With close to 4 years of experience I’ve had the opportunity to optimize hundreds of websites and achieve great rankings for clients across many different verticals and niches. I’ve successfully executed SEO and link building campaigns for some of the largest brands & Fortune 500 companies, while also servicing small to mid size businesses just as well. Throughout my years I’ve been able to achieve first page (and hundreds of #1 positions) results for extremely competitive keywords on both Google.com and Google.ca, but can’t disclose specific results or clients publicly, however check out my rankings for any of these extremely competitive and job specific keywords and you’ll quickly see I’m the real deal:

• SEO expert
• Link building expert
• SEO expert Toronto
• Toronto SEO expert
• SEO Toronto
• SEO consultant
• SEO freelancer

My philosophy about search engine optimization and link building is pretty simple, the key to any successful SEO program is based on a multitude of factors, but at the end of the day it always comes down to a combination of two major components.

The first is on page optimization, so basic techniques like making sure you have the proper keywords in the title tags, meta descriptions, page content and other places. There’s some other additional strategies you can use but at the end of the day on page optimization, which really only accounts for about 25% – 30% of the entire search engine ranking algorithm, will initially set your site up for success in the search engine rankings, but the key component that is going to get your site to rank above others site (who are just as well optimized from an on page perspective) is an effective link building program.

Link building is the process of building backlinks (or inbound links) from other authoritative sites such as blogs, article sites, directories, forums, video sharing sites, etc. etc. Each backlink kind of gets recognized as a vote of popularity in the eyes of the search engines, and each is weighed differently according to a long list of metrics that make up Google’s ranking algorithm. So the more authoritative, niche relevant backlinks you build over time which focus on promoting both your targeted keywords as well as your corporate or business brand, the higher you will in turn rank for the keywords you are targeting with your SEO/link building campaign.

SERVICES

Let me start off by saying I absolutely love link building and am extremely passionate about my profession as an SEO freelancer. The search engines are always changing and link building is constantly evolving so it’s an exciting time to be part of such a booming industry. I specialize in offering affordable and highly efficient SEO and link building services. I’ve explained my four step SEO process; in an old post but the process still holds true. It’s all about targeting keywords with significant search volumes related to the client’s business or service, and then executing an effective SEO program which consists of a combination of on-page optimization and monthly link building services.

My SEO services are individually priced for each client based on the number and competitiveness of the project’s keywords, and I try to tailor my packages in order to deliver affordable, cost effective SEO campaigns. With my years of link building experience I’m able to implement a strong link building program for clients in ANY niche on both Google.com and Google.ca.

The best part? You are not only dealing with a true SEO and marketing professional who understands that SEO is a very powerful way to drive significant traffic and leads to a business, but you are talking directly to the guy who will be implementing the actual campaign. So you never have to deal with pushy sales reps or account managers who have never even done any link building at all.

I offer my SEO freelance consulting services directly to clients, so if you are a business owner or marketing manager and want to find out how I can help to get your company found online use my contact form and get in touch with me.

I also offer SEO and link building services to a few large digital agencies and search companies across Canada and the United States as a behind the scenes link builder & SEO consultant. Some of the services I’ve provided include in-depth keyword research and competitive analysis, backlink analysis, general SEO consulting, on-page optimization and link building of course. Reports on keyword rankings and key performance indicators can easily be re-labeled for use by agencies or companies, and my services for SEO and the monthly link building execution are marked up at the discretion of the agency or company. If you are a representative of a digital agency or web company and would like more information on my services please use my contact form and get in touch with me.

CONTACT

Please feel free to contact me or give me call at 647-448-4449 if you have any questions about your current SEO campaigns or would like to find out more information on any of my services and how I can help your business/client to achieve the highest possible rankings on the search engines!

• Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM – @aaronwall
• Dave Snyder, Managing Partner of the Blueglass Agency – @davesnyder
• Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel – @debramastaler
• Eric Ward, Ericward.com Linking Strategies and Chief Link Evangelist at advertising intelligence firm AdGooroo.com – @ericward
• Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SEW and owner of Justilien.com
• Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO blog – @graywolf
• Rae Hoffman-Dolan, aka Sugarrae, CEO of MFE Interactive – @sugarrae
• Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz – @randfish
• Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com – @martinibuster

Although it wasn’t so much a “give-it-up” styled post it did offer some great insights into what some of the top link strategists and experts have to say about the future of link building. It’s a great read to be sure to check it out.

And now for my answers

1.) It’s always important to include the brand in your anchor texts when link building. It’s just natural – I always have to explain that link building should always appear organic – ideally with no detectable patterns. So historically speaking, most of your links should come from your brand or even www.yourdomain.com – if the majority of all your inbound links are only using your targeted keywords as anchor texts you are in trouble my friend. Always important to mix it up, so “brand”, “www.brand.com”, “brand – keyword”, “keywords from Brand”, “shop for keyword at brand” and so forth. Don’t get too aggressive and forget about building a brand focus.

