In an announcement on July 20th Facebook states that the changes will result in a “cleaner, and simpler design, along with the opportunity for users to preview and test the next-generation features and functionality” You can read more from their official July 20th press release here

Changing Facebook’s Ad Location
In addition to this press release, advertisers were emailed a seperate announcement detaling the changes to the advertising system. Currently, Facebook ads are placed on the left side of the page, below a profiles navigation. The new changes will place the ad on the RIGHT side of the page - an area of the page that, arguably, users are more used to seeing ads (thank your Google, Yahoo and MSN).

Moreover, Facebook will now be showing TWO ads at any one time on any given page. There was no mention of how an ad is selected to place first, however it is safe to assume that placement will be determined by ones minimum CPC bid. That being said, this change may pave the way for Facebook to adopt a “quality score” type of a system similar to Google and Yahoo’s which “rewards” advertisers with higher ad placement through a calculation involving high click-through-rates, bids and landing pages.

The last major change is the addition of a new ad on Facebook’s home page. This ad will be located to the right of the News Feed and initially run for a limited set of advertisers (no mention of how to be part of that limited set). Their statement does say that “as this space continues to evolve and improve, we’ll provide more details.

It will be interesting to see how these changes affect the uptake of Facebook’s advertising system. Given the recent announcement that MySpace’s advertising platform is now operating in full swing, it appears that Facebook wanted to make a little splash of their own. That… and the fact that Facebook’s investors might be looking for some sort of return on their investment.

As a current Facebook advertiser, it would have been great to see them invest in their platform and add some very basic functionality that other services already have. Here is a list of my “Darn, Sure Wish Facebook Had This in Their System” wishes:

1. Conversion tracking - Google, Yahoo and MSN all have it and it REALLY helps explain to a client where their marketing dollars have gone and specifically what RETURN they have received for it

2. Better Billing Reporting - It can’t be that hard to create a system that sends me a pdf invoice of when a credit card has been changed and shows the breakdown of those charges/clicks

3. An MCC - Recently when I wanted to set up a new client I found that until another client had paid off their credit card… I couldn’t create a new campaign. Having some type of “My Client Centre” would be nice and would help manage different accounts in a more streamlined process.

4. Reports in HTML - Create the option of having reports generated as HTML, not just excel!

Basic rule of thumb (and this goes to Yahoo and MSN too) if you want more advertisers, serve the companies who are selling your product with effective tools to manage your system.

You can see Facebooks new changes by accessing their beta site here - however at last check, this was re-directing to their existing home page.

Forums are a great way to participate in meaningful conversations on your specific topic or industry while building awareness of your website, products and services as well as developing back links to it. In many cases forum links are followed which is even better! However, that’s not what matters in this context. With forums we’re really interested in generating exposure to your brand and developing the back links from .ca domains and have a Toronto focus.

So, how do you find them? I created a list of “Toronto Forums” with .ca domains by using the following three advanced search queries in Google. Use the Advanced Search option in Google and list 100 results at a time to make your life easier.

• [vBulletin toronto site:.ca] Finds toronto based forums using vbulletin and a .ca domain.
• [phpbb toronto site:.ca] Finds toronto based forums using phpbb and a .ca domain.
• [forum toronto site:.ca] Finds toronto based forums which contain forum as a keyword and a .ca domain.

With any one of these queries you can specify additional keywords to target specific topics. For example, if you want to just find gardening forums in Toronto on a .ca domain you can try this:

•  [gardening forum toronto site:.ca]

The following forums are just a selection of ones I found while working some of these queries discussed above.

1. Urban Toronto
2. UFT Students (you don’t need to be student)
3. GT Cars Forum
4. Blue Jay Way (Baseball forum)
5. Leafs Forever (Hockey Forum)
6. Digital Home Forum
7. Toronto Raptors - Hooplife Forums
8. Biking Forum
9. Toronto Argonauts Forum
10. Red Patch Boys - Toronto FC Supporters Club (Soccer)
11. Law Students Forum
12. Toronto Integras (Acura Forum)
13. Toronto Golf Insider Forum
14. Toronto Nissan Forum
15. Toronto Mazda Forum
16. Canadian Aviation Historical Society Forum
17. EHMac - Canada’s MAC Forum
18. Canadian Automobile Sports Club Forum
19. Gardening Life Forum
20. Cybertron
21. CinemaSpy
22. Smart Canucks
23. Golf Resource
24. Pro Gaming League Forum
25. E46 Toronto - BMW Forum
26. Acoustic Neuroma Association of Canada
27. Ask A Master Gardener
28. Canada Jams Forum
29. Canadian Nursing Students’ Association
30. Young Poets

I encourage you to experiment with this and identify possible forums relevant to your site. Most importantly - start participating on the forums. Be sure to setup your signature with a link back to your website and if possible do it with one of your most important keywords!

