For the longest time I was jumping around from one SEO strategy to another, thinking that one day I would hit a jackpot or something.  But it never happened.  I never truly attained any real results from SEO and achieve top rankings for the keywords I was actually trying to rank for.  I would tell myself, “I think if I just do a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, everything will work out”.  And the problem was, I never actually stuck to it.  I never actually used the techniques long enough to have actually see the fruits.

Once I accepted the fact that, SEO takes time, work, and patience, and that the latest fad wasn’t going to solve my problems, that’s when the magic started to take place.  I consistently used the same “boring” techniques over and over again, day in and day out, and I started to see some great results with my own sites.  Instead of looking for the latest link building strategies, I started to outsource these tasks, and started thinking long-term instead of short-term.  And boy did things ever change!

I truly believe that the best SEO strategy is the one that you follow.  I’ll repeat that again.  The best SEO strategy is the one you follow. If you think about it, it seems like common sense.  And it really is.  But most people just don’t get this simple concept, until all else fails.  Stick to the fundamentals and the search engines will reward you.  It’s really that simple.  You don’t have to create an intense strategy that looks all pretty on paper.  I still have maps I created years ago of the most complex SEO strategies you can imagine.  But did I ever follow through?  Could have they actually worked if I implemented them?  Probably.  But the main thing is consistency.  Of course, it’s good to have a solid strategy that have been proven to provide results, but those are every where.  You can do a quick google search, and you’ll find them.  No need to learn the most cutting edge techniques and strategies that will give you an advantage over everyone else.  The thing that truly give you an advantage in this game is persistence, and consistency.  And yes, I am a also an advocate of acquiring greater knowledge and skills, so that doesn’t mean you just stop there.  But whatever you DO know, make sure to actually apply it.  And if you can’t fathom the idea of having to do the same repetitive things day in and day out, then outsource it.  Simple enough, right?

So if you’re looking for the best SEO strategies, then it’s really all laid out for you.  You’ve really known it all along, but just never trusted yourself enough to do it.  Someone on whatever forum, always had a better and more unique strategy for you to follow.  But now you know.  Apply it, and get back to me in 3 months with the results…

Oh, and if you absolutely have NO strategy, then check my other posts about SEO and link building techniques.

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Toronto SEO

Here’s some of the best internet marketing tools and services that I use on a daily basis:

Keyword Research

• Market Samurai
• Micro Niche Finder
• Google Keyword Tool External

Social Bookmarking

• Social Marker
• SE Nuke
• Social Bookmarking 101

Video Creation

• Camtasia Studio
• Jing
• Proshow Gold
• Animoto

Video Submission

• Tubemogul
• Traffic Geyser
• SE Nuke

Web Design

• WordPress
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Filezilla (FTP Client)

Pay Per Click

• Adwords Editor

SEO

• SE Nuke
• Unique Article Wizard
• Article Underground
• Niche Press Platinum

Outsourcing

• Bestjobs.ph
• Onlinejobs.ph
• Craigslist.com
• Kijiji.com

I will add to this list frequently as I think of more things that I use for specific aspects of internet marketing, or that I find effective in the future.  Some of these aren’t actually tools, but are very helpful resources to help you with your internet marketing efforts.  I highly recommend a lot of these tools, and services, so that you can maximize the potential of online marketing.

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Internet Marketing Toronto

So how do you achieve this you may ask?  Well, one of the first things I like to always do whether it’s PPC, SEO, Video Marketing etc., is to test.  I like to test to see what actually works, and what doesn’t.  It wouldn’t make any sense at all if I was spending all my time optimizing for a keyword that didn’t convert for me in the search engines.  I want to ensure that my time is well spent, and that when I scale things up, that it is well worth it, and that I am being as efficient as possible.  So instead of just putting out a lot of stuff, test starting small, and then expand.

