As part of SES Toronto 2010, I’m doing a series of interviews with some of the expert panelists to get some insider advice to help improve your SEO efforts.

Up first is Jeff Quipp. Jeff is founder and CEO of Search Engine People Inc. He has been engaged in the search industry for more than a decade, and was one of the first people in Canada to recognize the Internet as an emerging marketing channel.

He’s going to be talking at SES Toronto about a popular topic: Link Building.

Here are my questions for Jeff and his answers.

1) What’s your personal favorite method of building links?

“My favourite method of building links is creating and distributing widgets. We often create portable versions, so that others can copy and paste the widget onto their site. With great content in hand, it’s a much more pleasant process to reach out to target businesses to ask if they’d like the put the widget on their site … you’ve got something of real value to offer them. Its also a very effective means of link building.”

2) What link are you most proud of and how did you get it?

“I can’t go into too much detail because it’s a client site, but one piece of content we created and promoted, generated 100’s of links from .edu’s in the U.S. It was an exceptional piece, that generated exceptional results for a hyper competitive term. Watching that piece take off amongst the .edu community was one of the highlights of last year for me.”

3) If you had to get a website ranked through a link building campaign but could only choose one tactic (article writing, press releases, social media, etc) – what would you choose and why?

“If I could only choose one, it would depend on the competitiveness of the term(s) being targeted. For relatively uncompetitive terms, I would be more inclined to link build by reaching out to suppliers, clients, complementary businesses, and the like. This would permit me to better control the anchor text of the links, which as you know is very important. If the term(s) being targeted however were much more competitive, then I’d likely employ either a widget or badge (or combination) approach.”

http://caaneo.ca/about/blog/blood-alcohol-calculator is an example of a widget Jeff’s company built for a client.

4) Twitter: Can linking to your website from your tweets help improve your organic search rankings?

“Yes, but not for the reason you might think. Twitter links are NoFollowed, meaning they’re not supposed to pass on any real rankings value. That said, some people take tweets, and display them on their own sites, in which case the link maybe search engine friendly and help rank. The link itself though doesn’t use good anchor text, so the majority of the value is lost.

I am an advocate that good content is a numbers game though … the more people that see it, the more people will link to it. Accordingly, if posting it to Twitter means more people will see it, and potentially share it, then definitely Tweet it.”

5) What session are you most excited about attending at SES Toronto this year?

“I’m most excited about the Session on Augmented Reality on Thursday. The concept is relatively new, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it will overlap with search engines of the future.”

To view details about this session visit SES Toronto 2010.

Jeff’s Story

Back in 2001, Jeff Quipp, in his role as head of traffic acquisition for Bell Sympatico, hired an SEO company to help increase traffic and meet corporate objectives. It was a fantastic idea – you could actually increase your visibility in search engines, and this would help drive people to the website. It was a radically new and exciting thought!

The only problem was, it didn’t work.

Being a smart guy, Jeff figured out for himself how this “SEO” actually worked. He then thought to himself that if he was having trouble sourcing an SEO company which could actually deliver reliable results, then surely other companies out there were having the same problem. It was time to do something about it.

“The strategy has paid off as Jeff’s company hit the PROFIT 100 list last year as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada.”

Jeff bought HTML for dummies, spent the first month learning HTML and SEO, and forging relationships with business owners online through forums. Early on he recognized that the technical work was not his strength so his first hire was a programmer. Jeff’s first client was X Copper and he continued finding clients mostly through networking and referrals. The strategy has paid off as Jeff’s company hit the PROFIT 100 list last year as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada.

Packages to start working with Search Engine People start at $500 / month for 3-5 key terms that are not too competitive.

Is there anything else you would like to learn from Jeff? How are you building links to your website?

I’ve love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Well it’s been another great day here at SES Toronto. The day started off with a keynote speach by Emanuel Rosen who is the author of The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited. The Anatomy of Buzz is a great book to help you increase your word of mouth marketing and I’ll soon be picking up the Revisited version.

Just like I did yesterday, today I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from today’s workshops. I again stayed mostly to the Geek Track to get really deep on technical issues and tactics to build more traffic. Thank you everyone for the great feedback that you left on the blog from yesterday’s post.

