Toronto SEO Blog

For those that have a general idea of what SEO is (which is all of you, as you found this site), but aren’t familar with the various issues involved in SEO, we thought it would be helpful to provide a one-pager that summarizes things.

For more details, refer to SEO Services Toronto, or the other pages on this Toronto SEO Blog.

When it comes to SEO services, there are two primary optimization areas:

Onsite & Offsite.

Onsite Optimization

Keyword Lists – The core of your entire SEO campaign, invest in creating a keyword list that’s going to provide you with real returns – traffic, sales, leads and ultimately, revenue.

Base Line Ranking Reports – Once you’ve created your keyword lists and know what you’re looking to rank for, run baseline SEO ranking reports BEFORE you implement anything.  This report should then be run every 30 days to show how your SEO campaign is performing.  We provide online reports for all our clients.

Meta Tags – title & description tags – yes, they are still very important – it’s normally what you see when your viewing results in any search engine. If your site’s been submitted to DMOZ then you’ll want to add a NO ODP (<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>), tag so Google doesn’t end up showing some title that an overzealous DMOZ editor decided to edit.

Content – this is what your site’s all about (or at least it should be).  Create SEO content that’s really useful for your visitors and the search engines will reward you. Never scrape content from other sites – if you can’t write it from scratch, modify it to make it unique. Make sure your content has a healthy number of keywords throughout, as well as links to your other pages.  Don’t duplicate pages, but if you have to, make sure you’re using the canonical tag.

Internal Linking Structure – use SEO links within your copy to other pages on your site. It helps to tell search engines more about your site – plus they tend to ignore main navigation(s) as they are repeated on every page.  For large sites (over 20 pages), create a sitemap page that links to all pages (or as many as possible), so it’s easy for the search engines to find and index your pages.

Directory, File Names and Navigation Structure - keep things clean, if dynamic URLs are used, create mod-re-writes to produce clean search engine friendly URLs (301 redirect the old pages if the site’s been around for awhile). Page names should be optimized based on the topic of the page – keep it logical and user friendly.  Use bread crumb trails when possible.

Onsite Optimization Summary

Build the best site you can, not just for search engine optimization Toronto, but for your users.  Provide loads of content, make it easy to navigate, and let visitors interact with your products and services. In addition to the items listed above, search engines are also beginning to look at how your visitors interact with your site as a factor in ranking sites.  Google has access to data from   multiple sources including Chrome, Analytics, Adwords, Adsense and the Plus network.  This data can paint a quality picture for your site – bounce rates, time on site, load time, conversion data, and other key metrics can show them if you have created a quality site or not.   So it’s important that you start your SEO with what’s important – creating a site that converts.

Offsite Optimization

Offsite optimization equals link building.

Simply put links are the core of Google’s search algorithm. It’s like a giant popularity contest. They call it PageRank, but what it really means is that the more sites you get to link to your site, the more popular Google will think your site, which in turn will produce better rankings.

Link campaigns can include blogs, press releases (real one, not fodder), link baiting, Forum participation, and social media activity.

Avoid old school link activities such as directory submissions, static site links and link farms  (low quality sites all on the same class C IP address), as these type of links can actually wind up getting you tossed out of the search engines.

Link building has changed a lot over the last year and any one that’s running a link campaign had better know what they are doing and plan the campaign in a way that would pass human evaluation. If there’s any indication that the links to your site are paid, you run the risk of being banned from Google.

The key take away is that link building is all about planning.  Anyone can provide links, but not just anyone knows how to plan and execute safe link building campaigns.  Learn more about link building.

Social Media – With the advent of Google+ SEO and it’s impact to SEO, social media has suddenly become more important than ever.

Social media has always been a good way to keep your overall link profile looking natural as well as being good tool for brand marketing, but with Google actually changing their search results, giving preference to stuff you’ve +1′d or have in your Circles, as well as giving prime real estate on the SERPS to related Google+ people and pages, it’s no longer an optional component of your SEO campaign, it’s a must have.

While the traditional use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to promote deals and events and for general branding campaigns remain, Google+ is where we recommend you focus your energies, from an SEO perspective.

Article Submissions/Press Releases – provided this isn’t going to take away resources from content writing and other SEO efforts, article submissions and press releases can also be another good tool to help keep your link profile diverse and natural.  However, in terms of priorities – keep this one at the bottom of your list so it doesn’t require or divert any resources away from the real drivers.

Link growth rate – going back to the planning – make sure you’re not running link blitzes. Any activity that builds large volumes of links over short periods of time, particularly when the links are using keyword rich text, can trip alarms at Google and result in a human review of your site and link profile.

Also, if you have competitors that are involved in SEO, and they monitor specific search terms and see your site suddenly outranking them for major terms and they happen to do some snooping around your link profile, all it takes is a simple Google spam report to be completed.  If Google manually reviews your link profile and finds anything suspect you’ll be done like dinner.  It can take upwards of one year to show Google you’ve stopped the activity and be allowed back in the search results.

Offsite Optimization Summary

Make sure you have someone very experienced planning and approving all aspects of your link campaign – it’s not something you want to get wrong.  If you look at what percentage of your sites overall traffic comes from Google, I’m pretty sure you’d agree that getting tossed out of the index would be devastating to your business.

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Need help understanding where your company should be focusing its SEO efforts?  Check out SEO Services Toronto and read our SEO Tools & Resources page, SEO Toronto, as well as the rest of this SEO Blog, for more information on where to begin with your search engine optimization campaign.

Or contact us and have us review your site, vertical and link profile and receive a detailed SEO proposal – there’s no obligation and you’ll receive your proposal the same day.