Up next: Post #8: Directories. Find out which directories might be worth participating in within the Toronto context.

To become a Qualified Company in the Google Advertising Professionals program, a company must:

1. Have a billing and mailing address in a country where company qualification is available.
2. Employ at least two Qualified Individuals in the program. Individuals must be qualified under the main company-registered My Client Center account and not their own account. See the requirements for becoming a Qualified Individual.
3. Build and maintain the minimum 90-day required total client spend (spend requirements vary by country) for the company’s My Client Center account.

In Canada, a company must maintain a minimum of $100,000 over a 90-day time period to receive certification.

For good measure, Spark also has its Yahoo Ambassador and MSN Adwords certification in addition to its new Google Qualified Company status.

Spark would like to thank our PPC clients for entrusting their internet marketing to us and helping us meet this goal!

Calculating a complete ROI on internet marketing can be tricky especially when you need to track conversions. Most sites do so by counting the number of web leads they receive from contact forms. Unfortunately this is only part of the picture. A significant number of web visitors actually turn to the telephone when it comes to taking the big conversion step.

Most business until now have had to rely entirely on sales staff or receptions asking how the caller found them which results in spotty data. Welcome in the age of call tracking services which take the guess work out of this entire process. With our flexible call tracking service our customers can overnight begin tracking phone conversions right back to the marketing medium that generated the lead. That could be search engine optimization via organic clicks on the search engine results pages, pay per click ads, 3rd party websites such as major directories and of course offline marketing as well. Simple javascript replaces the websites usual number with the tracking number produced by the service. The visitor calls the tracking number and the call is instantly bridged to your regular lines. However, in the process the conversion is recorded.

We can track:

• What marketing medium generated the call
• Which keywords
• When they called, and how long the call lasted
• The callers actual phone number
• The callers geographic location
• Calls can even be recorded for training purposes (audio notice must be provided for the caller)
• For a small fee complete address look up can be done as well

A powerful reporting portal lets our WhoCalled customers look at their call volume over time and by campaign as well as dig deeper into individual calls. Data can be exported in various formats to be used in other systems such as your favorite CRM for lead tracking purposes.

The WhoCalled service has been an outstanding accompaniment to our standard marketing efforts. Our clients appreciate the power of the data that comes with it as we’re able to calculate much more accurate ROI’s on their marketing. In some cases we have seen the Cost Per Lead be reduced by as much as 50% because half of the conversions were being done by phone - and our customers had no idea.

If you’re interested in experiencing this powerful yet simple to use service for your business we encourage you to call our marketing team 905 663-2404 ext 114 to find 0ut how you can get started. Service plans start as low as $35 (CDN) / number and $0.15 (CDN) / minute for the long distance

Advertising, or selling links? It’s fine a fine line but when crossed can have some serious repercussions. Google position is that they don’t like it when you sell links only for PageRank. Instead sell banners and text ads that draw traffic to your site - if they pass a little PageRank, that’s OK!

So what happened to Newsday? Well, Google caught them selling links and penalized them for it. Perhaps overtime they’ll recover as most sites which receive a penalty do.

If you’re going to sell links from your site then you have to do it through back room. Don’t announce it on your site, don’t send the requests via email. Telephones are the only way to go in this regard.

Our opinion? Don’t buy or sell links for PageRank. Most business rely too heavily on Google for the traffic and it simply is not worth the risk.

Jarkko Laine breaks down a well thought out list of top female bloggers in the industry in this thorough article. My favourite main point in this article is that more women are becoming a part of the technology industry overall, blogging regularly and encouraging other women to get involved. This is a very positive message for those of us just starting out in the industry.