The first workshop that had a lasting impact for me was Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning and SEO from the Geek Track. Shari Thurow, the founder of Omni Marketing Interactive, discussed site architecture and how to optimize it to perform as quickly as possible. It’s been mentioned a few times at the conference so far that Google will soon (if it’s not already) look at page load time as a factor in your website rankings. If your website takes a long time to load then you won’t rank as high. This is of particular concern to me because as my site has grown, it’s been taking longer and longer to load – fixing the page load time is definitely a high priority item on my task list!

One of Shari’s suggestions was monitor your broken links (are your links working?), crawlability (is your page structure too complicated for Google to follow?), and indexation (are your pages being indexed into Google?).

“It doesn’t matter if you use sub-domains or sub-directories, as long as you do it consistently – pick one and stick with it”

She also advises entrepreneurs to focus your links on what makes sense to the user. Don’t cram websites full of links to try and boost your rankings for those pages. If it doesn’t make sense for the users then the search engines won’t give you the rankings. Also make sure to make your link structure easy to remember. Use your keywords in your URL – it’s better for SEO and people can remember it!

For example, if you had an article on New York real estate you want the link to be www.domain.com/New-York-Real-Estate.html instead of www.domain.com/article.php?id=443. People are more likely to remember and tell people about the article with the keywords in it.

Finally, she discussed sub-domains versus sub-directories. For example, if it would be better to use www.EvanCarmichael.com/Marketing or marketing.EvanCarmichael.com. Her response was that it doesn’t matter if you use sub-domains or sub-directories, as long as you do it consistently – pick one and stick with it. Shari is the author of When Search Meets Web Usability and I’m looking forward to checking out her book and putting her advice to practice!

The next workshop that made an impact was my favourite from last year. It was Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag from the Nuts & Bolts track. Last year it was my favorite workshop and I was looking forward to coming back this year to cover it. The speakers went over so much information and provided so many useful tools that it was difficult to keep up! I’m going to wait for the slides to be posted to the website and will post my update here as soon as it’s up!

Today was the first day of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference here in Toronto. I was invited to come as a guest blogger as part of the media. I did the same thing last year and it was a great experience. They have three streams of sessions going on at the same time so registrants have to pick which ones they most want to attend. The three streams are: Nuts & Bolts (practical how-to type of information), Geek (technical more advanced workshops), and Corporateville (for the attendees who are from large companies).

Today was an information filled day with a host of excellent speakers and lively discussion. I stayed mostly in the Geek track and thought I would share some of the valuable information from two of my favorite presentations of the day.

The first workshop I attended was Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today? One of the panelists was Marios Alexandrou who is a SEO Manager for Acronym Media. The bulk of Marios’ talk was on universal search. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, universal search refers to search engines like Google showing more than 10 blue links when you do a query. Instead you get video results, news results, maps, images etc thrown in as well.

Here is an example using the key word “Paris”

As you can see from the Google search results, three out of the top six results are not the blue text links that we’re used to.

The top result is a Google Map of Paris, France. The #5 result shows videos about Paris from YouTube and the #6 result shows recent news about Paris from Google News.

If website owners were to try and rank for this keyword with a regular webpage, they would only have a one in three chance of doing so because half of the ranked pages are from universal search.

Marios provided the following suggestions for entrepreneurs who are trying to get on page 1 for their important keywords and what universal search can mean for them.

#1 – Can’t get the top spot with a website? Try video!

YouTube videos are frequently popping up into the search engine results and if you optimize the video titles they can often be far easier to rank for than a regular website. If you’re having a hard time getting to that coveted #1 ranking, consider using a video to try and knock off your competition.

#2 – Dominate the rankings – Push out competitors!

So you rank #1 and #2 for your important key words – why not take over another spot in the top 10 with a video and another spot with a Google Maps result and yet another with Google image results? The more your site is featured on that first page the less your competition is going to get. Don’t settle for just the top two spots.

“Page load time will likely be a future factor in search engine rankings – the faster your pages load, the more you will be rewarded with high rankings.”

#3 – Engage more with your users!

