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!