Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

Internet Marketing Toronto: Post #9 Press Releases

Internet Marketing Toronto: Post #9 Press Releases

In our last post we talked about how the use of local directories can boost your local rankings. Today we’re talking about Press Releases.

Press Releases can be a very powerful tool in your local search engine optimization strategy. Specifically you want to create news about your company that is both interesting and geographically bound to Toronto (or any other location you are targeting). Most people are convinced that they have no news to issue as a press release. The reality is that all companies have something to say about themselves. Whether it’s new hires or new products or services. There is always something to say. In addition you can create news by responding to local events in a timely fashion. For example, if a small local disaster occurs as did here in Toronto this past weekend with the very large Propane Explosion which left thousands of people evacuated from their homes for more than 24 hours you could offer temporary help by offering supplies or shelter, or covering hotel bills for a family or two in need. This is certainly noble, newsworthy and good PR. The bottom line is that your company is likely not in short supply of newsworthy information.

Once you have a newsworthy idea to publish as  a Press Release you need to write it up. I’ve attached a very simple template to jump start your next press release. Write the story and be sure to target a specific related keyword, proof read it, and the publish it online. You can get away with using all of the free Press Release services most of the time. For those really newsworthy stories, those which you want to try and get picked up by mainstream media you need to opt for the paid services such as PRWeb.com. I’ve included URLs to some of the free PR sites below.

After you publish your press release you should be looking for three things:

1. In Google you want to see if you’re PR is coming up on the first or second page for keywords associated with your Press Release.
2. An increase in backlinks to your site as a result of the Press Release being picked up and published by other website.

Combined with the previous recommendations we’ve made in this series you’ll continue to see improved overall rankings for your geographically targeted keywords!

Free Press Release Sites

• 24-7 Press Release.com
• 1888 Press Release.com
• ClickPress
• EcommWire
• Express Press Release
• Free Press Release
• Free Press Release Center
• I-Newswire
• Newswire Today
• PR.com
• PR9.net
• PR-Inside
• PR-Buzz
• PR Compass
• PRLog

Downloads: Internet Marketing Toronto Press Release Template (MS Word .doc format)

Up next: Post #10: Backlink Development. Find out how to tie all of these activities together in a backlink development strategy!

New Google Tool - Insights for Search

I was popping by Google’s Inside Adwords Blog today and read a post about a new tool called “Insights for Search.” I tested it out and was impressed at what I saw so here is a review and some notes on how to utilize Insights for Search

The idea of this tool is to give the end user a glimpse into some search history, compare peaks and valley’s to news articles (much the same way Google Trends did) but also give a user the ability to understand search behaviour. It has some really powerful features, especially for an Internet Marketing agency like ours

Some very cool features include a “heat map” of the world or any geographic region you want to target and the corresponding rising search terms for a particular keyword you are examining. Additionally, you can compare up to 5 search terms and see how a users search habits differ across geographic areas. For example, if you are in the market for Laisk surgery - the west coast of the U.S. might be more inclined to use the search phrase “lasik eye surgery” while the east coast might use the phrase “laser eye surgery” more often. As an advertiser, it is important to segment these keywords and phrases depending on the target market you are focused on.

Furthermore, you can filter your queries by various categories. One example might be “java” which will have a different meaning depending on if you are looking for a programming language or a hot cup of coffee. Using the category drop down will allow you to segment the data accordingly.

You can also look at search trends by a particular date range. The default is set to 2004 - present but opening the drop down allows you to select some set ranges as well as a custom range.

Comparing your data by “location” and “time ranges” is also an option which can present some very powerful data but only for the top searches for the day, not custom keywords you select.

The tool also has a handy export feature to excel.

I was puzzled by the numbers that appear in the graph and upon further investigation found that these aren’t actual search numbers but rather “normalized” numbers that Google is displaying. You can read more about this here.

Help! My Bids Got Jacked Up by Google - What Do I Do?

I had an interesting experience yesterday working with a potential ppc management client to evaluate why his bids went from $0.60 to a $12.00 minimum. I have seen this many times before and thought I would share my process and list of things to check when evaluating why your Google AdWords bids have been jacked up. In this case, the clients CTR’s were great in almost all keyword cases and his overall average was above 4%. Thus, his CTR wasn’t the issue for the minimum bid spike.