For smaller sites (maybe you don’t have a brand!) or even adsense sites I’ve seen (and felt first hand) the dangers of going too aggressive with links, just the other week a MFA site of mine finally reappeared on the SERP’s after a couple months of dwelling in the dark – and I barely even did a lot of link building, I just focused only on the targeted keywords and I wasn’t using an exact match domain – it was “homeproductABC4u.com (example) and I only used “homeproductABC” and whammo.

2.) Well I sure as hell hope this doesn’t happen – I for one am not the biggest fan of Google +1 just yet as not enough of my true social network even has google accounts and truthfully I don’t really care what they like > I prefer an unbiased search results that isn’t influenced by what my friends or peers like/dislike. But you got to change with the times so if and when this indicator is “the new link” there will always be a way to become a player and make things happen, I just hope it doesn’t get nasty and people start selling retweets and +1′s through Mechanical Turk and DP, although I’m pretty sure it’s already begun.

3.) I haven’t really changed up my link building strategies that much, I still use the same mix of strategies although I am testing out different proportions of each mix across my network to see if some of the old techniques such as article syndication still carry the same weight. If I find anything earth shattering – I probably won’t share it

4.) I’ve seen link wheels work, and not work. Like anything else with link building if done properly and blended in nicely (link velocity, link variation folks I’ll always preach it!) it can definitely help. More so for non competitive keywords, but for competitive keywords it’s still a different source for links so in the grand scheme of things – go for it > but just make sure you are aware of what you are doing when it comes to link wheels.

5.) Yeah it can be possible, but really depends on what strategies they were implementing, they probably got hit if they were only focusing on a couple, so once again = link variation.

6.) Probably, although I haven’t done any testing. I’ll be honest I didn’t use Twitter for about a year because I paid some outsourced freelancer kid $20 to get me a 1,000 followers. Little did I know he got me a 1,000 followers by following 1,500 – awesome… after a few nights of cleaning up my list lesson learned but hey, you got to try right?

7.) Don’t waste your time, hire a link building expert instead and focus on your business! Seriously though, I’ve been approached a couple times by business owners who wanted to learn SEO (or thought they knew already and just wanted some tips). Don’t waste my time or yours, seriously focus on your business. If my car breaks down I don’t go and read online how to fix it, where to get the parts > I go to a mechanic or garage. If a drain bursts, I don’t go and try to find tips online, I call a plumber. So if you think you can handle SEO and link building on your own, once again – don’t waste your time and hire a professional.

8.) Yeah they probably count for something, but when you want to deliver results to a client it’s hard to say, hey look I got you a citation, but no links! Tough play, I rather focus on building links and figure that somewhere down the road the citations will happen organically. I’ll put this on my things to test list though.

9.) Link variation, link velocity. Watch going too aggressive with anchor text.

10.) Because I’m selling them! Haha kidding, but the real reason is because there’s so much shit out there now and the marketplace has become flooded with dropped domains and sites purely made to sell links. As a result, there’s now a premium to be paid on sites that are actually legit in terms of posting valuable content without placing links in most of the posts. These sites are good for links, but they are expensive so if you want to battle it out for tough keywords you better have the resources to do it.

All in all I think the keys to take away from the excellent answers provided by the panel and yours truly are to:

• don’t forget about building links around the brand
• social metrics are starting to have a place in the algorithm
• Panda update was for real, if you got slapped you need to adjust
• ABT!!! Always be testing
• Google Places is vital for any small business owner with a geo-targeted focus
• focus more on media outreach as opposed to straight up link building (brand, citations) (*depends on the competitiveness of the keywords and if you actually have a brand though)
• links are expensive
• LINK VELOCITY, LINK VARIATION

Here’s a quick checklist to always perform when trying to evaluate the on page SEO of any website:

Check the Title Tags for Keywords

There’s nothing worse than “Welcome to My Blog/Company” or even worse “Welcome to WordPress” lol – terrible! Ideally you’d want to have the domain name as well as the major keywords related to the site. I hate seeing something like xjhcv.net – CLEARLY a dropped domain so don’t waste your time. Here’s some good examples of what I’m talking about:

Home Renovation Blog – Your Source for Home Renovation Tips

Canada Travel Blog – A Travel Blog for Canadians

Check the Meta Description for Keywords

Don’t be lazy, view source and make sure that the meta description is at least optimized and includes the targeted keywords. Any blogger or webmaster who is serious about their site will have an optimized meta description, if not again probably are wasting your time dealing with them.

