More information about What we did for “For Goodness Bakes” here or visit their new site directly here.

CMG Pharma Website 2009

The Customer Management Group Inc. (CMG) has served the promotional needs of the international pharmaceutical industry since 1986. CMG’s mission is to create an operational framework for Closed-loop Marketing investmenst to be successful and deliver the maximum return on these investments.

CMG had a need to create a new marketing site to promote their products and services with the intention of increasing leads while providing visitors with information on CMG and Closed-loop marketing through product demos and whitepapers.

More information about cmg-pharma.com or go directly to the new CMG Pharma site here!

For many businesses, pay-per-click campaigns make good sense. The core concept is simple: pay top dollar to get top ranking, and the more you pay the more traffic you receive (I realize I’m over-simplifying here). On the other hand, organic search optimization (a.k.a. SEO) is more abstract and technical (not to mention time-consuming), and because of this many marketers opt to ignore SEO and focus only on PPC.

In this two part blog post I’ll share some thoughts on how PPC and SEO can work together to better optimize your search strategies and improve the success of both streams.

Choose the right keywords

Technical aspects of search engine optimization aside, the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses starting SEO efforts are:

a) it often takes a lot of time to actually see results for SEO

b) you need to wait a long time to determine if you are targeting the right keywords or not, and if you chose wrong – more waiting.

An easy way to avoid choosing the wrong keywords is simply to test the value of your keywords before you heavily commit to your organic search strategy. To test keywords, buy PPC ads from Google to see which ones are driving traffic to your site. PPC ads are a reliable and usable way of forecasting how a particular keyword might direct qualified traffic and conversions if optimized on a regular page for the organic results. So wherever a natural search optimization (NSO) forecast is needed, paid search can act as a reliable predictor.

There are also a number of great conversion tracking tools that show you which of your keywords will convert well. Bid on a variety of keywords tightly related to your business, and use keyword suggestion tools to see what you have missed. Odds are you will miss obvious keyword phrases – especially juicy long-tail terms. Find out which keywords perform well, and set up your initial SEO keyword strategy based on the top performing terms.

Blend Web analytics reports

Having organic and paid search results reported in the same place helps us to better understand the relationship between the two and think about a searcher’s complete journey, rather than paid or organic in isolation. Use your Web analytics tool to segment traffic by source (PPC and Organic Search) side-by-side for particular keywords.

Reporting PPC and SEO in tandem is advantageous in a number of ways, even for determining keywords that aren’t performing for either stream which most likely means your prospects just aren’t searching for those terms.

Blended reporting helps you identify the keywords for which you should be optimizing your Web site. Optimized pages will rank high on the search engine results pages, eliminating the need to buy those keywords (although there are advantages to showing up everywhere as well – see “Blanket Branding” in part 2 of this post coming soon).

Optimize Web content with PPC ad copy

Use the successful copy in your paid search marketing campaigns to your advantage. If it works in PPC, it’s likely that it can be transferred to your organic content optimization to help boost natural Web page rankings as well. It’s easy to change PPC ad titles, links and content on the fly, and analyze the results of these changes more quickly than waiting for the results of SEO efforts. Does a particular keyword/phrase used in the title increase clicks? Does the ad text compel readers to click? The winning content and keywords found from playing around with PPC ad content can then be applied more confidently to your Web site content optimization efforts for SEO purposes.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post in which I’ll discuss more abstract, yet equally important ways PPC and SEO can work together in regards to landing pages, blanket branding, and the long-tail search.

Online marketers are often overly concerned with running into duplicate content issues on their Web sites. Concerns range from duplicate page titles and meta descriptions to having full articles duplicated through syndication, and even the dreaded URL parameter.

Ok – first things first, technically speaking there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” imposed by any of the major search engines. That said, there are definite ways that you can damage your reputation with the search engines, but ultimately these instances are rare and you probably aren’t doing them.

To help dissuade some fears, I’ll clarify four common types of duplicate content that people are often concerned about, what affect they have and if you should be worried. I’ll also conclude with a quick description of the new (game changing) canonical URL tag which should make everyone’s lives much easier in the future.