Start by refreshing yourself with both the AdWords Terms and Conditions and the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. It will give you a framework to evaluate your page and AdWords campaign. If any of the information contained in these documents raises some red flags for you, I would start there.

1. What recent changes did you make? - Have a look in your account at your change history tool. This is located under Campaign Management, Tools and My Change History. Change the date range to go back to when your bids were low and evaluate the changes leading up to the bid increases. Have some specific look at your ad changes, did any of your landing page URL’s change?

3. Website Downtime - If you have downtime monitor running, have a check to see if your site experienced some downtime closer to when your bids were raised. If so, this could be the problem and should be fixed by upgrading to better, more reliable hosting. Another, more in-depth check is to see if Google’s robots are having issues crawling your site. You can check this if you have Google Webmaster Tools running on your site. Check the robot.txt to see if the Google AdBot was having issues with your landing page and site.

2. Landing Page Load Time - Run your page through this page load time tool. Have a look at the speed in which your page loads. Are there any images that are taking a long time to load? Is there flash on your page that is eating away at your load time? If so, consider changing this to decrease your load time.

3. Landing Page Content - Have a read through the content on your landing page and pass it around to a few people who are removed from the situation. Ask them to give you 5 - 10 keywords that sum up the page. If these keywords are different than what your advertising on - they you just failed a human review. Run your site through the following tools and see what Google finds relevant for your page.

a. Google Keyword Tool - Enter in your sites url and see what keywords the tool suggests.

b. Google Adsense Preview Tool - If your using IE, you can download this tool here. Follow the instructions and use the tool on your page. See what Adsense ads Google would display on your site. Are the relevant to your topic and industry? If not, that is a good indication that Google doesn’t like your landing page. If your a Firefox user, you can download a Firefox extension for this here.

4. Privacy Policy - Google’s system tends to disfavour sites that request personal information without a clear purpose. Here are some specifics from Google’s Help Centre to guide you:

Visitors’ personal information:
- Unless necessary for the product or service that you’re offering, don’t request personal information.
- If you do request personal information, provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used.
- Give options to limit the use of a user’s personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving newsletters.
- Allow users to access your site’s content without requiring them to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.

5. If you are disfavour puzzled, you can try calling up Google and requesting to speak with a rep who can elevate your issue to be reviewed. I am not promising this will lead to anything, but if you get the right person on the right day… sometimes you can get lucky. Failing that, you could always get in touch with an internet marketing agency like us ;) who has dedicated agency reps and can further shed light on the issue.

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 8: Directories

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 8: Directories

In our last post we talked about different forums you could participate in. Today we’re talking about directories!

Directories are a great way to broadcast to the search engines that your “in business” and get referring traffic from the more popular directories.

Before we dive into the list of local Toronto directories I wanted to point out that you should seriously consider submitting to the Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web and Business.com. These three directories carry alot of weight and worth the extra money if you’re serious about increasing your online presence.

Finding directories is the same as finding forums - but with some modified advanced queries.

• [directory toronto site:.ca] Finds toronto based directories and a .ca domain.

The following directories are some that I’ve come across and like to use depending on the situation. When submitting to these or any directories I recommend you create an email forwarder such as “directories@domain.com” as there is a high probability of getting onto some spam lists.

1. Business.com
2. Yahoo! Directory
3. Best of the Web
4. Toronto Vegetarian Association
5. Downtown Toronto.ca
6. Anar.ca - Catering to Persians in Toronto
7. Canadian Art Directory
8. Yoga Toronto
9. Natural Health Care.ca
10. ServPro.ca
11. CanPages.ca
12. MyGTA

With a little searching it’s not hard to come up with quite a few candidate directories. I encourage you to experiment with the queries and get your business listed!

When it comes down to listing your business be sure to have the following information prepared:

• Title: Write a nice short title that fully describes your business and includes your most important keyword(s)
• Description: Write a longer description of your business that expands on the topic(s) in your title. Be sure to user your keyword again.
• Meta Description: A simplified version of your description which would fit into your meta description tag.
• Contact Name: Use your real name, or someone in your company
• Contact Email: Be sure to create an email forwarder for this as you will get this email address on spam lists.

After submitting to the directories be prepared to activate some of the requests by email - so be sure to check your junk mail folders. A few weeks after submitting to the directories have a look at you backlinks again - you’ll begin to see some of these starting to popup!