Other On Page Factors to Check for:

- if any keywords are included in the header tags

- check keyword density on the page for targeted keywords

- check overall content on the page to make sure it’s niche relevant

- check site architecture to see if they’ve linked well to their most important pages off the homepage

The BIG Picture

At the end of the day you need to take these on-page factors and also look at off page factors to get an overall feel of the quality of an entire website – it’s all about painting an overall picture of the site in order to truly gauge it’s online authority and the potential link juice you would get from having your link placed on the site. Onsite analysis is pretty similar to onpage analysis but you need to focus on a few more factors at the site level. Besides the obvious signs of pagerank, cache dates, number of inbound and outbound links, etc.; you need to really look at the number of indexed pages to gauge how SEO friendly their site architecture is. Also, you need to spend more time checking the quality of inbound links as well as anchor text and link variation (sites vs blogs, articles vs directories, .com’s vs .edu’s vs .org’s).

Before attempting to gauge how powerful the site is itself, it’s imperative to first check whether or not the site/domain is penalized or not (must rank for own domain name) as well as the age of the site. After that I always check to see whether or not the site is ranking for any of its main keywords, which should always be found in the title tags of the homepage.

Being able to quickly perform onpage analysis is extremely important but don’t forget to always take into consideration off page factors as well. Always look at Pagerank, domain authority and page authority using the SEO MOZ toolbar (helpful metric), related links, quality of outbound links, number of outbound links, dofollow vs nofollow links, cache dates, and more. You really need to look at all these factors (offpage and onpage) in unison when conducting a thorough analysis of the factors affecting the potential link juice from that link.

Obviously relevancy and a good pagerank is imperative, but a great telling signs of a pages’ authority is its cache date; within one week is great, 1-2 weeks is average, 2-3 weeks is just OK, and anything 3+ weeks isn’t very powerful.

Conclusion

When I’m evaluating a site, I love to use both SEO Open, Search Status and the SEO MOZ toolbar as well as some good old fashioned searching in Google. Within 5 minutes I check:

• PR (using Search Status)
• Page authority (SEO MOZ toolbar)
• Domain authority (SEO MOZ toolbar)
• Total pages indexed (SEO Open)
• Cache date(s) of the page(s) I’m evaluating (SEO Open)
• Total backlinks in Yahoo! site explorer (SEO open)
• Number of links and linking root domains (SEO MOZ toolbar)
• Check for the age of the site (SEO Open)
• Check the archives database (SEO Open)
• Title tags, meta description, header tags, content quality and relevancy

I always said being a link building rockstar isn’t rocket science – it’s just a matter of being organized, efficient, creative and having a competitive edge to your personality. Remember these points when trying to perform SEO analysis of any website.

To me it’s all about being smart regarding buying links. The plain ugly truth is that in almost every competitive niche online link buying occurs and has been for years and years. It’s just now gotten to the point where it’s been publicly debated like never before – because you have the content pushers who cry that Google should change this and change that and “links shouldn’t have such an impact on the SERP’s” – but at the end of the day SEO comes down to an algorithm and there is no specific review feature for every site that is out there in the web. Also, keep in mind that every link is somewhat “paid” for in some way, shape, or form. If you send product samples for a blogpost – you’ve sent a monetary value worth of product and hence – a PAID link! At the end of the day it comes down to the fact that not many people are not going to link out to your site out of the goodness of their heart so at some point it takes some negotiation – money, product, services like reciprocal linking or 3 way linking, a “gift”! Even if you publish award winning content – there is still a cost associated with publishing that content and getting it distributed – need to pay the writer, internet usage, building overhead, etc.

The only major change that I’ve seen since I started a few years back is the type and quality of sites that you can now acquire links from. For example, you can get PR 5,6,7 links any day of the week from some of the top newspaper publications in the United States through several online link brokers – I’m dead serious. Even crazier to me was the online conversation I had that is definitive proof that the link selling game has reached unprecedented levels. Basically a few months ago (before JC Penney & Overstock got smacked around for buying links and Forbes got the slap for selling links) I had a conversation with a link reseller on a webmaster forum asking me if I wanted to buy links on two of the TOP Toronto media sites. I kid you not I almost fell of my chair when I saw what the offer was.

