jon's got some interesting software for co-browsing available in any case.

And last but far from least (perhaps the most enjoyable conversation on the night) was with Nicolas Cossette. He's joined ranks with the enemy (kidding about the "enemy" thing... what I meant to say was "evil empire" haha - OKOK, relax, I'm joking ) but is nonetheless a very friendly guy. He commented on my SEO ROI blog a little while ago and we finally got to meet and have a chat :). I'd keep my eye on him, fellows, because he's a clever guy and I'm a fairly talent judge.

(I also need to mention Philippe Martin and Michel Leblanc, who, as usual, were the cool and courteous organizers of this month's Yulbiz. Also, a cheery-o to Geoffroi and Alain whom I saw but didn't get to chat with.)

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PubCon Rockstar

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:42:00 +0000

Every Pubcon needs its Pimp, and he is I.

Besides writing grandiose openings with questionable grammar, I've got a laundry list of reasons why I'm the biggest Rockstar WebGeek (specifying webgeek, because when you're going to a conference by and for webmasters ... well, Dave Navarro isn't about to show up) and why I should be selected to party with Shoe et co. in Vegas.

If you're totally clueless about what I'm talking about, this is an entry to Shoemoney's Rockstar contest. Warning: there is some adult oriented humour and a liberal dose of sarcasm - if you can't take a joke for what it is, please don't read any further.

Also, for my regular readers, this is a more personal post not quite related to the regular content of this blog, so take it for what it's worth (some young adult type humour) and not as a reflection of my professionalism.

[...]

Why are you still reading?

For starters, I spent a month and a half travelling this past summer in the Middle East. Not only did I not get shot or blown up, I actually took shots and threw up! Err, wait, scratch that. I partied like a rockstar, swam with the fish, charmed the chicks (a little chopped corn will go a long way towards pleasing the little furry future chicken filets... no, seriously). And besides being a pimp and having a damn good time of it, I'm rocking this SEO game like stoning was legal!

Let's have a look at each of those points.

1) I got more partying done this summer than Paris Hilton's done advanced calculus! Or more than Matt Cutts, whoever's smarter/done more. (My $500 are on Paris.)

Here's yours truly crowd surfing at 2 am on his tour bus (in the blue shirt and grey boxers).

Are you ready for some more? (Crowd: "Oh yeah!" Rapper: "Are you ready for some more?" Crowd: "Oh Yeah!" Rapper: "Cuz you know I want to feel it, and you know I need to feel it." Lol, don't know why that lyric just popped into my mind, but I couldn't help slipping it in there.

With a friend, I tamed a bucking camel (while wearing short shorts) and propose to repeat the ride on Jeremy's back in the Nevada desert (harder too, because he's got no hair to hang on to!).

Further to that, I went incognito, Indiana Jones style, through water tunnels wearing what turned out to be a day-glo turban (Did you know white Ts make good turbans? Bet you didn't! Next time you hear someone make a racist "towelhead" remark, call them on their ignorance ... the term is "Tshirthead".)

Did I mention that when I party and get rowdy, the people around me get their smiles rearranged? You contest judges wanted to talk about fighting, well check this out:

OK, OK, so maybe it was a fossilized piece of junk from an archeological dig and not some guy's jawbone that I ripped out. Still, I think hanging out with me would be very beneficial to our judges, each of whom seems to have some issues with their smiles. I mean, consider:

Dax is actually frowning! If I had my picture taken with my pants around my ankles, I'd be doubled over laughing!

It seems that Rebecca, Neil and Shoe also have an issue with smiling, as you can see from them hiding their pearly whites...

Shoe's got his arm around a Hooter's hottie! And he's not smiling! And then he's holding a massive cheque while again, his cheekbones aren't the slightest bit perky!

Rebecca's a little more subtle with it. She's in disguise here with a mustache so she can plausibly deny it was her. But we know she's hiding that grin just the same!

And Neil's slurping on a beer bong. Looks like the social communities of college fraternities is what he's really studying!

Greg ... well, let's just say that with a smile like that he makes a hockey player look good... A for effort at least!

The only judge who does a half-decent job (and has a nice smile - props to your dentist) is Dave Dellanave:

The relation between this and PubCon is simple. ~~By making fun of the judges I'm getting them - by means of reverse psychology - to secretly want to be my friend and invite me to go with them to PubCon.~~ If you're going to socialize and network (and maybe even pick up a girl or two), a little bit of charm is essential - and your humble servant has plenty of that. Which brings us to point two:

2) Picking up the girls. If you're going to party like a rockstar, you're not just going to be getting wasted. You're going to be macking the hell out of a room. In my month and a half of travelling this past summer, I picked up no less than 5 girls and was offered to join the mile high club on my plane back home by a sixth.