Now, I’m in no way implying that you shouldn’t put out a lot of your content on the web.  Actually quantity is great! The more stuff you put out, the more chances you have to attract as many quality visitors as possible to your site.  But personally I’d rather know which strategies are the highest leverage for me.  Once you determine what gives you the greatest results, then focus most of your time and efforts on that.  It also doesn’t mean that the other methods aren’t as effective.  It just means it needs to be refined and can take more time and resources to employ.  But our goal shouldn’t be to good at EVERYTHING at once! We have to make sure we use our time wisely, and create as much as profit as possible so that we can reinvest for further growth.  That’s the name of the game.  If we don’t actually maximize our ROI as quickly as possible, then we’ll remain stagnant, slowly decline, or worse – go out of business.

So it’s extremely important to realize that when implementing an internet marketing strategy that you test small, and scale big when you figure out what works.  This way you’ll more likely be able to see profits much quicker and then re-invest what you’ve earned.  This is also very important if you’re just a start-up or an individual, and don’t have a lot of capital to start with.  So make sure to test and track to see what’s working.  Whether you’re promoting your videos on youtube, focusing on long tail keywords in the search engines, or doing pay per click.  Whatever gets you results, stick with that for the time being, and sooner or later you’ll be able to do everything with the great efficiency.  Well ok, maybe not everything…you get the point! Until next time…

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Toronto SEO

One of the biggest challenges internet marketers face is being able to stay completely focused with one system.  Every day we are bombarded with new emails of the latest internet marketing products and how they can help us if we just bought the course.  But we all know very well, that even once we buy the program, that it didn’t truly live up to our expectations, or we’ll go through the program, and won’t actually apply what we’ve learnt.  There’s really a common factor here, and that is lack of focus, and consistency to stick with one system, until we see results.

I’ve been doing internet marketing for many years, and I’ve been stuck in this trap myself for a very long time.  Although I’ve gotten much better at being able to stick with one system, I can still sometimes be on the lookout of the newest, latest tool or gadget.  Now I’m not saying we should completely put our blinders up, and that we shouldn’t look to improve upon what we are already doing, but it’s important to be aware of when we start to go overboard with things.  I for one, know that when I’ve read more guru stuff in one day, and spent more time on the warrior forum than actually creating content and implementing ideas, that I’ve fallen back into old patterns.  We all intuitively know when we are not focused.  It’s important always to listen to that inner nudge, to come back to our center of gravity when we find ourselves going off track.

One of the biggest illusions of progress is that it has indeed been achieved.  For example, there have been many times when I have checked my statistics, and many emails in one day, and noticed after 8 hours of work, that time had gone by so fast, and that I had “worked” a lot.  But the reality is that most of the time had been gone in reading, and responding to “useless” email, or seeing how many visitors had come to my site, and if my rankings had improved.  Although it may seem harmless, and something which is normal, I’m sure you’ll well aware of the problems this can cause to the productivity of one’s day.  This is why it’s absolutely critical to limit checking email, statistics and anything else that doesn’t actually contribute to true progress.  Sure stats can help you determine where you need to improve, and checking your email can be important and related, but it’s important to limit it so you don’t get caught up.  Getting caught up can be detrimental to your success! I’d say limit it to no more than twice per day.  That’s it!

Being an internet marketer requires a considerable amount of energy, action, strategic planning, consistency, patience, persistence, and creative insight.  It’s not for lazy people, those that are looking for the easy route, and think that they can just put everything on autopilot.  It’s for those that realize that the internet truly is a dynamic place, and you constantly have to stay engaged with your customers, your readers, and your system.  Every day you have to create more unique content that actually provides REAL value and will be useful for those reading it.  Whether it’s in the form of articles, videos, audios, or webinars, you have to be on the top of your game every day in your market.  You have to be willing to answer to your clients, or customers requests, and concerns.  You have to be able to be up to date with the changes that take place in your market, as well as any current strategy you’re using.  So for example, if you are doing SEO for clients, then it’s important to be up to date with the changes in algorithms, so that you can use it to your advantage, and make sure you and your clients benefit, or can leverage it.  Although the fundamentals of internet marketing are always the same, you always have to “be in the know”.  Don’t sleep!