Now I’ve personally debated for a while whether or not I wanted to discuss that these two leading Toronto media websites are offering BLATANT paid links (which are dofollow too by the way). I’ve decided that I will discuss the offer proposed to me (and it’s impact on SEO) but I will not divulge either of their names as I’m not a whisteblower nor do I want to be known as one. What the truly pathetic part about the offer is that these massive media sites reached out to link brokers on some webmaster forums who can’t even speak english to resell on their behalf, pretty sad times but hey, nothing has changed regarding paid links from my experience. The only thing that has is the rampant availability of authoritative, high PR sites that are now offering links as a form of “Advertisement” off the homepages of their sites. Anyways I’ll expand later on this point but here’s the conversations:

a) My request for links:

Hey there

looking for high quality links related to accommodations and apartment rentals in Toronto

want year links, sites should be relevant to the niche
be over one year of age
have good amount of backlinks and not sell adult, pharmacy, etc.

please pm me with “accommodations Toronto” in the title

thanks!

b) Link broker’s proposal:

Hi
i have a great website related to Toronto that will give you great benefit to your site

http://www.siteinquestion1.com/

pr 8
placement in content area under section “ads” – sitewide
$1000/per month
$2650/ 3 months

dmoz listed
high traffic website
5k alexa
453000 pages indexed
in august 2010 traffic was around 3,337,000 UV

paypal:

thanks

c) My response:

hey there

where would the link be placed

I am from Toronto – how do you have the rights to post content on this site? are you working on behalf of them? did someone contact you directly?

d) Link brokers’ response:

i have direct contact with company

link will be sent first for approval

and you need to send 35% advance payment to process

remaining with in 24hrs after link placed

if any reason link not approved then you will get 100% refund with in 1 working days

approval process can take 2 business days

i am fair seller here you can check my itrades

you can check with another reputed member of DP “username”

he placed the order for three link with deposit

unfortunately his links are not approved and he get 100% refund with in 24 hrs

let me know if you are interested

thanks

(end of conversation)

And here was the second conversation:

a) Same proposal as before

b) Link broker’s response:

Hello,

I have a quality site in the required niche in which you might be interested.

http://www.siteinquestion2.com/ PR 7/$400/month

Let me know if you are interested in the site.

Thanks

c) My response:

how and where are you able to place links on this site?

d) Link broker’s response:

Hello,

Thanks for showing your interest in the site.

Your link will be LIVE under ” Links and Offers ” section ( right of the middle on home page ).

Let me know your interest.

Thanks

e) My response:

do you work on behalf of questioninsite2?

To be honest I find it crazy they are even selling links in the first place and for that price tag not sure how many clients can afford it?

f) Only limited spots are available for selling and yes they are selling the links. Let me know your interest

Thanks

(end of conversation)

WOW! So there you have it, direct proof that both that a couple of Toronto’s most established online properties are now selling links through backdoor link brokers off of webmaster forums. Never thought it would come to this and I don’t like calling out businesses or competitors’ strategies in the SEO industry but felt that people need to know that this is going on as it’s a massive game changer with unknown implications.

Will Google step up and penalize these publications as it did Forbes? If so, will they send them a warning first? I can see from their perspective that this is just like selling any other form of advertising so they don’t want to miss out on the extra revenue dollars but at what cost? Do they even realize they are going completely against Google’s terms of service? I guess only time will tell.

A couple months ago Forbes was penalized by Google for selling links on this page:

Here is the source code as they have since deleted the text ads:

So as you can see from the source code major companies are taking advantage of the opportunity at hand to buy high PR, authoritative links. Now in Google’s eyes they would just like to see these kind of links nofollowed – they have no problem with text link advertising for traffic and branding purposes – but it crosses their link guidelines if these kinds of links are bought/sold in an attempt to manipulate both PR and the SERP’s.

Now all in all I’m not complaining by any means – I think link buying and selling is just something that occurs in competitive niches and if you want to compete with the big boys then it’s part of the cost of doing business. But to that point here’s a few points I’d like to add to help protect yourself from Google’s wrath if  they should suspect you of buying links:

1. Never focus on just one link strategy – especially not just paid links as it doesn’t look natural at all
2. As my great friend Wisam (the best SEO professional I know) says “don’t kill a bird with a cannon” – meaning if you don’t need paid links to rank, then don’t use them!
3. In some industries you need to play the game  – sure you can cry wolf about paid links and hire a content dev team to pump out articles each day but in some niches you’re up against big budgets and massive link buyers. For example, in Canada one of the BIGGEST insurance companies continues to dominate the rankings based off of an extremely aggressive paid link strategy – I know because a) I’ve physically sold them links and b) I track their backlink profile each month just for fun.
4. Link velocity and link variation – are my two favourite terms that I’ve written about and one of the most important pieces of SEO advice I can share. Link building progression should be as NATURAL as possible. Meaning don’t have any massive spikes in the number of backlinks in any given month and always be sure to have link variation (sitelinks, directories, social media links, article links, etc) and always, ALWAYS make sure you focus on anchor text variation as much as possible.
5. TEST, TEST, TEST = Can’t stress this enough! I have a pretty extensive blog network (blogs for link selling, adsense & affiliate marketing) that I test different strategies on all the time. For me the best lessons I’ve learned have come from pushing the dial too hard – if you’ve never gotten a site penalized or banned then you really don’t know how far you can push the envelope.
6. Google is smart, but it’s a machine – at this point it can’t eliminate paid links or any other link strategy as the algorithm is based off of links. Also, always keep in mind that it’s hard to penalize a site based off links as a competitor could be buying the links to your site trying to get you penalized. At the end of the day Google is still link driven and it is very hard for an search engine optimization expert or company to compete without relying on links.
7. In conclusion, be smart about buying links if you choose to do it and don’t get greedy like JC Penney did and try to rank for every single term out there – eventually you’ll piss someone off and you may be contributing to the possibility of your site getting a manual review from Google.