Have a look:

Here's your favourite rockstar taking a short break from dancing to smile for the camera with the cute girl he picked up over the weekend. Note also the white pants, like a certain rockstar who's popular in Vegas wedding ceremonies.

And like any self-respecting rock star knows, it's not sufficient to just pick up one girl a night.

Heh, my eyes look so conniving/evil there. Sure sign of a party animal rockstar ;).

Following that, there was another cutie who I unfortunately did not get a chance to take pictures with, and whom you'll have to take my word on. Next up was this delightful young thing from Toronto, which just goes to show that even Toronto can get some things right. Did I mention this was a Montreal SEO blog?

The story here was that I was walking back from a cafe and saw this girl and her friend. I thought they were cute, recognized the uniforms they were in as being from an organization I'd had an interest in and chatted them up. Next thing you know I've got a hot date Friday night! Fun in the [setting] sun, as they say.

Note also the smiling! (This image wasn't cropped, it was just self shot from very close.)

I then met a girl who had an awesome personality and whom I was dating until just a few weeks ago.

We were walking along and saw a harpist and just had to take a picture - I mean, when do you see a harpist street performer around? I thought it was funny that as a harpist, she also harped about getting a donation before she'd let us take a picture with her. If you're keeping count, this is #5. And still more smiles.

The airplane girl I won't post a picture of because it might upset ms. #5. But fyi, I turned her down as ms. #5 and I were still dating at the time. ("How un-rockstarish and boring! How non-controversial!" I know, I know... )

Bottom line: Pick me to go with you to PubCon and not only will we party, you guys will get a crash course on smiling, keeping up the smile as much as possible without getting tired and making smart conversation to pick up girls (or guys, for you, Rebecca). And for you Greg, until you see a dentist, I'll teach you to be a good listener ;).

At the end of the day, most girls and guys aren't expecting to date supermodels (though if you're a self-confident and only occasionally own-horn-tooting, wink-n-a-smile-ing, easy-chatting p-i-m-p like yours truly, you can have that expectation). They want someone friendly, who'll smile and listen to what they have say with interest while making them feel good about themselves. Like your humble servant, moi.

3) I'm an SEO rockstar.

Consider a couple of the things I've written, results I've achieved and some of the research I'm undertaking.

1) Sitelinks research project: What in the algo triggers the attribution of sitelinks to a site?

2) The beginner's Primer to Search Engine Reputation Management.

3) Google stealing search share from right under MSN's nose, which it seems no one in the industry noticed.

4) At the ISEdb, The New Directory. Imho, Seth and the good folks at Squidoo have gotten a good portion of the idea right, and it appears Gooruze will be doing the same.

5) This piece on linkbait at Pandia addressing the essential characteristics of succesful linkbait based on 5 cases. (Rebecca, the Moz is in there, so do check it out.)

6) These articles at Youmoz which are pretty dandy and instructive, imho:

and some others too.

Besides that, I'm #1 and #6 on Yahoo for SEO Montreal (was #1 and #2 earlier in October, but the SERPs have just changed very recently).

My SEO ROI .com referrer logs already show top 50 rankings on SEO consulting, and it's only been actively promoted for a few months.

I'm a multi-disciplinary fellow. I have:

Planned and supervised the design of my SEO ROI site from A-Z this summer, including graphics and code;
Re-wrote the copy and some html code on the landing page for this Montreal hotel which increased their conversion rate, an impressive feat considering it was already above the industry average;
Ranked this blog top 20 for Local SEO and this site often comes up in Map results for Montreal SEO on Google when the SERPs have Maps integrated (it would be awesome to attend the PubCon local sessions!);
Built a domain portfolio that counts awesome generic KW domains including a handful that have 6 figure + Overture results (not to mention LinkBuilding.ca ;) ). Do I care if they're .ca? Not so long as Google etc. don't.
Scored a minesweeper best time on expert of 120 seconds, or ~1.2 seconds a mine.

So if you can excuse the hard-selling, excessive bragging and weak self-deprecating jokes - I may be a rockstar, but I'm a n00b at this contest stuff - I think you'll find in me a fun guy to hang out with and one who's happy to listen to you :). Bring me to PubCon!

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P.s. Did I mention I swam with the fishes? I was being serious about that:

Come to think of it, with $500, I think I'd take the judges with me for a an hour of diving in Cali, which would be an awesome group activity.

I mean, when I'm not trying to discretely sample some earwax...

He never saw it coming! hehe

And then, this guy on the right didn't realize the joke was on him :

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Get Google Sitelinks Research Project Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:51:00 +0000

Google attributes certain websites "Sitelinks" and at the SEW forums, I found an interesting discussion on what it is that causes this. It's all speculation though, so I've decided to start a research project on what factors in Google's data/algorithms might cause these Sitelinks to appear.

