Web Design Burlington, Oakville, SEO, PPC, Adwords

I attended an event in Toronto recently that was hosted by Google Canada to kick start the recently launched "Google Engage for Agencies" program. The Engage for Agencies program is new and its purpose is to provide training and support for agencies (like us) that help businesses with their AdWords efforts.

The event was first class and featured a keynote presentation by Chris O'Neil, director of Google Canada, as well as presentations, training and Q & A by other "Googlers" from the AdWords division.

Here is some information from the event you might find interesting.

If you have been learning about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, you may have come across the term "Backlink". For those of you who have not, you may be wondering what exactly is a backlink, anyway, and why do you need them?

A Backlink, also known as an inbound link, is simply a link from another website to yours. Backlinks are important for SEO because search engines like Google and Bing use them to help rank websites in their search results. Backlinks are something like votes from the web - the more "votes" (backlinks) a site or page has, the more authority it is considered to have by the search engines. There are many other factors that are used, but backlinks are one of the most important. Basically, if you want to show up high in the search results, it is good to have a lot of backlinks.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS you no doubt will have seen the standard RSS button on web sites and wondered what is was. RSS is essentially an internet web feed format designed to share web content such as blogs, news, audio, video and a variety of other on-line content. RSS mostly stands for "Really Simple Syndication" but is sometimes referred to as "Rich Site Summary". In this article I would like to take a closer look at RSS, what it does, and how it can help your business.

The typical internet user may have several sites or more that they frequent for their content. They may visit Yahoo News, CNN and The Wall Street Journal for current events. They may also visit several entertainment or personal interest sites like PGA.COM or MLB.COM in addition to trade related sites like Hwy52.com. This ad hock method of information retrieval is very inefficient and can be quite time consuming.

First of all, let's get straight what a press release is and is not. A press release is a short article written in a factual way. It is not a sales letter or an advertisement. Its main purpose is to promote your product, company, or event to the media in order to gain publicity. A well written press release can make a reporter's job easier by providing the basics for a news story, but a poorly written one will be discarded.

The most important thing to remember about a press release is that it must be "newsworthy". Newsworthy basically means something that is interesting enough to be, well, news!  The five main criteria used to determine whether an item is newsworthy are its timeliness (is it current?), significance, location (how local is it?), prominence, and human interest value. For example, a men's clothing store giving Tie-tying tips to dads for Father's day is news (timeliness, human interest), but having a Father's Day sale is not. Remember, it has to be interesting to those in the media and to your audience, not just to you.

If you have a small business, and haven't signed up at Google's Local Business Center* yet, you really need to do it! Local search has become the hot search space, and if you ever want to get noticed in Google's "7-Pack" (The 7 business listings that appear beside the map at the top of a search results page), then you need to get started. You can sign up even if you don't have a web site!

You can find it through Google Maps (http://www.google.com/maps), just follow the link that says "Put your business on Google Maps". This will take you to the Local Business Center. If you already have a Google Account, just sign in with your email and password, or you can use your Adwords login and password. If not, sign up for a new account with Google.

Here are some of the top selling .ca business-oriented domain names of the past year, including the top two which sold in January of 2010:

• Play.ca - $34,000 USD
• Vans.ca - $25,000 USD
• Interaction.ca - $30,000 CAD
• ForSale.ca - $29,000 CAD
• Boots.ca - $19,950 USD
• Suits.ca - $18,900 USD
• PropertyManagement.ca - $14,200 USD
• YourMoney.ca - $8,000 USD
• Stores.ca - $8,000 CAD
• HomeBusiness.ca - $8,000 CAD

Every day in North America more individuals than you may realize use the major internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to search for products and services that you sell and provide. Chances are that if you are not on the first or second search results page for your keywords or phrases you are not going to get that call.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a term that refers to the art and science of getting people to find your website on the internet. It's a bit of a misnomer actually as you do not "optimize" the search engines but rather you optimize your web site to be found and to rank high on the search engines.

I can say from my own observation that SEO is a science that it not fully exploited in the majority of businesses. Most likely do not have an SEO strategy and have not given this subject the priority it deserves. Consequently, there is a real opportunity for businesses that develop appropriate strategies to lead in this area.

Like many of you I no longer use the yellow pages to look for products and services but instead rely on the major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo. When I need a product or service for either personal or business use I simply enter the keyword or phrase in to my favourite search engine and based on the search results I will decide how to proceed. Getting your business to rank high on natural search results pages is important but just as important is whether a potential customer will click through to your site or to your competitors site.

There are many reasons why people choose one business over another when both rank high on search engines but I want to discuss only one for now  - your domain name type.