Types of Duplicate Content

1. Meta Content

• What is it? This is a number of HTML tags that sit in the “head” of a Web page. It includes items such as your page title (the one that displays at the top of your browser bar), meta keywords and description tags.
• Should I be worried? Not about being penalized, but definitely about diluting your keyword ranking potential. You won’t be penalized by the search engines for duplicating of any of these items on your site (and of course meta keywords are essentially useless). That said, it’s crucial that you create unique and appropriate titles and meta descriptions for each page on your Web site. As most of you know, titles and descriptions are your Web pages’ primary exposure to visitors in the SERPs – if your content in these areas isn’t compelling to potential visitors then they’re not going to click, plain and simple.

2. Page Content

• What is it? This is anything in the “body” of your Web page – headings, paragraphs, lists etc. Concerns usually arise when there are news items or articles that are duplicated in multiple areas on the same Web site, or syndicated to external sources (i.e. via RSS).
• Should I be worried? Again, not about being penalized, but definitely about diluting your keyword ranking potential. The more duplicate content you have on a site, the more you compete with yourself for keywords, potentially diluting your ability to rank higher with specifically targeted page content. Unless you’re doing something like recreating entire Web sites under different domains and claiming the content as unique, you will likely never be penalized for duplicate page content. Again, your visitors and usability should prevail and page content should only be duplicated if absolutely necessary for your visitors.

3. Page URLs

• What is it? This is usually when one Web page can be accessed via multiple URLs, and is most commonly found when using dynamic pages within a Web CMS. For example, a single destination page may be accessible from different URL formats such as www.example.com/page/index.php, www.example.com/page/, and www.example.com/page/?id=1.
• Should I be worried? Not about being penalized, but definitely about diluting your keyword ranking potential. Are you seeing a pattern yet? This type of situation is very similar to that of page content – it is very likely that all three versions of the URL will get indexed and as a result the rank of the page content will be diluted between three competing versions when there should only be one.

4. Domain Level

• What is it? This is the most overlooked type of duplicate content that we find. It includes having multiple domain names pointing to the same Web site, as well as using the www and non-www versions of your domain. Any domain (including www vs. non) pointing to your site could be mistaken for duplicating another full version of your site if the domains aren’t properly redirected.
• Should I be worried? I’m sure you can guess what I’m going to say here – these elements have the same pitfalls for page rank as page URLs above. The easy fix for this is to always make sure that all versions of domains (www and non-www versions) pointing to your Web site are properly 301 redirected to the primary domain so that all traffic will land on your primary domain, and the only pages that will get ranked by the search engines are those on your primary domain.

The Canonical URL Tag

Recently Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live announced that they will be supporting a new “canonical URL tag” to help Web site owners control and eliminate self-created duplicate content in the search engines. The tag is part of the head of a Web page, in the same section you’d find the title attribute and meta description tag. It uses a meta link format to tell search engine robots where the location of the original version resides.

For example, if a bot finds the tag:
[<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.example.com/article1/ />]

on a the page: http://www.example.com/latestarticle/

the tag tells the search engines that the page in question (http://www.example.com/latestarticle/) is to be treated as a copy of the URL http://www.example.com/article1/, and that all of the page rank and authority belongs to the original Web page, not to the “duplicate” version. As a result, the canonical URL tag gives Web content managers more control over managing duplicate content, making our lives easier.

Active Diversions Website 2009

Orangeville, Ontario had a requirement for additional Co-Ed Adult recreational sports leagues for the Spring and Summer.Darryn Stevenson and Katrina Lawson decided to take this need and turn it into a business and have started Active Diversions.  Active Diversions offers Ultimate Frisbee, Flag Football and Beach Volleyball leagues currently to any Orangeville and Surrounding area residents interested in some fun, active outdoor activity.

More information about activediversions.com or go directly to the new activediversions site here!