If anything this is exciting news for SEO companies and professionals in Canada as more and more Canadian business owners will be taking their businesses online and will need help in order to get the most potential business off the web. Google’s free website program will get the business owner excited and once they set up their AdWords account they will start to realize that they’ve probably been missing out on a massive stream of business for however long they’ve hesitated taking their business online. Then they’ll eventually need to do more online marketing than just AdWords and will try to find a cost effective way to make the most out of SEO. Since they haven’t invested thousands of dollars into a website they should be better off and more financially prepared to make an investment into both SEO and AdWords respectively. Any business owner must be extremely excited about this announcement today but web designers everywhere must be shaking as the web services offered by Yola are actually pretty decent and looks like they also have the ability and resources to help customize your site and handle the build for a few extra bucks.

The fact that this program is also sponsored by RBC, Rogers, Globe and Mail and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce indicates that this program isn’t going to stop any time soon. Between this announcement and the constant advertisements for the Yellow Pages 360 web advertising platform the awareness of internet marketing services in Canada has never been higher – definitely exciting times for all!

Step 1: Performing in-depth Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis

In this process you should use keyword research tools (one of the best is the Google Keyword Tool which is free – just be sure to always use exact match when searching and choose your targeted country in the advanced options interface). From here you should be able to get a feeling for what keywords you want to target based off the search volumes. However, the next step is to do some competitive analysis to see what keywords you should choose to target. Sometimes keywords are either: to competitive, to general, or not geotargeted enough to warrant investing a good link building campaign towards.

If this is the case you have a couple options: you can first pick the “low hanging fruit” – meaning keywords that are less competitive but you will rank for quicker. Or you can choose to go after the big keywords but just understand that they will take longer. I usually think a mix of both is good, focus on some easier keywords to earn the client’s trust and to prove that SEO works while laying the groundwork for the tougher keywords to be targeted in a couple months time.

The competitiveness and number of keywords you choose will heavily influence your monthly budget so you really need to make sure you choose the right keywords in order to get a good return on your SEO and link building investment. A good SEO expert should always lay out different package options and fully explain why they have selected specific keywords to target with their campaign.

Step 2 Perform Content Mapping

Once you have chosen your targeted keywords you need to match these up with pages from your website. It’s not recommended to target the homepage with every keyword so you need to pick your top set of keywords to target the homepage with and then consider which deeper pages of the site could be targeted as well. If you have specific product pages or city locations you should always target these pages in the long run, as it will provide a better search experience then having your potential customer navigate through your site in order to find their desired product/service. Sometimes this is not possible, so you can either consider adding new pages of content, or understand that the more keywords you have = the more diluted your budget will be as it’s spread across the number of keywords you target per page.

Step 3 Perform On Page Optimization to Target Selected Keywords

This is an absolutely crucial step that most companies attempt to do, but usually implement ineffectively. First off, on page factors really only account for about 25% of the entire search algorithm so you really want to make sure you have done a great job maximizing the opportunities. Make sure your targeted keywords are in the title tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, header tags, and have a decent keyword density within your content as well. So many times I see these expensive, snazzy looking websites all built in flash with terrible navigation structure and no content at all. At the end of the day on page optimization is your chance to theme your website for Google, so don’t waste valuable opportunity saying “Welcome to My Website”! TELL Google what your website is about as much as possible without being spammy. On page optimization is always a trade off between what’s best for the search engines and what’s best for the user – but either way you need to fulfill the basics.

One more thing, on page optimization is a ONE TIME SHOT. I have been shocked and appalled more than once when I hear horror stories from companies claiming that they have been told in the past to perform a quarterly on page optimization review for ridiculous amounts of money. People, unless you are drastically changing your website or your targeted keywords there really is no need to perform on page optimization more than once, albeit except for maybe a few small tweaks here and there to test for usability purposes. Another thing, if you have a massive product site and think that you should spend thousands optimizing every single tag for every single page instead of investing in link building, you are clearly mistaken as once again, on page optimization really only accounts for about 25% of the search algorithm. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying not to invest in on page optimization; it’s just you need to be careful and understand that as long as the basic elements are present (keywords placed prominently in the title tag, meta description, header and image alt tags, content on page) then the page is ready to be targeted with backlinks.