Anyway I hope that I was able to convey my thoughts in a way that in some way can help you get a greater perspective on what internet marketing is really about, or serve as a reminder.  We all forget from time to time that the true purpose of why we do this in the first place, and that is FREEDOM.  Freedom not just for our SELF, but also for others.  That is why we are SERVING others by providing them with creative solutions to their problems.  That’s what the internet is all about.  Creating useful content or services that can serve as a powerful medium that can help those that are reading it, or using it.  Those that understand these concepts, WILL succeed in internet marketing, always will.  It’s not THAT hard.  It just requires one to have extreme one pointed focus, and to have faith in their system.  And soon enough, we’ll find that if that we’ll achieve the results we’re looking for, while remaining true to ourselves in every way.

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Toronto SEO Services

I’ve been using this method frequently, and it’s allowed me to find very many links in a short period of time.  I was doing this manually since I wanted to test it out and see how it worked first.  I kept track of where I made my posts in excel and referred back to them after a couple of days to see if they were approved or not.  Well, the good news is that I’ve had over a 50% success rate with it, and I’ve been getting a lot of PR 1-6 links with my anchor text.  And this is not the page rank of the site, but of the pages themselves!

So if you use this SEO tactic frequently, you’ll most likely see some great results with it.  I’ll probably be outsourcing this task so that I don’t have to do this manually any more since I know it works.  I’m going to continue testing more SEO techniques to see if they work, and if they do I will report back here.

Oh and yea, please when making the comments, contribute and don’t just post “thanks for this post” or something like that!  Website owners don’t like that, and most likely won’t approve your comment and label it as spam.  So keep this in mind, and you’ll be good to go!

Also, don’t get discouraged if not all sites approve your comments.  The key to this technique is numbers, so post as many comments as you can daily and soon you’ll have so many quality links you won’t know what to do with yourself.  You can also outsource it, since it can get quite tedious and time consuming, and focus on things that really give you the most leverage for your business.

Cheers!

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Internet Marketing Toronto

Here are some things I’ve found work really well in helping you to rank higher in search engines.  A lot of this stuff probably isn’t new, especially for more advanced SEO’s, but it’s just more evidence that it works.  There’s also many other strategies and techniques to get higher rankings, but are the main ones I use to achieve top rankings for myself and my clients.

1. Create lots of unique content on your website – I can’t stress enough the importance of creating unique content.  My highest ranking websites have at least 30 pages of unique content on them.  You could also start a blog on the back-end, and really just pump your site with regular useful content.

2. Maximize your internal linking structure – building themed pages and linking the relevant pages together is an absolute must to get the most out of your on-page SEO.  This is an often underestimated technique.  If you’re still not maximizing your internal linking structure on your website, then I suggest going back to each one and doing it.  Probably the quickest and easiest way to create higher rankings.

3. Include 2 to 3 of your primary keywords in the title tag – When optimizing your title tag, make sure to put your top 2 to 3 keywords in there, especially for the homepage.  I use a pyramid structure for title tags, so I include extremely competitive (but well researched) keywords for the homepage, and then optimize my inside pages with the secondary pages.  I also still recommend optimizing your meta keywords, and description tags.  Some SEOs completely discount them saying it doesn’t count, but we don’t know for sure.  It’s better to be on the safe side

4. Submit to article directories – I like to spin my articles and submit them using article distribution services like Unique Article Wizard, and Article Marketing Automation.  Getting one way back links from a variety of relevant sites, and unique IP’s is important to increase SEO rankings.

5. Write unique blog entries – I use a service called Article Underground, and Linkvana, and these alone have gotten me top rankings for VERY competitive keywords.  Make sure when using Article Underground Blog Network to really spread out the number of blogs which you write on.  The more diversity the better.

6. Get your site listed in relevant directories – I like to find directories with High Page Rank and are seen as Authority in Google’s eyes.  For example, for my local SEO website, I submitted my site to all the business directories I could find such as Canpages, ibegin, Google business listing, Canadian business directory, etc.  It might also be worth getting a listing in Yahoo directory but it’s $299 per year.  But most of everything else is free.

