A Website SEO Review of your website is an excellent way to begin optimizing your website. You will receive a complete set of recommendations on how to improve your website visibility and rank as high as possible with the major search engines.

Your Website SEO Review will focus on four major areas:

1. Structural Problems
2. Keyword Analysis
3. Competitive Analysis
4. Recommendations

Website Review Outline

Structural Problems

* Identify any problems with your current web design that may be preventing it from ranking higher.
* Examine any technical issues that may be causing problems.

Keyword Analysis

* Research the most popular SEO keywords people use to search for your website.
* Uncover the most powerful keywords with the least competition.

Competitive Analysis

* Compare your websitsite to other websites in your industry.
* Show you why other websites are ranking higher than yours.
* Identify areas where you can outrank your competitors.

Recommendations

* Step by step recommendations on how to improve your website rankings.
* Show you the strategic changes that can be made to attract more visitors to your website.
* I will go over the report with you, and answer any questions you may have.

No Obligation
After your SEO Website Review, there is no obligation to purchase any further SEO Services from Search Marketing Vancouver. If you would like me to help you with any of the recommendations, I will provide you with a written estimate, and the decision will be yours.

If you are tired seeing your competitors listed above you in the search engine rankings, order an SEO Website Review from Search Marketing Vancouver today.

For a free estimate on a Website Review contact Search Marketing Vancouver at: 604-817-1032 or email Richard@SearchMarketingVancouver.com

You’re probably aware of the importance of building backlinks to your website, but you may be unsure exactly where to start. Justilien Gaspard form Search Engine Watch put together a short but sweet article earlier this month called Link Building With a Small Budget.

Check it out. It’s a great place to start.

Adding text-based links to internal pages within your website will help search engines index as many pages in your website as possible and improve the ranking for the page the link points to.

The visible text used for any hyperlink is known as Anchor Text.

Search engines use the anchor text from incoming links as one of the methods to index a page.

For example the Vancouver Storage website for Yaletown Mini Storage,   the anchor text for an internal link to a page about their Vancouver storage facility should contain keywords related to that page.

The anchor text in the above links are: Vancouver Storage and Vancouver storage facility.

Varying the anchor text is preferable as it appears more natural than if the identical text is used repeatedly. Using the example above, other useful internal links are:

Vancouver Mini Storage
Vancouver Self Storage
Vancouver Public Storage

All the above examples are all far superior to anchor text such as: Click Here which does nothing to tell Google what the page is about.

The same applies to backlinks as well, but the anchor text used for a backlink is often out of your control. Focus on what you CAN control.  Start with your internal links.

Every two years, SEOmoz releases their Search Engine Ranking Factors survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds. This is the most comprehensive, and respected survey of its kind.

72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document is an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents.

By analyzing the results you can see which SEO activities have the greatest impact on your search results.

The biggest change from the 2007 Survey, is that now top 3 factors all refer to the quality of your External links, or Backlinks. Simply placing your keywords in your Page title isn’t enough to rank for competitive terms. You’ve got to develop a Link Building Strategy to be successful in SEO.

So you’ve just created your first Pay Per Click ad, and your dying to see what kind of placement you’ll receive on Google. An Excellent idea.

So you search on your favorite keyword on Google to see your ad and there it is. Mission Accomplished. You try a few other keywords, just to make sure they work as well.

Later that day, you search again (to make sure your ad is still there.) You notice the placement has changed, so you check it again later that night, and again the next morning.

While knowing your ad placement is important in determining your bid, the problem with constantly searching for your own ad, is that your are slowly but surely lowering your quality score. Fortunately there is a better way.

Google has a free tool designed for this very purpose called the Adwords Preview Tool. It allows you to see how your ad will appear on Google for any given search, but will not register as an actual impression, so it will not affect your quality score.

Simply enter the search term, select which Google domain and region and hit the Preview Ads button. Use it as often as you like!

Adwords provides a great deal of flexibility on defining your target area for your PPC campaigns.

When you first begin a new campaign, one of the first questions you need to answer is questions is, “In what geographical locations do you want your ads to appear?”

The easiest way to target all of Greater Vancouver is to select,
Select one or more other locations. underneath the pre-set radio buttons.

Select the the Custom tab in the Top Right of the Pop-up Box.

At the top Left, select the Map Point link above the Target a custom location box. By entering New Westminster in the location box, you can then target the 30 km surrounding area covering most of Greater Vancouver.

Click the View on Map button to see all the areas within the 30 km radius. This will include West Vancouver, Tsawwassen, White Rock, Langley, Maple Ridge, and everywhere in between.