Google is constantly adding features and enhancements to all of their applications, and the search engine results pages are no exception. Most recently, or not so recently depending on who you talk to, Google has been experimenting with “enhancing” their SERPs to improve the speed of the results and performance in general. This enhancement uses Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX – don’t worry if you don’t know what that is) to serve this content dynamically.

Should I be excited or worried?

Both…
By using AJAX, Google can provide results much faster by placing more load on the user’s browser and less on Google servers, requesting only the search results and nothing else (like reloading surrounding page elements). Using AJAX will decrease bandwidth and speed up all aspects of search from loading the results, to making search suggestions, or even loading paginated results (i.e. Page 2 of the results) or cached pages. Of course, this is only going to work well for modern browsers that support AJAX fully (and properly); users with legacy browsers might actually experience impeded performance.

The scary part for many is the fact that, since Google is loading content via AJAX, the URL created for the search is appended by a hash (#), rather than a question mark (?) which is standard parameter query syntax. This means that it is not actually changing the URL, and it is not triggering any of the analytics tracking that you would normally pick up with a standard parameter-based query in Google. In lay terms, this means that you might actually lose the ability to track items such as search terms (keywords), number of results and maybe even source (i.e. google.ca vs google.com). If this is the case, there is going to be a huge amount of actionable data missing from analytics in the near future.

How do I tell if I’m experiencing the AJAX enhanced Google search?

Look at the address bar after you’ve completed a search query. Normally you’ll see the URL for google.com appended at the end with a query parameter that begins something like “search?q=KEYWORD”:

i.e. [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo&btnG=Search]

If you are seeing a URL that has a hash “#” instead of the “search?”, then you are definitely seeing the new AJAX interface:

i.e. [http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=seo&btnG=Search]

Bottom Line:

Google claims that this is strictly experimental and affecting a small number of users, but from the buzz I’ve heard, there are many people who have experienced the new interface.

As stated by Matt Cutts in the comments of Rebecca Kelley’s SEOmoz article, AJAX: Great for Scrubbing Analytics Clean!, “We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.”

Some are worried that this means that Google is trying to inadvertently force everyone to switch to Google Analytics so that they can still access search query data, but the reality is that Google is not going to handicap their user-base by implementing this across the board without an alternative that will actually pass the vital data required by the numerous analytics vendors out there. The likely solution will be something along the lines of URL rewrites (actually changing or masking the final URL to match the query after AJAX has completed the search), or some sort of redirect URL when a user clicks on a link to visit your site (again changing the URL to pass the appropriate query data) – which is what Yahoo! currently uses with great success.

As a new industry begins to grow, the need arises for a base set of standards to guide it’s growth in the right direction. Without them, an industry can grow wildly out of control making it hard for companies to be effective, and impossible for consumers to choose the best solution for their needs. Standards ensure that the industry follows a set of rules –

– that meets the needs both of consumers and of the industry itself.

The topic of Web standards has actually been around for quite a while, and the standards to be discussed here have been used by many designers and developers for years. That said, we still see non-standards compliant sites over and over, and businesses seem to continuously fall into the same traps when deploying new sites or redesigning old sites. We see it so often that I was compelled to write this article to remind people of the real advantages of using Web standards.

What are Web Standards?

When a Web site or Web page is described as complying with Web standards, it means that the site or page has valid or nearly valid HTML (XHTML), CSS and JavaScript while also meeting accessibility and semantic guidelines. Having a set criteria of Web standards ensures that sites which follow them enable the highest number of different users (human and artificial alike) to effectively use the sites, while also making them easier to update, maintain and grow. Web standards also make it much easier to produce Web applications, providing a benchmark from which applications can be developed and a set of rules to adhere to.

The driving force behind all of the current Web standards initiatives is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a collective that has been working for years to establish and maintain Web standards.

The Basics

While trying not to get too technical, the basics of what makes a site “standards compliant” translates to the following key elements (with some examples):

1. Use valid (X)HTML

Using valid HTML (and preferably XHTML) is the first huge step towards compatibility with current (and future) browsers along with better rendering in the old ones, essentially future-proofing your site. XHTML requires that you use proper tag structures and hierarchy which not only make it easier for search engines to read and index, but also provides a much better user experience for visitors (see #3 below). To assess your Web pages for valid (X)HTML, use the W3C HTML Validator.