The first thing I've done has been to establish a methodology of possible factors to test for. Second, I've created a sample set of 100 sites that have Sitelinks. Here is the list of sitelinked sites:

Atu2
Kidsastronomy
General Motors
McGill
University of Toronto
Kraft
Omniture
Insurance.com
Sierra Club
MSN
Yahoo
Goog
SEW
SEL
SEObook
SEOmoz
Squidoo
TD Canada Trust
Parliament
DoubleClick
24/7 Real Media
Loblaws
Xbox360 Forum
Loreal
KidsDinos
Biology4kids
CoolMath4Kids
Genealogy.com
Ancestry.com
PlentyofFish
Problogger
Vistaprint
Logos.it
Blue Host
Hostgator
Mortgage101
Tiger Direct
Law.com
Microsoft
Adobe
PlanetPhotoshop
W3C
ScienceMag
Journal of Medicine
Journal of Psychiatry
Journal of Biological Chemistry
American Bar Association
Beckett
Alibris
Digg
Stumble Upon
Media.com
Fox TV
Canada.com
Conservative Party of Canada
Liberal Party of Canada
Green Party of Canada
Food Network
Scholarships Canada
Standford newspaper
London England – VisitLondon.com comes up below news results and below Maps results with Sitelinks.
Toronto Canada – Toronto.ca below maps
CollegeHumor
Download.com
IGN.com
Counter-scipt.net – Counter-strike scripts
Feedreader.com
Newsgator
CTV – CTV.ca comes up after a futher query link to Google finance and stock info
TSX.com for Stock
Berkshire Hathaway
Mohawk College – Mohawk
How Stuff Works
Kids Health
Victoria’s Secret
Myspace
Alexa
Facebook
LinkedIn
Technorati
Sitepoint
DigitalPoint
V7n
Compete
Bargain.com
HaAretz
Yediot Ahronot
Pajamas Media
Vertrue
Consumer Reports
Shareasale
CJ.com
Namepros
Olive Garden
Gardeners – Garden Supply
Shoppers drug mart (but not Pharmaprix)
Creditcards.com
ISEdb
Pandia
WebProNews

It's a pretty prestigious group, I think we can agree. I'll be conducting tests over the next weeks and months to figure out what the Sitelinks attribution factors are. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, try typing in the name of your favourite site into your Firefox address bar. You'll find that those sites that have sitelinks will see their site show up right away; some others will return a Google results page (there's a grey area where sites have no sitelinks but they do get returned automatically in Firefox.

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Black Hat PPC Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:05:00 +0000

Black Hat PPC is an application of the black hat approach - read the rules, test the rules, bend and test the rules then stick with what works - to Pay Per Click marketing.

My first readings on the topic are for a man who, inter alia, is familiar with how the top dogs rank for Poker queries. That is, he is the absolute elite when it comes to ranking for competitive search terms, largely because he's got an in-depth knowledge and understanding of blackhat SEO. I'm referring to Mr. Mikkel deMib Svendsen.

Mikkel wrote The Art of Black Hat PPC Management. I think it was one of the most influential things I've ever read and perhaps one of the best written as well. What's particularly interesting is his point about blackhat PPC being virtually risk free. SEs won't ban an infringing advertiser; at most they'll temporarily remove his ads. The reason is that they want the advertiser's money.

In a more recent bit of reading (Mikkel's article was written for the now defunct E Marketing News, back in 2005), the unnamed author of this PPC blog has written a sort of update/refresher (without saying so explicitly) on blackhat PPC. Some of the ideas are original, some are the same Mikkel was advocating 2 years ago. In particular, his article is geared towards affiliates looking to flaunt network and merchant rules on PPC bidding. His inspiration comes from the SEWatch, apparently.

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Greg Sterling and Local Search

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:30:00 +0000

Greg Sterling is a local SEO with a lot of knowledge, an ability to write heaps of quality content and some good stories on local search to boot.

First things first: Greg is the man behind Screenwerk.com. (Which for some reason he's hardly optimizing? Edit: Correction, he's optimizing Gesterling.wordpress.com just fine but Screenwerk.com is the professional address of the site - just like Montreal SEO .ca for this one. The screenwerk domain gets you slow loading times though, Greg, and is possibly inhibiting less savvy people linking at your individual posts, imho.). It's a great blog with a variety of excellent information on local search marketing (this one on Yodle and co. competing with the Yellow Pages is a pretty good one, imho)

Second, Greg's got some fascinating data up on the percentage of people using local search, according to Nielsen. He's added further analysis at his Locals Only column at SEL. One highlight: 86% of people said they used the Web to find a local business, vs last year's 70%, and 78% say they use it more today than they did before. By contrast, 52% of people use the Yellow Pages less, according to the same data. (Looks like a bright future ahead for Yodle et cie.)

