Bloom Marketing

Bloom & Vancouver Community College working together to promote VCC fall programs

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:33:38 +0000

Vancouver Community College has selected Bloom Marketing to promote their Fall 2010 line up of programs via search engine marketing. We are very excited to be working with BC’s No. 1 College.

http://www.vcc.ca

Bloom chosen as exclusive SEO provider for RE/MAX of Western Canada

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:30:09 +0000

We are very happy to announce that Bloom Marketing has been chosen as the exclusive Search Engine Optimization Service Provider for RE/MAX of Western Canada. We will be responsible for rolling out SEO tactics for all 200+ offices across BC, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Yukon.

http://www.remax-western.ca

Partnership with Design Pax

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:36:22 +0000

We have recently teamed up with DesignPax, a leading web design firm in New York City. The DesignPax team specializes in web marketing design and has created hundreds of original campaigns for companies of every size. Clients enter all the necessary information in one simple form that only takes a few minutes. The finished creative is delivered within 48-72 hours and clients can make up to three revisions without any further charge.

http://www.designpax.com/

Carlos Obregon guest speaker at Small Business BC seminar

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 18:42:45 +0000

On May 29th from 9am to 4pm, Carlos Obregon of Bloom Marketing presents at a SEO, Web Writing and Web Analytics Intensive seminar hosted by Small Business BC.

Get your web sites working for you! Studies show web viewers spend only seconds on websites reading the content. This seminar will help you condense your content and layout your website so your most important information is viewed first. Learn how to analyze your web site code, find out what keywords potential customers are searching for, analyze your web site traffic, and make sure you are listed in the right search engines. Interested in clicks and click throughs? In this seminar you will learn how people arrive at your website, how they navigate through your site and how the user interacts with your online buying process? This seminar will help you understand more about your customer through the use of web analytics and server logs.

Google Adwords introduces ‘Broad Match Modifier’ in Canada and the UK

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:42:38 +0000

In Google Adwords, broad match phrases can lead to your ads showing up for some very irrelevant queries. For instance, if your broad match phrase is ‘pink shoes’, your ad can show up for a wild assortment of queries like ‘ pink clown shoes’, ‘pink ballet shoes’, ‘pink scuba shoes’. While if you use phrase match, your ads may not get enough visibility for ‘pink shoes’. So Google has introduced ‘Broad Match Modifier’ to remedy this issue.

How it works

Here is an exert from the Adwords blog about this new feature:

Today we’re introducing the broad match modifier, a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren’t considered close variants.

The graphic above illustrates the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies. As you can see, modified broad match keywords match more searches than the equivalent phrase match keyword, but fewer searches than the equivalent broad match keyword. Match behavior also depends on the specific words you modify. For example, the keyword formal +shoes will match the search “evening shoes,” but the keyword +formal +shoes will not.

Set a preferred domain for search

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:31:47 +0000

So what is a preferred domain? The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results. By not setting a preferred domain, your www. and non-www version of the web site may be seen as duplicate content. And this would be bad!

If for some reason you cannot find your web site in Google when you type in www.example.com. Try example.com instead. Google may see the non-www version as the preferred domain.

So how can you set a preferred domain? You can set a preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This is usually the first thing we check for our SEO clients. Here’s how to do it:

To specify your preferred domain (Source: Google):

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you’ve removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you’ll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

Tne

Googles dislike for duplicate content

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:23:24 +0000

There is nothing that search engines hate more than duplicate content. Google and the other search engines have very stringent criteria for detecting duplicate content.

Here is Google’s definition of Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

Use 301s: If you’ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.

Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don’t publish pages for which you don’t yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.

Understand your content management system: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Google MayDay – drop in rankings for long-tail phrases

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:15:33 +0000

There has been some interesting discussion regarding a possible update from Google which folks have dubbed “MayDay”. Webmasters and search marketers are reporting that they are experiencing large drops in long-tail search traffic especially for large web sites for well established brand that you would think have incorporated clean SEO tactics.

Reports from SEO Roundtable (www.seoroundtable.com) suggest that:

Most of these complaints come over webmasters seeing a huge drop in traffic from Google over “long tail keywords.” Keyword phrases that are 3 or more keywords long. One person said he had a “traffic dropped 50% in a few days, 100,000′s of long tail k/w.” Another person “recovered until this Mid April, when it started seeing some recovery, then bang now 90% of its traffic, mostly long tail disappeared.” Then we get the “me toos,” “that’s exactly what has happened to my site. 50% loss of traffic and constant hammering by googlebot.”

What to do? Monitor your long-tail search traffic might be a good idea to see if Google MayDay has had a negative impact on your organic search traffic. Especially if you are a large e-commerce site, you might want to double check your long-tail non-branded keyword traffic from your analytics. Chances are you might overlook this on a keyword level, but collectively you will want to check for a major traffic decline from organic traffic over the past couple of weeks.

Go to SEO Roundtable for more insight into this matter.

How SEO can Help your Business

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:52:05 +0000

We are often asked exactly how is it that SEO (search engine optimization) can help a business. SEO is the process of making your website comply with what the search engines consider important in terms of having a useful, up to date and easy to navigate website.

Search engines are all about providing the end user with relevant information, a properly optimized website gives the user the information they are searching for and it is also easy for the search engine robots to index.

Try this for your own website:

Without using your business name, try searching for your products or services.. does your site come up? if not, just imagine what kind of opportunities you are missing out on, potential customers wanting to buy from you but cannot find you. This is the equivalent of having your storefront hidden behind a brick wall.

The good news is that SEO can help you make your site easier to find, we have prepared a video that will show you how this works:

SEO to help your business

Find out how users are searching for your business online

admin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:48:40 +0000

We all know that people are using search engines more and more to find businesses like yours. But how do we find out what kind of keywords are used more often in a specific area?

Fortunately Google makes this data available for all of us, it provides details as to how many people are searching for specific products or services and what kind of keywords they are using on these searches.

On the video below we show you how to use this data to improve your website: