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5 SEO Myths De-bunked!

If you are responsible for the SEO of your Toronto business website, it’s essential that you stay current with the latest changes in internet marketing; however, this can be difficult when you become overwhelmed with information, not all of it reliable.

To help stay on track with your SEO in Toronto we have compiled a list of the most commonly believed SEO myths. Becoming familiar with them will help avoid traps that could otherwise negatively affect the SEO of your Toronto company.

1. Google Search Results

Myth: Google search results almost never change meaning you rarely need to tweak or update your blog

Google rankings change far more often than you may think. In fact, 78 percent of pages change position every day, reports Social Media Today. So, hand-in-hand with keeping your website current, is checking to make sure your pages are always optimized. 

Photo courtesy of VASCO SOLUTIONS(CC Attribution)

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Keywords: Long Tail | Short Tail | Why Do They Matter for SEO?

Using keywords is the first step in the SEO strategy for your Toronto business. If you use keywords correctly, they will drive highly qualified traffic to your site, making a huge impact on your online success.  However, before you can start reaping the benefits of SEO in any Toronto business, you need to have a sound understanding of what keywords are and how to use them effectively.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are the words and phrases prospects use to seek out content or information on search engines like Google. Some keywords are highly competitive and receive thousands of searches a day — if you chose only these keywords for your Toronto business SEO strategy, you would probably struggle to receive a high ranking on the search results page.

Photo courtesy of Craig Key(CC Attribution)

If you are looking to target specific demographics rather than your audience as a whole, consider turning to long tail keywords. By most standards, these are phrases of three words or more, although some authorities define them as phrases of at least two words, according to HubSpot - A software marketing platform.  These long tail keywords are more precise, they often less competitive than single keywords and can help businesses find customers at an exact time in the purchase cycle.

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Major Google SEO changes roll out this week. How will they affect you?

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As of yesterday, Google announced that they’d finished rolling out their third major upgrade to their search ranking system this year.

They’re calling the upgrade Penguin 2.0 and, like Penguin 1.0, it’s trying to eliminate the benefits that businesses (and their SEO service providers) once got by creating questionable or spammy links back to their sites.

Google Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts explains the changes in detail in the video above, but here are the main takeaways for SEO:

  • Paid links, or links from paid content back to your site won’t give you the SEO boost you once may have seen
  • Links with keywords that have traditionally been associated with spam – words like “payday loans” for instance – will not give you the same SEO boost as previously
  • Spam links, like the bogus comments with links that you’ll often see on blog posts, are being weeded out and they will not benefit your SEO strategy either

We’ve talked to a few people already who have seen their search rankings for important keywords drop substantially. That’s essentially been the cost of their decision to work with dodgy, often offshore, SEO services partners. And now they’re in pain.

At Fruition, and with a number of our clients, we’ve actually seen our Page Rank increase this week. The reason? We’ve focussed on the thing that Google will always, always, always reward: creating great sites with great content that users love and that people want to come back to, link to, and share.

 

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Google.ca vs. Google.com: Is your SEO optimizing for the right search engine?

Google Doodle from Canada Day 2010

When you search Google from Canada, did you know that you see much different search engine results than someone doing the same search from the USA (or the UK or other countries)?

That’s right. Google maintains separate databases for 10 different countries (that’s US, UK, Canada, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Australia, for those of you scoring along at home). And if you’re in Canada, even if you type Google.com into your browser, Google automatically redirects you to Google.ca, the Canadian version of the site.

And those results can be dramatically different.  Take, for example a search for “news” on Google.ca (Canada):

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