Finally, it's occurred to me that Greg has mastered something that we don't get to see very study in internet marketing - story telling. And I'm not talking about "Let me tell you the story of how I made $10,583 in one day" stories either. I mean stories like you'd read in the local business press. Consider this story on mothers, social media and their influence in the East Bay Area. Or consider this most recent post on a coffee shop telling members of the social media site Yelp to keep away. It makes the whole thing a lot more interesting than when you just read about a social media site or about generic data.

10 points on the originality and quality of your local search content, Greg!

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Expert SEO Interviews

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:27:00 +0000

As part of my regular reading, I've come up on some great interviews with SEO experts recently. I'm also preparing some of my own with local SEO experts, including Mike Belasco, Stoney deGeyter and others.

First of all, I need to link to LinkJuicy's interview with Michael Gray. Link Juicy is a solid blog and the interview touches on some excellent points. In particular, he has some good points on varying your methods for attracting links and discussed paid links as well, in some detail. There's some good tips on linkbaiting, though I heard the Stumble Upon advice from Muhammad Saleem first, who perhaps should have been credited. However, Michael might have known that stuff independently.

Second, SEObook's got an excellent interview with Eli of Blue Hat SEO. I've been reading Eli consistently and he's in my feedreader. There are some juicy nuggets in there, particularly a disagreement between Eli and Aaron on Google's algorithmic focus-du-jour.

Finally, I'm preparing a Local SEO Ranking Factors document, using much the same methodology as SEOmoz's document on the regular Search Ranking Factors. I'll be interviewing some of the top pros in the field. The two above have agreed so far, and both Sharon Odom Fling and Mike Blumenthal have expressed interest. I know this is going to be a huge thing if the other local SEO experts and myself handle the methodology and promotion right! Stay tuned...

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Facebook Camp Montreal, Local SEO Research

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:19:00 +0000

This Montreal SEO's schedule has been fuller than Homer Simpson after a free all-you-can-eat buffet of late, and I've got some great news. First of all, Facebook Camp Montreal (like the Toronto event, but better), is being organized by Sylvain Carle and company. Second, a Youmoz blogger may have discovered an additional local SEO ranking factor. And third, there are some cool local SEO posts I've seen around that I want to share!

First things first: Facebook Camp Montreal is being organized on this wiki. Yours truly has put his name down to speak on the opportunities for advertising on the Facebook platform. I'm fascinated by Facebook's marketing opportunities and hope to give an interesting presentation! If you think you've got something interesting to say, why don't you put your name down too?

Second, a Youmozzer nicknamed Jaz thinks he's discovered a new Local SEO ranking factor: targeting the State-wide keyword to improve your ranking on the city-wide keyword. He's seen some results, but they're as yet inconclusive.

Similarly, I recently rewrote the copy and some of the code on the Hotel de Paris's homepage, which included using a provincial abbreviation in the title. I'm waiting to see what the results are with regards to city search. In the meantime, I've brought up rankings for other keywords we previously weren't on the first page for, which is always nice!

Third, there are some cool posts around the local SEO scene I should share. To begin with, I'd like to thank Mike Belasco, aka Mike the Internet Guy (and a savvy local marketer himself) for helping me find some of these sources. One of them is Matt McGee's blog, who among other solid local SEO blogging, writes about a problem with local search: geography doesn't mesh well with current SEO models. Also, in something of a followup to his discovery of Google Maps spam, Mike Blumenthal reports on some changes in how Google handles bulk local business listing uploads.

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Yulbiz Meme

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:40:00 +0000

Following the fun time I had at September's Yulbiz, I've decided to start a Yulbiz meme. A meme is like a blog version of the children's game tag, except that instead of just saying tag you're it, you have to talk about a specific topic.

So I'm going to tag the different people I've had the good fortune to meet at Yulbiz. I'm talking about Michel, Philippe, Jerome Plantevin, Benjamin, Guillaume, Elise (who has this nice post on search technology), Benoit, Jean-Julien, Philippe R, Geoffroi, Kim, Jerome Paradis, Sylvain and Sebastien. And if I didn't meet or you see you at this past Yulbiz or any others, please do respond to this meme anyways!

And I'm going to ask the following questions:

Name some things that motivate you to blog.

What is your ultimate professional/career goal?

How do you promote your blog?

Describe your personal brand and your blog's brand in 50 words or more.

Why do you come to Yulbiz?

Read on to see how I've answered those questions!

I'm motivated to blog because I realize that it's a powerful promotional tool and also because it's fun to see comments and traffic on your site!

My ultimate professional goal is to have a succesful business allowing me to enjoy life and live comfortably while having enough money to give to charity to have some impact on my environment/community/society.

I promote my blog through - big surprise - SEO! Amongst other things, I rank for Google Sucks, which happens to be Googled often enough, as well as SEO Specialist, Montreal SEO and SEO Montreal. As well, I like to comment on other blogs when I have a moment and other bloggers have written something interesting/intelligent.