If West Vancouver and Tsawwassen are not in your target areas, you can easily select a smaller radius, or move the centre farther east to another location such as Surrey. Once your satisfied with you’re target area, hit the Add button.

You’ll then see 30 km around New Westminster, BC, CA (Custom) in the Selected location box at the bottom.

To add another city or town, like Abbotsford, simply click the town on the map, and check the box beside the name of the town in the select location drop down menu and it will be automatically added to the Selected location box.

Once you’re satisfied with your defined target area in blue, hit save at the bottom of the pop-up box and you’re done.

How to Make Your WordPress Blog Look Like a Website

More and more small business are using WordPress as their primary website. While traditionally known as a powerful blogging platform, WordPress can also be used as a flexible, low-cost alternative to designing a website from scratch.

The key to making your WordPress site look more like a Website and less like a blog is the use of Pages, rather than Posts. Unlike posts which are constantly updated, pages can be designed once, then left alone.

Here’s an example of a WordPress site using the Vigilance theme (Just one of over 1,000 free templates)

Nav Bar Across the Top
Selecting a theme with a Nav Bar across the top automatically makes this home page seem more like a website, and less like a blog. The effect is even greater due to the elements that are NOT there. Notice there is no mention of comments, pings, categories, blog rolls, or an achieved list of posts.

Call to Action on Every Page
In this example, when navigating to the other pages, the right column will remain the same on each page. The advantage to this type of layout, is that the big orange button with my phone number on it (my ‘Call to Action’) is visible on every page.

The right column is made up entirely from easy to manage widgets. Widgets are point-and-click, fill-in-the-blanks preset elements like photos, lists of services, and quote boxes for testimonials. No programming required.

Make a NEWS Page
A common reason I hear small business owner give for not starting a blog, is the time it will take, and the added pressure of feeling they have to keep posting to their blog on a regular basis.

One simple solution is to call your website updates NEWS instead of BLOG. If you don’t feel like updating your website, you don’t have to! But any time you wish to announce the completion of a new job, introduce a new product or service, or run a promotion, just add it to your NEWS page.

Single-column Themes
Another option is to select a single-column theme allows you to have each page look completely different. With thousands of free or low-cost themes, you’ll certainly be able to find one that matches the look and feel of your business. Check out the Free Themes Directory to find one you like.

Here’s another post from Louis Lazaris on how to Make Your WordPress Blog look like a Website.

With a WordPress Website you won’t have to call your web designer every time you need to update your site. Hosting costs range for $5-$7 month and I charge $300 for my WordPress Setup Service
Call 604-817-1032 for more information. I’d be happy to help!

When it comes to Selecting WordPress Themes. Some are better than others in terms of SEO. One feature you should look for is the ability to customize your footer.

As the footer will appear on every page, it’s a great place to place your keywords.

Here’s an example using the Constructor WordPress theme from a WordPress site I set up for Vancouver environmental painting company, Metal Dog Painting.

By including their areas of services in the footer, they increase their chances of appearing in the search results for those areas, without having to repeat them on each page manually.

The footer is low-key is a light grey colour, so it doesn’t detract from the desired focus of each individual page.

Regardless of the theme you chose, you should always add the All In One SEO Pack. This will also you to have complete control of the Title Tag on your Home page, and will automatically generate an SEO Page Title for each post.

While your at it, install the Google Sitemaps Generator as well so your sitemap is automatically updated every time you add a page or post.

If you would like a WordPress Website or Blog Setup for your company, call 604-817-1032. It’s a great place to start if you don’t yet have a website.

First of all I’d like to thank Richard for inviting me on here to write about the topic I can make sense of these days. I met Richard face to face at he last Vancouver SEM Meetup group and had a great conversation about link building, and here we are now. I’m hoping to get your brains going on the topic at hand and I should give you some ideas that will lead to link building strategies that you wouldn’t have thought of.

For those of you wondering who I am, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ryan Clark and I’m a Vancouver based link building consultant, but most people know me from my blog over at Linkbuildr.com. I’ve been doing SEO for just about 8 years now and sometime in the middle there got heavily into the link building aspect. I’m not sure if it’s a sad fact to state that I get turned on by backlink profile data and hunting new ways to build links, but that’s the (sad) truth.

Read more »

BC AIM hosted a sold out session October 8th at the Sutton Place Hotel entitled;

Is Social Media Marketing all Hype?

The second of a two part series on Social Media, the engaging and informative luncheon consisted of a panel of 4 esteemed Social Media experts including George Moen, president of Blenz Coffee, Richard Sandor, managing director of DDB Vancouver, Chris Breikss, president of 6S Marketing; and Ryan Holmes, CEO of Invoke Media. Read more »