Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

Is The FBI Leveraging Social Media To Spread Their Message?

Recently the FBI announced via Press Release their “Operation Bot Roast” and the “Bot Herders” that the operation is targetting. Operation Bot Roast is the FBI’s attempt to identify and shut down operators of Bot Nets which are responsible for a variety of cybercrimes including phishing, email spamming and Denial of Service attacks.

What is un characteristic of this press release is the humorous names such as Bot Roast and Bot Herder. FBI press releases are never this attention grabbing. Given that this is an operation targetting cyber crimes, I think (and this is just my opinion) that the PR staff for the FBI consciously advised them to name the operations as they did so that they would appeal to the community, get blogged and passed around!

I bet we’ll see this Press Release make it round the internet very quickly!

Our Collection of Search Engine Optimization Tools

A good part of SEO involves understanding the current quality of a site across many, many factors. Figuring all of these factors out by hand is certainly possible, but it would take long time. To speed the process up, developers have created many web based tools to aid in the process. We’ve recently decided to collect all of our Search Engine Optimization tools in one place on Delicious. These are our tools (although we have a few in the works ourselves), but rather they are tools the community has produced which we use every day.

Since the Delicious feed is so convenient to use, we thought we’d share it with you. If you are interested, just take the RSS Feed URL below, and paste it into FireFox as a Live Bookmark, or your favourite RSS reader. You’ll always stay up to date since we’re constantly adding links to this feed as we come across them! Enjoy!

http://del.icio.us/rss/sparktools

Great Tip for Developing Negative Keywords in Google AdWords

After attending the Toronto SES conference, the Spark team has walked away with a basket full of great tips and improved techniques for SEO and SEM. One of my personal favourites was utilising a new report available to AdWords marketers. First, follow these steps to generate your report and then I will explain the value.

Step 1 - Access the reports tab and scroll down to the Search Query Performance report and select the radio button
Step 2 - In the Setting category select “Account”, “Summary” and the largest date range available to your account
Step 3 - Feel free to eliminate any columns you want to remove from the Advanced Settings section
Step 4 - Email the report to your address.

Once your report is available, open it up in Microsoft excel and focus on the keywords column.

Voila! What you have before you is the actual keywords and phrases that searchers used when they clicked on your ads. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT??? Well, because you can now glean any and all possible negative keywords that don’t generate relevant clicks on your ads.

A word of warning, negative keywords in one ad group may not apply to the next. Therefore, use the campaign negative keywords sparingly and stick to targeting your negative keywords in the appropriate ad groups.

The 10 Commandments For Writing Press Releases

Writing an affective press release is no easy task. We’ve struggled with it many times ourselves. SiteProNews yesterday wrote an article on the 10 Commandments of Writing A Press Release. Reading it will certainly help you create affective press releases more easily and quicker than ever before!

http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/jun/15.html

Chris

Google Will Anonymize Log Files After 18 Months Due to Pressure From The EU

As reported in Ars Tecnica today, Google has bowed to pressure from the EU and will anonymize log files after 18 months. This comes after their determination to retain the data for 24 months - a full two years.

Privacy advocates will certainly conside this to be a small victory!

Chris

Second Day at Search Engine Strategies Toronto!

Not surprisingly today was even better than yesterday. What we found most enlightening were the discussions around Social Media Optimization, the coming of Personalized Search and Universal Search.

Social Media

Leveraging social media sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Stumbleupon etc. to produce a spike in traffic, and then lasting links which boost your natural rankings. The key to doing it well is ensuring you’ve got something newsworthy to say, finding influential people to promote it, and watching the results.

Personalized and Universal Search

Personalized and Universal Search are going to dramatically change the way we find information, and the methods we measure SEO efforts by. For example, being on first page of a Universal Search may no longer be the most important thing because searchers will likely go deeper in the search results pages looking for that “perfect photo” or “funny video” all the while scanning the natural and paid listings along the way. Big changes are coming down the pipe!

Summary

The search landscape is changing at an alarming rate. Fortunately, through shows like SES and SMX we’re in tune with these rapid shifts, and we’ll be adjusting and augmenting our services and practices so that you may benefit the most from our services!

Stay tuned for plenty of ideas from your Internet Marketing Consultant!

Chris

First Day of Search Engine Strategies Toronto

The first day of Search Engine Strategies Toronto has been a tremenduous event. We’re very excited about all of the interesting information the conference is bringing together including topics such as Social Media Optimization, Viral Marketing and the wealth of new statistics on the state of search optimization in Canada. All of these are great news for you, our customers doing business in Canada.  The next couple of years are going to be very exciting in deed!

Many topics at the show have caught our interest including the growth in local search, and the increasing power of social media optimization as a PR and link building tactic. We’ll be tracking both of these trends and over the next few months we’ll be leveraging both of them to deliver even more value to your business.

If you have any questions about these topics, or the SES show in general please email us, OK!

Chris

Spark Attends Search Engine Strategies Toronto!

June 12th and 13th, Search Engine Strategies is holding their conference here in Toronto. We’re attending so that we can continue to stay on top of the latest in search engine optimization and search marketing techniques and trends. It’s all part of on going efforts to bring you the best strategies for your business day after day!

Attending the conference are Adam Green, Clive Lobo, Glen Reeves and myself, Christopher Kata. After the conference be sure to check back here as we’ll be posting about some of the more interesting presentations at the conference.

Chris

Use Local Search To Boost Your Targetted Traffic

Local search continues to grow in popularity. Not sure what Local Search is? Well, it’s a specific search engine which focusses on finding results that are within a specific geographic region. It’s most applicable to a person who is looking for a business or product in their immediate area.  By ensuring your listed in the local search engines you improve your odds of getting additional targetted traffic.

One small catch - not all local search engines are free, and they are not necessarily easy to get into. For example Google Local requires you to receive and respond to a postcard mailed to your physical address. It takes a little time but that’s how they verify your physical location and avoid spamming and poor quality data.

Here is a list of local search engines worth considering:

• AOL Local Search
• Ask Business Search
• True Local
• Google Maps

Chris

Great Google Analytics Blog

If you’re as interested in analytics as we are, you may find this Google Analytics blog useful. I’ve been reading it for a while now, and there is quite alot of good information on it.

Google Analytics Blog

Chris