My personal brand is outgoing, friendly, a bit mature for my age (20) and generally a fun guy to be around. I tend to smile a lot and crack jokes, partly because it feels good and partly because other people seem to like it. My professional brand, as you can tell by my Bookworm-SEO pseudonym is well-informed on the latest goings-on in the search marketing world. That's why I can offer cutting edge services like Local SEO and Online Reputation Management. Additionally, and particularly where my SEO ROI brand is concerned, the branding is upmarket and professional. You're not buying a discount service, you're investing in your future lead-and-sales-generation. That's what I delude myself into thinking anyways. Check out SEO ROI and tell me what you think!

I participate in Yulbiz because it's an awesome get-together of the local business/tech community. You meet some brilliant people and fascinating entrepreneurs, besides just enjoying a down-to-earth atmosphere amongst like-minded people.

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Yulbiz September 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:40:00 +0000

Yulbiz September 2007 was another classic meeting of business bloggers.

The "incontournable" networking event, as one participant put it to me, saw some fresh faces and also some familiar ones my regular readers will have seen before. Heading that list of friendly faces are of course Michel Leblanc and Philippe Martin, cofounders and organizers of the event. They are, respectively, one of the most respected voices in internet marketing in Montreal and one of the top blog designers in Montreal.

Read the full post to find out about the other fascinating people I met and spoke with, including one awesome entrepreneur who's just raised $1M in VC funding (Round 1)!

To start things out, I'd like to give kudos to the smart team at Les Affaires for coming by to do a story on Yulbiz. This included Mr. Jérôme Plantevin, journalist for Les Affaires, and tech blogger.

He was there with cameraman Benjamin Nantel (couldn't find blog for him, and I don't recall him saying he had one, but he's got videos on Youtube). There was also an editor from Les Affaires but somehow I didn't get his card (if you read this, please leave a comment to tell me who you are and where you'd like me to link!).

But then, I figure some credit should also go to Guillaume Brunet, who's left TD Meloche Monnex (your loss!) to go to Transcontinental (smart move!). Transcontinental, for those of you who don't know, is a Canadian media giant that owns, amongst others, Publisac and Les Affaires.

Mr. Brunet and others were also busily talking about the new Regie des blogues d'affaires - the first French language blog ad network, a la Pajamas Media and Federated Media. It's supposed to be fully operational since the 20th, according to Guillaume, but I can't see a site for advertisers and publishers to sign up. Congrats also to Guillaume for snagging a juicy speaking spot at a Quebec tourism industry conference.

Other interesting people I met included Elise Somers, who is the force behind Emotions au travail (Emotions at Work), and is a business coach. (Like Alain Theriault, another business coach I met at the last Yulbiz.) Welcome to the blogging world Elise! And again, Elise, I encourage you to check out Philippe's Fabrique de Blogues. (Ben's Business Blogs Now is also good, but I'm fairly certain that Ben is focused on his job search startup.)

A little later in the night I had the pleasure of meeting Benoît Marcoux, who is a veteran in this computer stuff. He used to program in C back in ... 1987! We're talking about when the Internet consisted of Usenet groups and Al Gore (sorry, Al, I couldn't resist ;))! Benoît registered Marcoux.ca back when you needed a company to register a .ca domain! You know, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth ;) (and when Al Gore was busy inventing the Internet). He is a management strategy consultant.

About the same time I met Phillipe Régnoux. He's working for 2RCommunications, when he's not planning a Quebec - Gabon entrepreneurship exchange. The man has got at least one thing right (and probably many more): it's business development, not charity, that will help Africa develop and solve its economic hardships.

Running through the beautiful cards I collected this Yulbiz I find the names of Jerome Paradis and Kim Vallee. Jerome has a software company and is currently developing some Web 2.0 type stuff and a Facebook app! The specifics aren't coming to mind at the moment, but I recall being impressed at the idea when he told me aout it. Kim is blogging on party tips and advice.

Other people I got a moment to speak to include Geoffroi Garon, whom I'd met at a Yulbiz a while ago, and who's taken his consulting skills in house at K3Media. Also interesting was Marc Snyder, who's a political consultant with the Mayor's office for Le Plateau. You can reach him at marc.snyder@ville.montreal.qc.ca.

I was also fortunate to once again (see my previous Yulbiz post) speak with Sylvain Carle, the popular blogger and serial entrepreneur behind A Frog in the Valley (his personal blog) and Praized Media. A loud congrats to Sylvain, Sebastien and Harry on raising their first round of financing from VCs!

(Speaking of VCs, the VC I told you about (my cousin's best friend) is called Liroy Haddad.)

Interestingly, Sylvain's two partners are both local search experts! Harry Wakefield and Sébastien Provencher both worked at the Yellow Pages Group for a while before moving on to other projects.