Some people love the text content while others prefer the videos, search, maps, and news. By optimizing for all the different universal search categories you can cater to all the different tastes of your potential customers.

Two other interesting thoughts that came out of Marios’ presentation and discussion:

• SearchWiki – Google wants your vote and they are paying attention to how people are using the SearchWiki rating mechanism
• Page load time will likely be a future factor in search engine rankings – the faster your pages load, the more you will be rewarded with high rankings

The other speaker who I really enjoyed hearing today was Mike McDerment. Mike is the CEO & Co-founder of FreshBooks, an online invoicing company that caters to professionals and entrepreneurs.

Mike’s talk was part of the workshop Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions and was special because it was different – he focused on the importance of making your website a business. It’s great to rank well in the search engines but if it doesn’t lead to a lot of business, who cares? Mike shared his story about how his website was originally designed for search engines and he got traffic and did get some customers but he wasn’t where he wanted to be.

“Nobody expects the personal touch from a website and by reaching out FreshBooks generated media attention as well as earned customers for life.”

By switching the design to focus on the customer and not the search engines he was able to see a massive increase in business. Mike is heavily customer-service oriented and has managed to create a 30-person company which truly cares about their clients. He tries to go out of his way to make sure that his customers are happy, which is rare for an online business. His talk reminded me a lot of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos preaches about excellent customer service.

It was refreshing (no pun intended) to hear someone talk about buildling a business and not just how to rank in Google. Some of Mike’s advice included:

• We are all in service businesses, not technology businesses
• Giving outstanding customer experiences should be the main focus of your business
• Relationships with customers is the currency of your success
• Take care of your staff and they will take care of your customers who will take care of your business
• Follow the 4E Mantra of: Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday

Mike also shared a story about a customer of theirs who was on Twitter and mentioned that she was stood up by a date that night. The FreshBooks team, which makes a regular habit of following their customers, responded by Tweeting that they would never stand her up and then sent her flowers. Nobody expects the personal touch from a website and by reaching out FreshBooks generated media attention as well as earned customers for life.

Mike’s session was a reminder that we all need to think about the business of our business, provide outstanding customer service and not just worry about ranking #1 in the search engines.

I’m looking forward to another great day tomorrow and I’ll keep you posted with another update!

For those of you who follow search engine news you’ll know that the biggest events that cover the industry are the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Being based in Toronto I was able to attend SES Toronto last year and am pleased to be able to attend again this year. It’s one of those must-attend events where you get to hear from the top experts in the industry, be able to directly ask them questions, and get valuable advice to help you grow your business.

“Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.”

I’m also fortunate enough to have been able to connect with two of the experts who will be presenting at SES Toronto this year. I asked them about what factors they see as being important for website owners in the year ahead. The two interviewees were Greg Jarboe and Amanda Watlington. Here is a little more about them:

Greg Jarboe

Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm, public relations agency and video production company. Founded in 2003, SEO-PR has won a Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for Public Relations and PR News, and was a finalist for SES Awards in three categories: Best Social Media Marketing Campaign, Best Business-to-Business Search Marketing Campaign, and Best Integration of Search with Other Media.

“Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.”

Amanda Watlington

Amanda Watlington is owner of Searching for Profit, a search marketing consultancy focusing on the interaction of the consumer with businesses, using search engines, RSS, blogs, podcasting, or other new media to deliver their messages. An industry thought leader and an internationally-recognized speaker, Amanda has led sessions on search marketing, web strategy, and social media at Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World, Ad:tech, and DMA. She shares her views of where search marketing is headed on her blog, Blogs and Feeds, and as a blogger for Search Engine Watch.