Up next: Post #9: Press Releases. Find out how to create Press Releases that will help with your local search engine optimization!

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 7: Forums

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 7: Forums

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.

Spark Internet Marketing - Google AdWords Qualified Company

At long last, Spark Internet Marketing has been awarded our Google Qualified Company status (insert polite applause here). Since launching our company under a year and a half ago, it has been a goal of ours to manage enough Google AdWords spend and clients to elevate our standing with Google from “Qualified Individual” to “Qualified Company.”

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!

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 6: Blogging

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 6: Blogging

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.

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 5: Produce Local Based Content

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 5: Produce Local Based Content

In our last post we talked about integrating Google Analytics and configuring it properly. Today we’re talking about the need to produce local based content.

The three major search engines have become quite sophisticated and are no longer simply looking for links and keywords. Today it’s more about relevancy and timeliness. Search engines want to serve up results for searches that are more current than others if those make sense. So for our purposes in this series that means you need to write content for you site about local news and events as they pertain to your industry!

If you’re not staying on top of local events in your industry you should be. You can then write about them as they are happening on your website. You’ll generate more traffic for your site by getting ranked higher. All the while you’re reinforcing the fact that you’re website is about this specific locality which will benefit your rankings long term.

We wrote about staying on top of your industry in a earlier post, so you should check that one out. Also - the best and simplest way to write content for your site is through a blog - but you can always do it old school and simply write new static pages for your site!

Up next: Post #6: Blogging. One of the best and simplest ways to produce local based content is to install and write on your blog. Along with blogging comes in actively participating in local blogs in your industry which generates links back to your site and reinforces your local presence to the search engines!

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 4: Analytics Integration

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 4: Analytics Integration

In our previous post we talked about all of the on page optimizations you need to do in order for your site to be recognized as being locally relevant to Toronto (or any geography you’re targeting). Today we’re talking about integrating analytics and knowing what information you need to review.

Google Analytics Integration

There are quite a few analytics packages out there, some are free while others are not. For the time being we prefer to recommend Google Analytics  purely for it’s balance between simplicity, ease of integration and features. There are more powerful platforms and simpler ones too - this one just strikes a nice balance.

Here are the basic steps for obtaining an analytics account and integrating it into your site:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and sign up for a Google Account. If you have one already, skip this step.
2. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and choose the SignUp Now button from the middle of the page.
3. Once your signed up you need insert the Google Analytics tracking code into each page of your website above the </body> tag.
4. Deploy your pages and you should see that Google Analytics has detected the code and data should start collecting - although you cannot see it until the next day.

Now that your analytics are being tracked you should do the following things:

1.  Set your default page (the page that displays when enter just your domain name into the browser). Do this by clicking the Analytics Setting link in the top left corner, and then editing the settings for the section titled “Main Website Profile Information”. The default page is usually something like index.html, .htm, .php, .asp, or default.html, .htm, .asp, .php. This causes your Google Analytics to consolidate pageviews for your domain represented as “/” and your home page (default page).
2. Setup a Goal to track conversions. Most of the time visitors to your site will contact you by filling out a contact form. If you don’t have one, set one up with a seperate thank you page. From your Analytics Settings page you can define a new “goal” by specifying the name of the thank you page and assigning a goal name. Now whenever anybody submits a contact form a goal will be recorded.
3. From within your analytics account you should always keep an eye on the keywords that are bringing you traffic and monitoring your bounce rate for them. If it’s a relevant term but with a high bounce rate you may need to improve the quality of content on the page that is ranking for that term.
4. Finally - you should have a look at the geographic locations where your drawing traffic from. Ideally if you’ve been doing your local search engine optimization properly you should start to see an increase in local traffic!

Up next: Post #5: Produce Local Based Content. Producing some local based content gives you the breadth of content needed to anchor your website in a specific geographic region. You don’t need tons of content - just some!

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 3: On Page Optimization

Internet Marketing Toronto - Post 3: On Page Optimization

In our previous post we walked you through a complete review of your competition from a keyword perspective and showed you which key elements to keep track of. In this post we’re concentrating on the on page optimizations you’ll need to make to your website in order for the search engines to recognize your intent to rank locally.