Step 4 Link Building Execution

A good link building strategy is imperative for any cost effective search engine optimization campaign. Even if you perform the best on page optimization possible, chances are you still will not rank well for many of your targeted keywords unless you already have an extremely authoritative site or massive amount of organic backlinks.  Each month link building strategies such as directory submissions, content creation and syndication, social media outreach, blogposts, sitelinks and more need to be performed in order to achieve the desired rankings. ALL these strategies need to be natural, organic and make sure they adhere to Google’s guidelines regarding link building. Two keys to any good link building strategy that I always talk about are link variation and link velocity:

Link variation – make sure each month you focus on a wide range of link building strategies and vary the anchor texts used in the backlinks as much as possible.

Link velocity – watch the rate at which you build links very closely. It’s very easy for Google to detect a sudden spike in backlinks so even if you are really excited about SEO and link building but have no links when starting understand that SEO isn’t a quick fix for your business – it takes time so be patient – slow and steady wins the race as it’s not worth risking your online presence in an attempt to game the search engines.

All these 4 steps above are necessary for any cost effective SEO campaign but at the end of the day the process doesn’t differ much, it just changes in size, scope and budget. Any budget decided upon needs to affordable for the business owner to absorb. Ranking improvements don’t happen over night, results should definitely be expected within 90 days but for competitive keywords to crack the first page of Google it can take 6 months and beyond. So any budget agreed upon should be enough to effectively target and achieve rankings for the selected keywords without breaking the bank for the business owner at the same time.

The final step of the process is to always measure incoming traffic based on the keyword rankings using a tool like Google Analytics. If you obtain great rankings and adequate search traffic doesn’t follow then you need to start all over again at step 1 and identify new keywords. Conversely, if you are already getting good leads from a keyword on the second page, then you should invest more heavily or target that keyword better with the existing SEO budget.

Keep open communication between the business owner and SEO company/expert and make sure that everyone is always up to date with monthly ranking reports and even link building examples where required. To ensure the SEO campaign is cost effective and implement properly remember to always stay true to the 4 step process!

At the same time as I prepare myself for a once in a lifetime opportunity I just want to take a few minutes to reflect on the past couple years and highlight some personal successes as well as some work accomplishments. I was originally planning to really pimp this post out but due to time constraints just going to lay it out there:

- Last month had the privilege to speak at SMX about Google Sitelinks (on the organic side of course). Was a really nice way to cap off my two year anniversary in the industry that I’ve come to know and love so was really cool to be speaking alongside the names of many of the top dogs in the internet marketing scene. It actually went really well and was really pleased with my first shot at public speaking; hopefully I get some more opportunities in the future.

- Couple months ago took part in a group interview on Search Engine Land featuring 30 of the top link builders out there. This was probably the coolest for me as I literally have read a very high percentage of all of these SEO/link building experts work that has been published and truly respect their work in the industry. So to be included alongside all of them was really awesome as I wrote about earlier in a previous post. Here are the three parts of the group interview:

http://searchengineland.com/30-link-builders-discuss-backlink-analysis-for-campaign-design-part-1-35275

http://searchengineland.com/71-technical-factors-for-backlink-analysis-from-30-link-building-experts-part-2-37240

http://searchengineland.com/backlink-analysis-20-uses-beyond-link-building-part-3-of-3-39141

- I’ve also written over a dozen posts since I started for Search Engine People, and am quite proud of them and think they really offer a lot of value; especially for beginners starting out in the industry. Just want to record them all for historic purposes so here they all are. A few of them have even been featured on some of the top sites on the industry including MediaPost, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and a couple of others.

- The first post I ever wrote!

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-art-of-eluding-google-is-it-even-possible.html

- Two part series on search queries for link building (still holds true today!):

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-power-of-search-queries-for-link-building-the-basics-and-beyond-part-1.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-power-of-search-queries-for-link-building-the-basics-and-beyond-part-2.html

- One of my favourite posts of all time and I still use these same core tools ’till this very today and start all my SEO training with these essential tools (and my SEO spheel which I’ve pretty much gotten down to perfection these days):

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/cool-tools-firefox-extensions-for-seo-enthusiasts.html

- Massive series on paid directories within link building and SEO:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-history-of-paid-directories.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/link-building-101-the-power-of-directories.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/link-building-101-how-to-evaluate-the-power-of-directories.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/link-building-101-the-power-of-directories-part-3.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/top-25-most-powerful-web-directories-list.html

- Another one of my all time favourite posts:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/identify-nofollow-juiceless-links-guide.html