I've just gone to add Sébastien as a friend on Facebook and I see he's got a Restaurant Reviews App on his profile ... the man is familiar with local! And wouldn't you know it - Praized "will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust." By the way, though we didn't have a very long conversation, Seb, it was certainly nice talking to you at tonight's Yulbiz!

Did I mention I save the best for last ;)? Once again, great Yulbiz folks!

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Make Money Online Carnival Posted

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:43:00 +0000

The Make Money Online Carnival has been posted.

Knightey Night hosts this week's edition of the Make Money Online blog carnival. It features my interview contest giving you a chance to ask questions to web design business guru Brendon Sinclair, as well as an interesting case study on Elance.

I also recommend this Beginner's Guide to SEO. I think every person entering the internet marketing world has tried to write an introductory guide to SEO, following the "quality content" adage. This piece is nothing new if you've been at this for a while, but it's an excellent overview with even a moderately advanced couple of pointers, including avoiding having content too deep. The author's clearly gone to some effort, so kudos to them.

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Google Stealing Internet Explorer 7 Search Share From Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:02:00 +0000

Google is stealing search share on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser from right under Microsoft's nose. Look up Internet Explorer 7 on Google and you'll find a Google ad offering Google's customized version of Explorer - with the Google toolbar.

Normally, the new Internet Explorer should come with Microsoft search in the toolbar. But as you can imagine, when people download Google's improved IE7, the standard search included is Google search. Possibly to include product, blog, video and other search boxes as well.

At the same time as Google is advertising on Internet Explorer 7, Google's page on the topic and Yahoo's own "Optimized for Yahoo" Internet Explorer 7 are ranking for Internet Explorer 7. What that means is that

1. Microsoft are not practicing Search Engine Reputation Management well enough. Yet companies like McDonald's and Facebook seem to have gotten the memo on online reputation management...
2. Microsoft is not attentive to the SERPs when it comes to protecting its brand. Which is kind of odd - this is the company that sued a kid named Mike Rowe for creating the MikeRoweSoft company a few years back.
3. Microsoft's new browser will contribute to giving its competitors a greater share of the searches people do online. As if its crummy reviews weren't doing that already...

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Ranking for Local SEO!

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:12:00 +0000

I'm proud to announce that Montréal SEO is ranking for "local SEO" in all the major search engines!

According to SEO Chat's search engine keyword position tool, yours truly is currently ranking as follows:

Results for: cityseo.blogspot.com

Engine Position
Google 19
MSN 8
Yahoo 2

Nice, wouldn't you say? In large part, I think I owe my success to this post here: Local SEO : Référencement local et Yulbiz

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Local SEO : Référencement Local & Yulbiz

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:01:00 +0000

Local SEO is an increasingly-important service as more and more searchers turn to Yahoo, Google Truelocal and other search engines to get information on local businesses. But this type of SEO requires more than just link-building, it requires knowledge of your locale. Like Montreal, for example, where French-speaking searchers are just as likely to look up référencement local as they are local SEO. A great way to

To optimize your site for local searchers, you need to know what sites they visit and who are the information hubs in your area. For example, my colleague Michel Leblanc runs a popular Montreal SEO blog, and he also talks about other internet marketing issues.

Similar sites in the Montreal scene are Montreal TechWatch and Techno Montreal. I heard about both of them - you guessed it - at a local event, Yulbiz! Yulbiz was started by Michel Leblanc and Philippe Martin.

This month's Yulbiz was a very fun event and I got to meet a whole bunch of new people, and see some old acquaintances again. Amongst other people, I met or saw:

Francois Aubin, of Cognitive Group

Iroi, Priscilla et Alex, of Montreal TV

Pierre Bellerose, of Tourisme Montreal

Sylvain Carle, of Praized

Alain Theriault, formerly of HEC Montreal, now an indie business coach

Steve Carignan, of IPS

Jean Julien, of iPub

Louise Collignon of Play Montreal

Josh Nursing, software engineer (this is an email link)

Eric Kucharsky, of Techno Monteral

Carl and Jason, of Puzzr

Veronique Arsenault, of Morin Relations Publiques (email link)

The reason I mention these people whom I met at Yulbiz is twofold. First, it's to make the point that networking offline is just as important a part of your promotional strategy as online networking. Second, it's to say thanks for chatting, help their SEO a bit and hopefully develop a further relationship online! Local SEO isn't just about mastering Google Maps ... like regular search engine optimization, local seo is about networking (PDF). And knowing the people in your area offline is as important to your search marketing effort as it is to know them online.

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Google's Strange Behaviour

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:14:00 +0000

Google's been acting strange lately, contradicting its' own advice and guidelines to webmasters. (If you're thinking, is he about to go on about why Google sucks, again... you'd be very perceptive.)

First of all, Google's been advertising in Gmail, using all-caps. They've had an ad running that says something like SEARCH Engine yada yada. What happened to no excessive capitalization?