2. Use semantic Web techniques

It’s important to separate presentational elements from code and content because it provides a clean and clear page for both spiders and text-readers to parse through. Other benefits include reducing the physical size of pages so that they load faster, maintaining a consistent look and feel throughout the site, and making style and content changes easier to manage. Semantic Web techniques include:

• Using semantic code organization to keep your page structure in order.
• Using proper headings and paragraphs to organize Web page content. Do not use tables for anything more than representing tabular data. There are still many sites using tables to control the layout of content within a site. Not only does this make a page non-standards-compliant, but it also makes it near impossible for non-visual visitors (i.e. visually impaired via text-readers or search engine spiders) or non-computer browser visitors (i.e. mobile visitors) to determine the flow of your content.
• Avoiding the use of presentational markup, that is, any style information in the code of your page (i.e. old-school font-tags). Instead, link to the layout and presentation information in well-defined CSS files. Linked style sheets allow the presentation to be removed completely from the page structure of your site, and allow much quicker application of global changes to the site. Having the XHTML only reflect the structure and function also makes it much easier for non-visual visitors to read through the page content based on the use of proper XHTML hierarchy. It also guarantees that everybody can adjust the rendering to their needs and preferences including providing separate style sheets for different rendering engines (i.e. mobile, monitor, text reader, etc.). The CSS Validator by W3C detects any non-compliant use of the CSS technologies.
• If there is an absolute need to add style information in the markup itself, ensure that you are using proper CSS in the head of the page, or proper inline style format in the XHTML tags.

3. Make your site and content accessible

An accessible site benefits all of your users and broadens your current audience by allowing text-readers, and by default search engine spiders, to accurately “read” and follow your site. These days, another advantage of meeting accessibility requirements is that your site will also be usable on the many mobile devices available to consumers.

Web accessibility is normally based upon the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines[1] published by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. Although there are 3 Priority levels, a site should at the very least always meet Priority 1. Some of the basic guidelines include:

• Use HTML tag attributes and text equivalents for all non-text elements on a page such as images (i.e. alts and longdesc), and media components such as Flash.
• Use a proper semantic hierarchy in your XHTML and separate your content from your site structure (see #2 above). This standard is required by law in some countries and is also required by many individual businesses and government agencies.
• Use appropriate text for elements such as links and image alts as much as possible. For example, naming an image “image1.jpg” does nothing to explain the content of the image, just as naming a link “Click here” does nothing to explain the function of the link or where it is going.

Although not standard accessibility requirements, adding these simple tools can provide great benefits to your users:

• Text-zoom – enlarges Web site text on the fly for those with visual deficits
• Color Switchers – provide a higher contrast for people with visual deficits, or monochrome for those who are color-blind
• “skip-nav” – allows text-readers and mobile users to skip your navigation and go directly to the page content.

To recap, here are the top reasons why you should be using Web Standards:

• Increasing site accessibility will result in a larger target audience.
• Improved user experience for all potential visitors.
• Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility (mobile devices included) will also result in a larger target audience. Compatibility with the widest range of browsers and platforms results in a future-proof implementation of your site.
• More accurate crawling and indexing by search engines – as long as you target standards and accessibility you’ll automatically also be optimizing your site structure.
• Removing presentational markup from your pages and using properly structured XHTML will result in reduced page weight (physical size) and as a result your pages will load faster.
• Placing all of your design and layout information into external CSS files allows for centralization and quick adjusting of site look and feel – thus allowing you to make global changes quickly and easily while maintaining a consistent look and feel for the site. Easy-to-maintain Web pages will also result in huge management cost savings.

Additional resources

When Web standards are discussed, the following publications are considered to be foundational:

• W3C recommendations for markup languages, such as HTML, XHTML, SVG, and XForms
• W3C recommendations for style sheets, especially CSS
• Ecma International standards for ECMAScript, most commonly JavaScript
• W3C recommendations for Document Object Models

Introducing the Leatherwork site of Doug Nave “Leatherdreamweaver.com”!!