- From last year when I live blogged SES for Search Engine People:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/signals-what-relevancy-indicators-are-search-engineers-watching-for-today-ses-toronto-day-1.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/beyond-linkbait-getting-authoritative-online-mentions-ses-toronto-day-1.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-ins-and-outs-of-twitter-ses-toronto-day-1.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/information-architecture-site-performance-tuning-seo-ses-toronto-day-2.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/tool-time-the-search-marketers-free-to-cheap-goodie-bag-ses-toronto-day-2.html

- And a two part series I wrote about recently regarding tips for crawlability and indexability:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/crawlability-enhancers-tips-for-deep-crawling-success.html

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/3-indexability-tips-maintaining-indexed-pages.html

I believe that’s all the posts although to be honest not 100% sure, either way at least most of them are now documented here.

-My drumming has improved dramatically! Got a pretty killer drumset these days, at least my cymbals and snare drum are kickass; actual drums are pretty shwag but ah well, I’ll upgrade one day. When I get back from Europe going to try and start posting some clips of me rocking out in an attempt to get my name out there a bit and hopefully start gigging again in the TO music scene; been too long since I rocked out onstage.

- On a personal level, my health has improved dramatically and really looking forward to getting back from Europe to take this area of my life to the next level and finally be pain free once and for all! Old hockey/rugby injuries plus a shitload of time in front of a computer aren’t a good combination let’s just leave it at that. But after hours and hours of health professionals working on me (physio, chiro, naturo, osteo, massage, and more – I’m not kidding) I’m pretty much a little health expert on my own so now know what it takes to be pain free so excited about that and think the nice 7 week vacation will definitely help me out

That’s what I’m most looking forward to is just to refresh myself both mentally and physically and really let loose and have the time of my life in Europe. So on that note, should probably start packing sooner or later so be back in a couple months to hopefully post at a more consistent rate but happy I got this one off my shoulders before I left; wasn’t what I originally planned for but it will do, at least it’s out there now.

I’m out of here; Watch out Europe Here I Come! PEACE!

The first post asked some great questions about covering backlink analysis in campaign design. You can check out my answers and additional insights below:

1.) When and why do you perform backlink analysis?

Backlink analysis is absolutely crucial to get a solid insight into what previous efforts have been done for a client or for a potential client. Before starting on any SEO campaign for a client (or even when pitching clients) I do a complete, exhaustive backlink analysis to see both the amount of links, and the different types of links (articles, directories, blogs, social media sites) that have been built already. Even more importantly is to thoroughly analyze the anchor texts used in order to give you a complete insight into their current “link profile”. This helps determine what kind of link building strategy I need to execute both in terms of link velocity and link variation.

Additional Insights

So basically my answer was every single time when either pitching or working on a client site. But I also perform backlink analysis whenever evaluating sites that I buy for my own network, or sites that I may be interested in trying to acquire links from. You really can’t tell the authority of a website without looking at its backlinks and evaluating its link profile.

I mentioned a few things above but also forgot some basic elements like the PR and age of the backlinks, but that’s pretty much a given. However aged links really are weighed more heavily so felt I should include this point even if it goes without saying.

2.) How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?

Backlink analysis has huge implications on any link building campaign. As I mentioned, by analyzing the current amount of backlinks you can then set your campaign strategy both in terms of link velocity and link variation. For example, if a client had very few backlinks, you know that you need to take your time and only use the absolute safest link building practices with lots of anchor text variation. On the other hand, if the client has a massive amount of backlinks with lots of link and anchor variation already then it’s a completely different story. In this case, you know that you don’t need to be as concerned with the speed at which you build links, but need to concentrate on higher end link building strategies with focused anchor texts as the basics have already been mostly covered.

Additional Insights

Don’t really have that much additional input on this question, it’s pretty common knowledge for any good link builder that each client or website is a unique case and therefore needs a customized link building campaign that is tailored based on its current link profile. The quantity and quality of backlinks will give you an immediate indication as to how easy or difficult the project is going to be and also gives crucial insights as to what link building efforts have been done in the past. You really need to gather this information accurately so that you can correctly analyze their link profile and then set your strategy for online ranking domination

3.) What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?

Great question, after a while all the different factors kind of blend together to tell a story when comparing one site vs the competition, but for those starting out I’d definitely say to first focus on looking at the anchor texts in each backlink profile. You obviously want to see a focus on your targeted keywords but want to ensure that good link variation was properly utilized.

Although the number of backlinks is obviously important, the link variation used is actually a more telling sign of the power of that link profile. Ideally you want to see a variation of link building strategies (articles, directories, blogs, social media, etc. etc.) as well as authoritative mentions (.org, .edu, online newspapers, clubs and business associations). The overall number of links can easily be inflated: whereas getting high authority mentions online cannot, so really can’t stress this point enough.