7. Use social media sites to create profiles – I use the profile link packets which I’ve found on the warrior forum such as Angela’s Links, and Joe’s Packets, to find high page rank social media sites and forums, where I can put my links (sometimes with anchor text) to my site.  It’s a great way to get links from Authority sites.  You can even link to those pages to give them a higher PR.

8. Submit your videos to top video sites – I use a service called Traffic Geyser to submit videos at least a couple of times per month for each site, to really get some quality links.  It’s also a great way to promote your website, and get exposure on the internet, since video is so popular.  You can also use free services such as Tube Mogul to do this.  Main thing is you get your stuff out there!

9. Focus on the long tail – Use your stats logs to find keywords people finding you with, and include them in your content and create quality one way links to them to start ranking higher for those as well.  I’ve noticed working with many clients over the past few years that most of their business comes from those long tail keywords.  So it’s best to capitalize on them!

10. Use social bookmarking – Social bookmarking (if done right) is a great way to get high PR links to your site, and get more traffic.  I use a service called social bookmarking 101 to really get my web pages noticed in the bookmarking sites.  I’ve written more about it in a previous post, and highly recommend it to anyone serious about getting the most out of Social Bookmarking.

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Toronto SEO Services

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Another great thing about Google insights for search is that allows you the flexibility to look at search volume trends for very specific periods of time.  This is very useful because if you want to see a specific trend, say within the last 30-90 days, then  you can find keywords that are truly “hot”.  And sometimes these keywords have very little competition so if you can in early, you can acquire great rankings in a fairly short period of time.

I also like the fact that you can compare keywords by country and subregions, because if you are geo-targetting, then  you can see specifically which keywords are getting action in that area.  This has been incredibly useful for me since I work with local clients so it really gives me a laser like focus as to which keywords to target.

So how should you use Google Insights For Search?

Well, it depends on your intention.  If you are looking for a broad perspective, or birds eye view of things, then you can goto insights, and type in a fairly broad keyword phrase to see the search volume trends for that market.  I would look at a couple of keywords to get an idea of what’s going on.

If you’re already in a specific market, and you’re looking for ways to really hone in to find the best keywords, then type in more specific “long tail” keywords and take a look at the trends for various time periods.  This is also a great way to find other relevant keywords, which you may not have ever thought of.  You can also do more broad searches, and then dig deeper, so it’s really just a matter of preference as to how you choose to use insights.

If you’re geo-targeting, then select the specific country, and/or subregion, and type in a more broad keyword.  The reason is because you won’t get a lot of data with specific regions, so it’s good to go broad, and then see which keywords show up.  So for example, say I’m in the “marketing” niche, and I want to know some good keywords in the Chicago area.  I would type in “marketing”, and then select from the drop down menu, the country (United States), subregion (Indiana) and city (Chicago).  Then I would select “Last 12 months”, or “Last 90 days” etc. to see which keywords are the top performers for that time period.  This will give me a very good indication of what people are ACTUALLY searching for in that area.

Like I said earlier, Google insights is extremely powerful, and can really help you with market and keyword research.  There’s a lot of different ways you can compare search volume trends, so the key is to get creative with it, and just dig in!  I always use this keyword and market research tool before starting any major project, or when I’m working for clients, and if you’re not using it, then I recommend you start doing so soon!

Till next time!

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Learn about Toronto SEO

I first stumbled  upon a really cool free SEO keyword ranking tool for this called, “rank checker for Firefox”, which can be downloaded at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker.  It allows you to input your domain and keywords, and it will check Google, Yahoo and MSN to check where you are ranking for those specific keywords, all within minutes!  This made my job a WHOLE lot easier, and freed up a lot of my time when it came to evaluations and analysis time.  However, the only problem with this tool is that you can only keep track of one site at a time, and the historical data doesn’t get stored anywhere.  So you never have a way to measure your progress relative to your previous rankings (unless of course you’re doing this all manually and export to excel).  Another downside of this is that the keyword rankings don’t always accurately reflect your rankings, especially if you’re geo-targetting.  So if I’m keeping track of rankings for my clients in a specific country, I don’t have that option.  There’s probably some other downsides as well, but it’s definitely a great free tool to save some time (who ever said the best things in life are free?).