You should pay particular attention to the following on page elements:

1. Flash
   If your site is in Flash have it taken out of Flash by a competent developer - and give them this information when they work on your site to ensure it’s constructed properly.
2. Titles
   Title tags are arguably the single most important on page factor for getting your website to rank for your chosen keyword. The title is displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and the search engines first hint at what your web page (website) is about. You should write a compelling title tag for every page of your site and be sure to include the most important keyword for that page towards the beginning of the tag. In this case be sure to use Toronto as part of the title tag. I also like to include the phone number “… | 1 888 123-1234″ at the end. Why? sometimes when people are looking for you they just want to contact you - the fewer clicks the better and if that means they can dial you right of the SERPS - that’s OK!Now you have a title that contains your keyword, your local geographic qualifier “Toronto”, your phone number, and it needs to be compelling enough to cause searchers to click your link and visit your site.
3. Descriptions
   The description is possibly the second most important on page factor.  Be sure to write a compelling description - in most cases it’s what’s displayed right beneath your title in the SERPS and it should reinforce the message in your title by expanding on the keyword topic and geographic qualifier. It’s with this description that you have the best opportunity to write something to compel searchers to click on your link vs the other 10 on the page.
4. ALT Text
   ALT Text is the text which displays when an image is missing or images are turned off. Only add ALT Text to images which convey information to the end user.  Do not add ALT Text to images which are used to construct the graphical look and feel of your site. So, good images for ALT Text include navigation bars which use images - repeat the name of the image but expand on it to. For example “Contact Us” as an image could have an ALT Text of “Contact Our Toronto Chiropractic Clinic”. This gives you an opportunity to relay relevant information to your visitors which includes the search engines! Other candidate images include photographs in banners, before and after shots, logos, sponsors, suppliers, charts and graphs, etc.
5. Titles For Hyperlinks (Anchor Text)
   Text based hyperlinks cannot have ALT Text, but you can specify a title attribute. As such the same rule applies to text based links as it does to images with ALT Text. Write a compelling title tag for each link on your site and use it to explain what the user will find if they click the link.Anchor text in this case is any text in the body of a page which has a hyperlink on it. For our purposes here you should atleast have one anchor text link in the first paragraph of your page that is the most important keyword you are optimizing for including the geographic qualifier of “Toronto”. Link this to your product or service page that describes your product or service. Take the time to write the title tag so that it expands on your keyword and compells the user to click the link and visit that page in your site.
6. Contact Us Page (hcard)
   The purpose of ranking on the first page of the search engines is to get customers, leads, prospects etc. right? So make sure you have given your visitors every opportunity to contact you. For starters include your phone number in the top of every webpage in your site as HTML text  - people like to copy and paste it and they can’t if its an image.Now lets consider your contact page. You should include all of your points of contact including phone, toll free, fax and email addresses for relevant departments in your company. Now - be sure to format this information using the hcard syntax.  Each of your addresses should be marked up as a separate hCard and for our purposes here we’re assuming you have a Toronto based address. hCards are address marked up with a syntax that defines your address on a web page and eliminates the guess work for search engines - now they know exactly what your address is and they can give you the credit for it. Yahoo! announced support of the format recently and we can only assume that Google and MSN are adhering to it too. I’ve provided examples for syntax which you can cut and paste (and edit the contents) directly into your site. I’ve also included the CSS styles to format the address and contact information to suit your own site.Finally you should provide a contact form which emails the information to a designated person(s) in your company (follow up is crucial) for those people who a) don’t want to call and b) may not have an email client handy to send a regular email message. Keep it simple - name, email, phone and comments. Get their contact information and then collect the rest of the information you need! Keep the form validation simple so as to not frustrate visitors and filter HTML from the comments field (on the server side) to prevent scripting errors and to reduce spam.
7. Google Map on Contact Us Page
   The more Google knows about your website and business the better. Configure a Google Map of your location and embed it into your contact page using the HTML code provided by Google! It’s convenient for your visitors and Google knows about it too!
8. Contact Information (hcard) In Footer
   Now that you’re familiar with hCards - place one for your Toronto address in the footer of every page. Remember we want to make it simple for your visitors to contact you!

Download: Example hCard
Download: Example CSS for hCard

Here are three good links for more info on hCards:
hCard Authoring | hCard Generator | hCard Viewer (paste in http://www.sparkinternetmarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/contact.html to see the hCard extracted from the sample)

Up next: Post #4: Analytics Integration. You need the analytics to track the success of your search engine optimization efforts and we show you how to easily integrate it into your site.