Second of all, Google's got some canonicalization problems going on. Both local.google.com and maps.google.com produce the same content, and one doesn't redirect to the other. It seems from searching Google that they've canonized their maps.google.com subdomain, but you'd think they would redirect the local sub?

Strange, strange behaviour from Google. Like I said, these hypocrites suck.

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Google Maps Reversed = Spam el Goog

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 03:55:00 +0000

Fellow local search expert Mike Blumenthal has discovered a massive spam attack on Google Maps. A company by the name of Tech Pros had spammed the Google Maps listings to be listed in every major and minor city in the United States for 'computer repair'!

What they didn't reckon with was that a local search and maps pro like Mike would be working in the computer repair biz and notice it!
Well, by the time I'd found the post on Mike's blog, the word had already gotten around and Google had booted the offending company (and another one using the same exploit, which Mike also discovered) from its SERPs (that's Search Engine Results Pages to the non-jargon inclined amongst you).

So how did they do it? Google Maps offers businesses two ways to get listed. One of the two ways is a bulk upload of a list, but which goes unverified (due to the sheer volume). It's a gaping loophole in the way businesses get listed in Google Maps and it's frankly surprising it hasn't been discovered earlier! In any event, this was explained by a commenter on Mike's post.

Two final comments in passing: I referred to Mike as a fellow local seo expert... I'm flattering myself. Mike's way ahead of me in knowledge and as far as my readings have taken me, the leading mind in the field. Besides that, Wouldn't you agree that this is the sort of thing that makes you say: "Google, you suck!" Like the title says: when Google maps gets flipped on its head, it's really Spam el Goog!

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Local SEO and Search Links

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:06:00 +0000

Local SEO and local search in general are healthy and developing rapidly. Here are some fascinating links I found around the SEO blogosphere.

In a follow-up to (or, according to the date, preview of) Mark's discussion of Google Maps vs Google Local's ranking factors, I've found - who else? - Bill Slawski discussing Google local search patentry.

Still at Bill's excellent site, we have word of new Place Rank and Interestingness ranking and scoring mechanisms. It seems that Google's taking more user generated content a la Gmail and Feedburner and using it to mark up maps and Google Earth.

Over at GoodROI we find out that Yahoo has modified their SERPs with some local data. On a search for McDonald's, Greg found a new link under McDonald's main site result that lets you find McDonald's locations near you! Yahoo've also done some other things to their SERPs, so go see what Greg has to say.

Still on the Yahoo SERPs, it looks like they've got more than "locations near you" added. There are also Flickr-based slideshows directly integrated into the results, OneBox style (I know Yahoo won't like me saying OneBox style, but what're ya gonna do, eh? hehe). Try searching for Montreal, Canada or as Yahoo Search's Lingxian Ding did, Phuket, Thailand.

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Google Maps Ranking Factors

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:16:00 +0000

Google Maps' ranking factors and algorithm are being researched very thoroughly by local search expert Mike Blumenthal. Mike's got several posts about the algorithm's factors, including some noteworthy comparisons to Google's OneBox results.

For those of you who like more old-school type SEO, Mike Blumenthal has a great post concerning directories that Google cares about in regards to its Maps algorithm. The directory factor still carries weight apparently, though as in the general search algorithm, that weight has greatly decreased since its heyday.

Another very insightful post of his considers the difference between Google OneBox results and Google Maps results. It appears that the OneBox results are focused towards more established venues with enough reviews to have a star rating (the more stars the better, obviously).

The cutoff to have a star rating, from looking at Mike's data, seems to be roughly 10-15 reviews; any less and no stars will appear. This is likely to avoid skewing the data based on only a handful of reviews.

In any event, I encourage you all to subscribe to Mike's "Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local" RSS feed if you're interested in local search. His blog is a great resource both on optimizing for local search as well as for local search news.

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Here are a few:

Google Maps Reversed = Spam el Goog
Local SEO and Search Links
I'm ranking for Local SEO!

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Google Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:14:00 +0000

A vocal minority of webmasters largely agree with me that Google sucks.

Pursuant to my post on why Google sucks, I conducted several polls online. The stunning result that I came across was that, in spite of frequent close-minded Google defences, a vocal minority of webmasters hate Google.

Digitalpointers to the tune of one third said Google sucks.

About 10 percent of SitePointers think Google Sucks.

Somewhere in the middle, initially reaching as high a fraction as one third, Earners' Forum members to the tune of 20% said Google sucks.

Unfortunately, many of the people polled who had the courage to criticize Google, did it mainly based on the narrow picture of search and ad publishing. The critiques I levelled at Google were not considered in the debates.

In any event, if you weren't sufficiently convinced by my previous post about Google's suckiness, look at these two searches (the second one concerns a potential client I'm courting).