After having used this tool for a while, I bought an amazing SEO keyword research, and competitive analysis tool called “Market Samurai”.  Now, initially I thought this was just a keyword tool, but they introduced a feature shortly after called, “rank tracker”, which allows you to keep track of each individual domain and keyword campaign.  It also stores that data, so that every time you access the rank tracker, you can just click “update” and it will update all your keyword rankings and let you know if your rankings have increased or decreased relative to the previous date.  Now THAT is what I call convenient.  I never have to use excel for keeping track of that data, unless I have to export that information to send to my clients every month.  But other than that, it makes my life much simpler, and saves me from having to chase rabbits at the end of the month!

Market Samurai has some other very cool features for rank tracking, such as how “deep” you want it to search the search engines (i.e 100 positions, 200 positions, 500 positions etc).  You can also keep track by the country for which you’re targeting, so if you or your client’s website is focused on Canada, then it will only keep track of the keywords specifically for Canada.  It’s as accurate as you can get!

If you’re serious about finding the most efficient way to keep track of your SEO keyword rankings, then I highly recommend checking out Market Samurai (and no I’m not affiliated with them).  It’s not just a great keyword research tool, it also has some other amazing features which can really help you with your SEO efforts.  I’m probably not doing this special seo and marketing tool enough justice (I still believe its the best overall SEO tool available today), but perhaps I’ll do a future review of some other great benefits and features of Market Samurai.

Cheers!

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More about iIntegral Toronto SEO

I’ve read a lot of self help and productivity books throughout my years (not that I’m very old, at 26), but I could never really put the pieces together in a way which would work for me.  Here I was, with a lot of great concepts in my mind, but just didn’t know how to implement them to really affect my life positively.  It wasn’t until I came across a program by Eban Pagan (aka David DeAngelo if you know him by that name), called “wake up productive”.  Now, I initially heard of Eban when all the Gurus were promoting his stuff during his launch, and I found it very interesting.  But at that time, I didn’t want to spend a lot on a self-help course, as I felt I could just glean all that same knowledge from any book from Indigo or Chapters.  Boy was I wrong…

I got my hands on a copy of his program, and it was definitely one of the most enlightening productivity programs I’ve ever come across.  The way the system is clearly laid out, really helped me to re-frame my perspectives on how to be more productive and efficient WHILE creating more time to actually relax and renew myself.  Sure, I may have read similar concepts before, but it wasn’t until I actually got concrete examples broken down in a step by step manner.  I guess I’m more a visual person and enjoy learning through videos!

Anyway, so I did some more research into his “sources”, and I listened to the two books, “The Power of Full Engagement” by Tony Shwartz, and also “The Power of Story” by Jim Loehr.  These two books (actually they were audio books) absolutely blew my mind as well, and really hit everything home for me.  For once, all the floating elements within my mind were finally aligned! I now understood what it took to be an extremely productive and efficient human being.

I implemented the steps and followed the plan, and probably haven’t felt this great in a while.  Although I may get “off track” sometimes, I’m much better able to refocus and renew myself.

So my purpose of this post isn’t to simply tell you a story, but to introduce the idea that it IS possible to actually be very productive without burning out and finding no time to do other things.  After all, isn’t the point of starting a business to create freedom in the first place?  I don’t want another job! I want to create ultimate freedom so that I can actually focus on other important things such as relationships, travelling, and so on.

Also, I will be sharing a lot of my productivity tips throughout the coming weeks and months, of course with my own unique perspectives, thoughts and insights.  I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, so I give full credit to all those that have helped me realize a better way to live life.   And I do highly recommend you pick up those resources I mentioned in this post.  But even if you don’t, you have some great stuff coming your way!

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