Doug Nave creates custom handmade Leatherwork and Fine Art. He decided that he wanted to create a site that showed both his creative and spiritual side. Doug wanted to be able to show his Leather creations primarily and also some of his Fine Art work from the past.

The result is his new site “LeatherDreamWeaver.com“.

Sitemaps are essential to creating a successful site from both a usability perspective and (of course) a search engine perspective. Implementing an HTML sitemap is a relatively simple task for any Web site, but the implementation of an XML sitemap (the standard sitemap’s cooler, more important big brother) is a trickier proposition and if it’s set up incorrectly, it could actually be detrimental to your rankings.

The Good: Why XML sitemaps?

“Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL…” (Source: http://www.sitemaps.org).

Unlike a standard HTML sitemap, which is essentially just an unordered list of links to the important pages on your site, an XML sitemap conveys other important information targeted directly at the search engine spiders:

• Assigning a priority to your pages: XML sitemaps can indicate (on a 1-5 scale with 1 being most important) the priority of certain pages in relation to other pages on your site. This is a great way to tell the spiders how to prioritize each page of content, resulting in your most important pages being ranked higher than your less important pages.*
• Passing content update information: An XML sitemap can also include two tags:

a) changefreq – tells the spiders how often a page is updated and indicates how often it is likely to change

b) lastmod – tells the spiders when a page was last changed and/or updated
*Google is clear to say that the information you pass is considered to be a “hint” as to how content should be indexed by search engine spiders crawling your site.  As such, there is no guarantee that they will index or rank your pages exactly how you indicate. In addition to this, Google Webmaster Central provides some helpful information when you have a sitemap that can’t be overlooked. All of the above being said, Yahoo! and MSN also both look for XML sitemaps.

The Bad: Potential problems with XML sitemaps

• Keeping your sitemap up-to-date: Unless your sitemap is directly connected to a Web content management system (Web CMS) or database that generates the sitemap every time a change is made to a page and submits it to Google, it’s easy for your XML sitemap to quickly become out-of-date.
• Competitive intelligence: If you’re telling the search engines the relative priority of all of your pages, you can bet this information will also be of interest to your competitors. Unfortunately, there’s no way to protect your sitemap such that only the search engines can access it.
• Reduction in natural crawling of your site: Some camps are recommending that XML sitemaps be implemented and verified (through Google, Yahoo!, etc.) but not actually submitted to the engines. The gist of these arguments (and they are valid) is that:

a) you probably aren’t as smart as the spiders at determining the relative “importance” of one page over another on your site (business blinders, not knowing your visitors, etc.), and

b) by adding an XML sitemap to the search engines you are telling them to ignore pages that you may have missed on the sitemap, which may in turn cause problems with crawling. In fact, natural spider crawls will often find issues with your architecture that you weren’t aware of.
Given the information above, if your site is new and doesn’t have hundreds (or thousands) of pages, it’s usually a good idea to create an XML sitemap but NOT submit it to the search engines – at least not until the site has been crawled and you’ve been able to determine if there are any problems with your architecture.

Submitting your sitemap

Google Webmaster Tools [http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/]

First, set up a Google account. Next, verify that you are the Web site owner through either Meta Tag or file creation. Google provides very clear instructions about how to do this – essentially, you need to have access to your site to perform these actions. Once you have been verified as the site owner, you can submit the URL of your sitemap. Google Webmaster Tools also provides a host of other information including crawl errors, pages with the highest PageRank, top search queries for your site, and much more.

Yahoo! Site Explorer [http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/]

Much like Google Webmaster Tools, first you require a Yahoo! account and then you’ll need to verify that you are the Web site owner. Yahoo! will then provide you with a file to upload to the root of your site. Once you have been verified as the site owner, you can submit the URL of your sitemap to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

MSN [http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx]

Currently, you can simply submit your XML sitemap through MSN’s regular URL submission page.