Instead of repeating the list of women here, what I am going to do is lay out the top 10 and also the ones that I found most interesting and have started to subscribe to. Can’t learn enough! I have to note one little peeve if you will indulge me. When trying to add some of these top 50 blogs to my Google Reader collection…some did not have an RSS feed available or have it noticeable. If bloggers are looking for an audience than please please please make your RSS feed link noticeable, available, clear…anything that would encourage me to click on it. PLEASE!!!! Further, if you don’t have an RSS link available to your audience…go get one! I can’t imagine that people are writing just for them…there has to be an audience of sorts. Rant complete!

Back on track. I have only entered the world of blogs in the last 2 years so it is a fairly exciting and new discovery on my part. Reading new information from a variety of sources on a regular basis is very exciting. Please feel free to share your favourite blogs and reasons why you love them! I appreciate your recommendations.

Alright…to the top 10 on the list of the most influential female bloggers:

10. Lisa Sugar

Sugar is the Editor-in-Chief of Sugar Publishing and started www.popsugar.comthat houses several networks surrounding celebrity gossip. NxE noted that her blog is significant because the project has been funded by Sequoia (they also funded Google and Youtube)…should be something to watch out for!

9. Ana Marie Cox

Cox has made herself famous, if you will, by writing political gossip as www.Wonkette.com with her alias Wonkette Emerita. The popularity of Wonkette gave her writer’s kudos in the world of politics. She wrote in Time Magazine’s blog and is currently the editor of Radar.

Personally, I love both Canadian and American politics and as such, will be taking a look at Cox’s work. It sounds exciting!! Who can resist?!

8. Xeni Jardin

Jardin is a woman of many talents as a tech culture journalist; co-editor of www.boingboing.net; co-host of Boing Boing tv; articles published in Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, Playboy and many more. NxE also notes that Jardin has also appeared on radio, television, and runs the Xeni Tech podcast. She is edgy and controversial…a love her or hate her personality and part of a hugely growing community online.

7. Heather Armstrong

Armstrong is well known for being fired from her job after gossiping about her co-workers and company on her blog. I love her already! She writes under the nickname, Dooce and her style is both fun and personal. According to NxE, “her incisive writing, wit and honesty” has given her a unique writing style and landed her in spot number 7. Check it out www.dooce.com! I have also subscribed to this one.

6. Erin Kissane

Kissane is the writer and editorial strategist for good editorial practices and business communications. Her blog, www.alistapart.com is an important resource to web developers. NxE totes her as a person who will “define what the Internet will be today and in the future.”

5 . Michelle Malkin

Malkin is known for her political socially conservative perspective and has made appearances on MSNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN. Her writing is very controversial…so you know I will be checking it out! Plainly, when Malkin speaks and writes…people listen and read.

www.michellemalkin.com

4. Pamela Jones

Jones is the online legal guru focusing on issues surrounding open source and free software community. She keeps the rest of us non-legal minded folk up to date. She is currently the editor of www.groklaw.net and has offered her knowledge to the book Open Source 2.0: The Continuing Evolution.

3. Gina Trapani

Trapani is one of the best writers of technology and productivity today. She has acquired a committed large readership. Lifehacker is a Gawker media web blog that provides tips and tricks, software and information to its followers. NxE says that it is a “must-read for many people, bloggers, and non-bloggers alike.” This will now be moved to my top 5 list!

www.lifehacker.com

2. Ariana Huffington

How does this sound: 12 books, co-founder and editor of the www.huffingtonpost.com. Huffington Post is a political blog and another on my list to follow. Huffington Post is the fourth ranked blog on Technorati and gets more than 18 million page views this month. It also helps that she has a few noted celebrity friends, according to NxE, such as Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron. Time Magazine listed Ariana Huffington on their list of 100 Most Influential People in 2006.

1. Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page & Jory Des Jardins

The top female blogger is a team effort from these three women that are meeting and writing for the purpose of promoting a community site that encourages and supports female bloggers. These ladies have planned and are continuing to plan events that encourage woman to start and succeed at blogging. This is a blog that myself and all other women reading this blog should check out. www.blogher.com

Happy Reading!

~S

A while ago we wrote about hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) firm. Since then Google has updated their page titled “What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?“. If you’re looking to hire an SEO I highly recommend you read Googles page on the topic. The more informed you are about the services you’re trying to buy the more likely you are to find a reputable company who truly has your best interests in mind.