Do you see that both result sets have duplicate content? No? Visit Larry Bodine's Legal Marketing Blawg. Now, Larry is a friend, and I asked him for some promotion on his blog for that post. His post essentially duplicates my ten reasons. And you know what? Since he paraphrased me, his post ranks. Try handing your friend's essay, paraphrased, to your English professor and see what he thinks of it. For all its talk of imitating human beings, Google still has some pretty obvious shortcomings.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry that Larry paraphrased the post or that it ranks - good for him if it's pulling traffic - my point is just to show the mediocrity of Google's results.)

Second, do you see Chetday.com's charisma.php in Google's SERPs? Well, it just so happens the page is essentially a clone, featuring different copy, of personalcharisma.com. Interestingly, while I'm sure the same owner owns both sites, personalcharisma.com says it's charisma infoproduct is being promoted by Jenny something, not Chet Day.
Anyway, by the use of paraphrasing and some internal link spam (scroll to the bottom), two otherwise identical (and spammy) pages are ranking in Google for the same keywords. (Notice also that the Jeannie Crabtree's whois email is Jeannie health-doc.com, which site is themed on alternative and natural health. Which is coincidentally Chet Day's topic too. ;) )

On a related note, you might care to see what these people have to say about how Google sucks, and their alternative to it. Google Sux, Alternative Search Solution

Incidentally, look for a follow up post as I analyze how the spammy sales pages are ranking in Google. On some forums I read and participate in, I asked about getting landing pages to rank in the organic search results, and this seems like the opportunity to find out. Stay tuned. And remember: if anyone asks, Google Sucks!

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Political Campaigns: Marketing's Slacker Children

noreply@blogger.com (Bookworm SEO) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 18:33:00 +0000

The Liberal Party of Quebec is buying into Google AdWords and search engine marketing, according to a story by La Presse (see also the debate this has raised). The LPQ politicians are setting a bad example to those people who heard about AdWords through La Presse, however.

A friendly acquaintance of mine who happens to be one of Yulbiz's founders (Yulbiz is the monthly meeting of Montreal's blogging community) was cited in the piece. Michel Leblanc, of Analyweb Marketing, found out that Jean Charest's Liberals were paying 8 cents a click for low-profile candidates names, and as high as 47 cents a click for "Jean Charest."

It'll be interesting to see if there will be any practical return on investment. Sure it's only a few dollars in the grand scheme of things, but the principle is important. Will these ads get people to buy Liberal Party memberships? Will they get visitors to vote Liberal?

The absence of calls-to-action and amateurishness of the site (unfinished navigation such as "Survol du premier mandat un peu plus de texte" - Translation: "Overview of the first mandate some more text [sic]"), answers those questions with a resounding no. The Liberals clearly have no measurable goals for the ads and site to achieve. (Note, even if they were using SEO instead of SEM, they would need to have measurable goals.)

From what I can tell, the Liberals are just buying search engine advertising in order to get exposure and to project an image of a technologically inclined party. Hence text like the following:

"En modernisant l’État, notamment par le développement des services sur Internet [...]
Translation: "By modernising the State, especially by developping our online service offerings [...]"

Just before I analyze the marketing and leave the political talk, I'd like to reply to what a PQ member saw as potentially confusing to web users. Google's Quality Score factor ought to place the PQ's ads for its own candidates above those of the LPQ. The higher the ad, the earlier it gets noticed. So people won't accidentally click on the first ad and end up on the Liberals' site. Second, the ads all have their party's URL in them, so users see what site they're visiting. Nobody is being misled.

Anyways, back to the marketing analysis and tips.

Political campaign management is the slacker child of the marketing family. Ads on TV and in the mainstream media have little measurable effect, and when there is an opportunity for tight measuring of ROI as with search marketing, the opportunity is squandered.

Here are my proposals for the political campaigns to do a better job with their marketing spend:

1) Define measurable goals. Are you looking to get a neighbourhood covered with your electoral signs in anticipation of an opponent's tour? Tell people in your ad to come pick up their lawn signs at your campaign office.

2) Track results, and cut short those marketing expenditures that don't provide the return on investment you need.
For example, instead of just insulting your opponents, make a page on your site that analyzes their shortcomings, and encourage people to visit that page. So at the end of your TV ad, the website URL is ourparty.org/theirleaderisawful. When people visit that page directly by typing it into their browsers, you know your ad is succeeding.

3) Engage voters and tell them how they can participate in the campaign. When someone makes a presentation to you on the environment, they ask you to legislate this or that. When you campaign, ask voters to hop on the train and campaign too.

Here's an example: Get an 800 number. Only mention it in your newspaper ads (when people call, you'll know the newspaper ads worked, and how much - see point 2 above). Finally, tell them over the phone what they can do specifically in their riding. When you see more posters favouring your policy proposal go up around town

4) Hire me ;). Email Bookworm.seo at gmail.com for rates and more info.

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