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

Check out this link to get your Google Dashboard: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?service=datasummary.

Local businesses need to look at their optimization efforts from all different angles. It’s not enough to just optimize for your brand name anymore even if you are well known local brand. In the case of Milestones, web sites such as dinehere.ca, foodvancouver.com, martiniboys.com, urbanspoon.com, all came up in results way before the Milestones web site when we searched for ‘Milestones Yaletown hours’. Milestonesrestaurant.com was #9!!!! Milestones should be number 1 for this query especially considering that we included their brand name in our query.

So how did the other sites rank so well for this query. It’s simple, they localized it. They each had a page dedicated to the Milestones Yaletown web site, these dedicated pages had ‘milestones’ and ‘yaletown’ in the url file name (i.e. dinehere.ca/vancouver/milestones-grill-and-bar-yaletown and http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/14/181178/restaurant/Yaletown/Milestones-Grill-and-Bar-Vancouver). And in the case of foodvancouver.com, Milestones Yaletown was set up in Google Maps (Show map of 1109 Hamilton St, Vancouver, BC V6B 1A1). So all these other web sites have keyword rich pages dedicated to the Yaletown establishment and a Google Maps listing to boot….so why doesn’t the Milestones web site. This is what came up #9 in organic search results:

Milestones Restaurants – Vancouver
Hours of Operation: Weekday Opening – 11 am Weekend Opening – 9:30 am … Milestone’s Yaletown is located in the heart of Vancouver’s trendy lofts and …
www.milestonesrestaurants.com/index.php?id=353/

And thus the #9 ranking for their own brand… behind all these other local sites. Their local competitor, the Keg Yaletown did a better job with their SEO. When we query ‘the keg yaletown hours’ in Google, their local listings appears followed by the dedicated Keg Yaletown page on their own web site: www.kegsteakhouse.com/en/locations/BC/…/yaletown-keg/

If you run a local business, don’t make the same mistake as Milestones. Take every measure to ensure that you appear for your own brand no matter what the search query.

Who do you share Google Buzz with? Gmail contacts, for one, but you can also send your updates to Twitter as well. Your Gmail contacts can respond to your updates, using the @ symbol much like Twitter and now Facebook use. Your Gmail inbox will be used to push notifications to Buzz users.

Google Buzz was just launched on Feb 9, 2010 so it may take a few days before you get access. In the meantime, check out this vid to see how it works.

Do you think that Google Buzz can compete with Twitter and Facebook? Do you think that dominating yet another area of the Internet is a good idea for Google considering all the anti-trust scrutiny? I guess only time will tell. In the meantime, I will check it out once it rolls out to my Gmail account.

Basically your Google Social Search results are customized for you based on your Google Profile. Add people to your Social Circle in order to personalize your social content. To set up your profile, go to http://www.google.com/profiles.

Is it okay to have a .com and .ca version of the same web site? Or should we choose a completely different URL for the Canadian web site? Is this a big mistake for rankings?

The domain would not make much of a difference if the two sites look and sound the same. Having a .ca and a .com web site would be okay as long as the web sites are noticeably different and the .ca web site has Canadian focused content and is hosted on a Canadian IP address.

In addition to changing some of the content to make it more Canadian focused, error on the side of caution and give the two sites more uniqueness by changing some navigation items especially if they are html text based.

Be careful. Duplicate content issues can mess up rankings for both web sites so don’t risk it and try to make the two sites as different as possible.

Also, check out Google’s Duplicate Content info page:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

It says ‘ 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.”

For example, when we search for ‘toyota’ in Google, the .ca web site is #1 but the .com web site is not in the top 30 results. In this case, the .ca and .com web sites are completely different and Google was able to recognize that the .ca domain has Canadian content.