One thing in particular stands out in this Google guideline - “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.” While there may be unknown “tricks” which may be producing organic ranking results which others have not yet caught on to - there really are no secrets in search engine optimization. Simply following best practices and standards for modern website development combined with a solid understanding of 1. Your keywords, 2. Linking and promoting and finally, 3. Conversion Principles, you will ranking for your terms and you will convert traffic.

Any SEO firm which is unwilling to fully explain their practices in language you can clearly understand is not someone you should seariously consider partnering with.

So before you make your decision, get informed about the search engine optimization and ask as many questions you can about the SEO firms you’re considering hiring - pick the one with the best answers and not necessarily the best price!

If you want to know more about SEO - feel free to contact me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know at no obligation. By informing consumers I’m improving our industry, and that’s good for everyone.

Blogging is a fantastic way to produce timely content on your website and participate in current conversations online. Confine this to a local geographic area and you’re now reinforcing your local presence to the search engines.

The first step in this process is installing the blog software - we recommend WordPress as it’s free and powerful. You should always install your blog on your main domain in something like www.domain.com/blog or a folder named after your most important keyword.

Installing WordPress is beyond the scope of this post but you can great information about it on the WordPress site. After installing the blog you should start investigating blogs you can participate in. Here is how you can do that:

Following Conversations In Your Target Locality

You need to find blogs that are publishing content preferably in your industry but not necessarily within the context of Toronto as a location or any geographic area you are targeting. There are several ways you can do this:

• Use Bloglines & Technorati to query for blogs with Toronto as a term. Visit the blogs and if they are indeed publishing content about Toronto then subscribe to their feed in your Google Reader (or favorite feed-reader application).
• Use Google to find .ca blogs talking about Toronto with this query [toronto blog site:.ca]. Add another qualifying keyword to target your industry. Visit each site and if it’s appropriate subscribe to their feed
• Setup Google Alerts to send you current data about your industry with .ca and blog as part of the query. Review and subscribe to those feeds as well.

Now that you’ve identified a tremendous source of content to work with you need to start reading each of the blogs and participating through comments in a very meaningful way. Don’t spam. Don’t use a keyword as your name. Don’t respond to to more than one post on your first visit to the blog. Don’t comment on older posts unless you find it particularly insightful! Use your real name, email and targeted URL and leave well written meaningful comments.

Do this on a regular basis  at least once a week and watch your backlinks grow. These are good links (followed or not)!

Publishing Content On Your Website

Now that you’ve begun participating with the other blogs - start blogging on your own site. Be free with your links and promote the other blogs your reading and commenting on. Overtime you’ll get their attention and they’ll begin reciprocating and your readership will grow as will your backlinks.

Identify timely local news and events preferably in your industry to post about.

All of these activities will serve to reinforce to the search engines your local presence and intent on being known for geographic terms!

Up next: Post #7: Forums. Find out which forums might be worth participating in within the Toronto context.

If you have reads some or all of the selections below, please post your reviews for others to see.  Multiple perspectives are always beneficial.  Over the next few months I am going to read and post a summary and a review of some of the books listed below.

1. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by James C. Collins

2. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James C. Collins

3. The Emyth Revisted: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to do About it by Michael E. Gerber

4. The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg & John Mann

5. Blink: Powerful Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

Okay, those 5 should get you at least until September!!

~S

In reading my feeds today I came across the Google blog post “Introduction to Google Ranking” which is a great post introducing the topic of how Google ranks the search results. It’s apparently the first of many posts on the topic. While I found it quite informative what really stuck out is this statement

“We make about ten ranking changes every week. . . “

That’s quite amazing if you think about it. In the span of 7 days the algorithms used to rank the results for a search term can change as many as ten times. There are two things to consider about this fact. First, that Google takes search very seriously and they are constantly working to improve the process for end users. Second, it’s no wonder that rankings vary from day to day including parts of a single day! When evaluating your rankings you can’t just look at a single day and say today we’re successful with our results. It just does not work that way. You have to look at longer term trends to determine overall results for your search engine optimization efforts.

In fact, if the particular algorithm change was strongly focused on a particular search it’s likely that your rankings could be dropped significantly for a short period of time while the results of that change are being evaluated and further refined.

If you want to know a little more about the Google ranking process I recommend you read the blog post. It really is informative!