I asked them both the same questions – here are their answers:

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

The first hidden gem is Wordstream. It’s a new keyword tool for taking long keyword lists for search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns and putting them in buckets that are segmented intelligently.  Another hidden gem is Radian6.  It’s an automated solution to monitor and analyze a variety of social media, including blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  The third tool has been around for a while, but it’s unfortunately a hidden gem: Yahoo! Site Explorer.  It allows you to explore all the pages indexed by Yahoo! Search and find pages that link to that site or any page.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

I do think reducing page load time is important.  Gzip is a popular data compression program.  It’s main advantage is much better compression.  However, gzip 1.2.4 may crash when an input file is over 1200 characters. (info on gzip compression here: http://www.gzip.org/)

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

I could say it depends on your target market, but that would be dodging the question.  Or, I could say YouTube, because I’ve just finished writing a book entitled, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, but that would be self-serving.  So, I’ll say Facebook.  Why?  According to Compete, Facebook had 104.1 million unique visitors in April 2009, YouTube had 77.8 million, Digg had 37.8 million, Twitter had 19.4 million, and LinkedIn had 12.1 million.  Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.  Plus, with more than 52,000 Facebook apps, there are countless ways to connect with social networks of friends and family.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.  According to comScore qSearch, there were 9.8 billion expanded search queries in the U.S. during April 2009 on Google, 3.2 billion on YouTube, and 3.1 billion on Yahoo!  That’s game changing.  We’ve also found that video content can generate more links and higher rankings than text content.    In fact, The Technorati Attention Index for May 14, 2009, shows the top site with the highest number of blogs linking to it in the past 30 days was YouTube with 60,644, followed by The New York Times with 17,374,  guardian.co.uk with 8,039, The Wall Street Journal with 7,513, and The Washington Post with 6,891.  What does this mean to search engine marketers?  You are more likely to see a YouTube video in the top results pages than a news story, blog post, or website page.  That’s a change with a big impact.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I’m looking forward to the keynote by Emanuel Rosen.  I’ve read his book, “The Anatomy of Buzz,” and can’t wait to hear about his latest book, “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.”  As for one of the conference sessions, I’m looking forward to “How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Things Done.”  Why can’t we all just get along?

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

There are lots of tools that a website owner should know about. I personally advocate trying a large number of tools and then determining which suits the individual’s workflow best. Here are three tools that I consider really powerful: Spyfu for keyword research. It is an excellent second line of research that enhances and enriches the data gathered from Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker. With Spyfu, I particularly like the Keyword Kombat feature that lets me clearly see comparative strengths and weaknesses relative to competitors. A second tool that I consider valuable is Crazy Egg. I use this tool on a regular basis to check how users are interacting with my pages. This gives me quite a few insights into how I can improve conversion and improve the user’s experience.  I must include in my tool kit the Web Developer Plug-in for Firefox. It is a super tool for analyzing sites. I use this in conjunction with YSlow to understand how a site is performing.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

Page load time is important for both users and search engines. Users want to receive the information immediately and are increasingly impatient. Speed issues also impact search. Every site has a “crawl budget,” and performance issues can impede how much of a large site is crawled. Managing performance is essential to indexing for large sites. Gzip compression is a recommended speed enhancement. The choice and recommendation would, of course, depend on the site. As I indicated above I use YSlow as part of my tools for evaluating sites. Speed is an issue.

“If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube.”

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

My choice would be YouTube since the sheer volume of traffic that comes to the site is so huge. YouTube’s traffic is the second largest online. It is also readily optimizable so the site owner can ensure take measures to get maximum performance from their videos. If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube. As a professional, I would urge the website owner to have a personal LinkedIn account and a Facebook page. Both are good networking tools. I personally prefer LinkedIn.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

The biggest impacts have come from the global recession. As a result I have seen an increase in the demand for SEO services as businesses that previously were prepared to spend lots of money on SEM are now reconsidering the virtues of SEO.  Many are taking budget from other marketing efforts to put them into SEO and SEM. There is also an increasing demand that search deliver results.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I am keenly interested in the future and use conferences to tune up my radar for what is the next big thing. For this reason I am looking forward to the session entitled “Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps.” As search migrates to the phone we all need to understand mobile marketing. Overall, the session line up is so good that it will be difficult to chose one session vs. another being held at the same time. I am moderating the session “SEO Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s New?” which should be very interesting, but at the same time there is also a session entitled “Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today?” that should be an excellent forward-looking session. Overall, this should be a terrific conference.

Thank you to both Greg and Amanda for spending the time to answer these questions. To learn more from them you can always attend SES Toronto! If you’re planning on coming out let me know and we can have lunch together.