Additional Insights

I was a bit surprised to find that not many others in the group interview focused as much on the importance of anchor text as I did. I really can’t stress this point enough, for example Search Engine People for years was getting some seriously authoritative links, but we didn’t rank that well for specific regional terms like SEO Toronto until we really started focusing in on that anchor text within our link building efforts. I’ve seen it time and time again with clients too, lots of great links with terrible anchor texts like “visit here” or “click here” or “read more”; sure you may get a nice PR and sitewide links for your brand or domain name but you’re not going to rank for ANY COMPETITIVE KEYWORD without really having keyword targeting anchor texts in your backlink profile.

However, that being said I should mention how easy it can be to rank some major brands when they have all these high authority links but have very few keyword rich anchor texts. Google is literally begging these sites to express what they’re really about through the anchor texts of their links; because as soon as you start some basic link building with keyword targeting they skyrocket up the rankings. So authority mentions are still extremely important, but at end of day I know that the anchor text used is definitely one of the most, if not THE most, important things to analyze within backlink analysis.

Conclusion

Really pleased by the amount of interest this group interview is already getting and can’t wait to see everyone else’s answers for the remaining 6 questions, which will be featured in parts two and three of this three part series on backlink analysis. So be sure to stay tuned and check out Search Engine Land frequently to catch the next post in this great series.

For the first time mobile device visits can be tracked out-of-the-box using Google Analytics. How can you access these stats, what does it mean and how can you use it?

The Analytics team over at Google sure has been busy! After announcing the additions of Annotations and Asynchronous Tracking over the past few weeks, they’ve finally made it super simple (they always do) to track visits coming from mobile devices all within the same interface and without any additional codes or filters.

Traditionally, in order to capture accurate traffic estimations coming from mobile devices, you needed to set up a tracking code using regular expressions and filters within Google Analytics; far too complicated for the average business owner to implement on their own.

it used
to
be hard
to tell which
device was
sending trafficThis advanced filter combination was pretty good for getting insight into the overall levels of traffic coming from mobile devices, but it was hard to tell which specific mobile device or search engine was sending that traffic. Comparing the filtered data using multiple dimensions was even more difficult.

We all know Google likes to try and simplify their tools as much as possible so it should really come as no surprise that as of this past weekend; there is now a Mobile section within the Visitors section of the Analytics sidebar. Say goodbye to regular expressions and filters, as now Google Analytics is doing all the “hard” coding part for you when it comes to capturing mobile traffic, check it out:

Another nice addition which has just been renamed and moved under the mobile drop down menu, is the information regarding the mobile carriers. This can tell you which specific mobile providers are being utilized the most by mobile professionals, customers and regular users alike:

Finally, you can now access visits from iPhones at any level within analytics: a telltale sign Google Analytics considers iphone traffic to be a significant and emerging segment (no surprises here).

You can find this segmentation under Advanced Segments (top right corner) in the Default Segments list.

Mobile Search Tracking for SEO and Business Owners

By having convenient access to this information webmasters, business owners, and Analytics professionals alike can immediately pull near real time stats regarding search volumes coming in from various mobile devices.

Without implementing any coding or site customizations, any Analytics user can login and immediately find out what percentage of their traffic is coming from mobile search, and then can delve deeper to find out exactly how these mobile users found their site – whether through direct visits or from the search engines.

This information is crucial and will help business owners and marketing professionals to gauge whether or not further investments into mobile marketing – through either mobile websites or mobile applications – is a good fit for their business.

Many web site and business owners have probably thought about making investments into mobile search but didn’t really have the hard data regarding what search volumes have been coming in from mobile devices.  Now they can collect this data very easily from within Analytics and make a much more informed decision regarding their mobile strategy.

Got to tip your hat to the Google team on these improvements; I for one am pretty excited to start collecting more in-depth client data regarding mobile traffic (more easily anyways) and from what I’ve been seeing on Twitter and the blogosphere looks like a lot of others are too, should be interesting to see what the Analytics team will unleash upon us next!

Additional Insights

Business owners really need this mobile search tracking data to decide what kind of mobile search strategy they want to execute. If they are only getting a tiny percentage of traffic then there’s no real need to invest in a mobile application if a simple mobile version of their current site will clearly suffice.

However, if your the type of business (services for examples like plumbers, emergency road service, heating and air conditioning specialists) that relies on having local people find your business then you need to realize that even if you’re not currently getting a significant amount of traffic from mobile search you need to plan for the future and start taking a piece of the open market share that exists within hundreds of industries as it relates to mobile search.

So my point here is that you can’t just rely on the current traffic volumes when making the marketing decision of entering into mobile search. Hopefully most business owners understand the importance of mobile search; they just have the option of how heavily they choose to invest.