Calgary Internet Marketing on Google
February 24th, 2009 | 
Author: Five weeks have passed since I optimized my website – www.mmwebmarketing.com – and began writing about it in this blog. Within 2 weeks of making changes to some of my content, my meta tags, some page titles and the menu, I began to see the impact. Ironically, as is often the case with Google, my site actually lost position in some of the searches I was using before. The keywords “Calgary Internet Marketing” and “Internet Marketing Calgary” were less effective and I dropped from page 8 to page 12 and beyond.
Today marks the beginning of what I suspect will be a journey to page 1 before I am finished. The reason I say this is that several positive things have happened and I have not made any additional changes in the interim. Now that I have proven to myself that my efforts did not in fact get me blacklisted, I am happy to say I will proceed with some other search engine optimization techniques in my attempt improve my position.
What happened to suggest things are working? Well, the site reappeared on page 8 of Google for both of these search terms. In case you missed it in a prior post, the search for “Calgary Internet Consulting” and “Internet Consulting Calgary” found the site on pages 1 and 3 of Google, while ” Calgary Internet Consultant” and ” Internet Consultant Calgary” have the site showing up on pages 2 and 3. So the results are not too shabby so far.
Another thing that happened was my first request from another website marketer to add their link to my site. They want to provide a reciprocal link on their site (which recently Google began to frown upon) so I will have to consider the options.
By the way I currently own 3 websites and will be happy to place quality links on those sites if anyone fits the category. You can check them out at www.realestate-canada.com and www.calgaryupdate.com . Just send me an e-mail and I’ll have look.
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Systems make Marketing Effective
I recently attended an Internet Marketing seminar here in Calgary which included an excellent lunch. It was presented in a meeting room attached to a prominent Calgary hotel restaurant. Allow me to state that the presentation by David West of eKzact Solutions Inc. was very informative and well received by the attendees.
On the other hand, the venue for the seminar was not appreciated by the guests as the comment sheets collected after the presentation clearly showed. There were 2 obvious concerns that the attendees pointed out and both could have been easily avoided by the restaurant staff if they had simply taken the time and initiative to pay attention to the clues being offered by the individuals seated around the table.
Like many restaurants I have been to, they were playing loud music in the background to create some sort of ambiance that one would hope was designed to give the main room an appealing atmosphere. I love music and always enjoy having some in the background when I am eating. It is a welcome distraction when conversation ebbs or I am alone with no one to talk to. However, it is a disruption when it is too loud or the beat inappropriate for the majority of the clientele. I can’t recall the last time I was out to dinner and the diners jumped up and started dancing wildly between the tables to some rock ‘n’ roll song or rap music instead of enjoying the food and quiet conversation. I have been to more than a few restaurants where the music and the volume are obviously selected to satisfy the tastes of the young waiters and waitresses with no regard to the patrons who pay their wages and tips.
The largest number of customers were in the back room area attending the seminar and several complaints were made with requests to turn down the music resulting in a token response which was rectified later when the 12:00 lunch crowd of 8 to 10 guests arrived and the volume increased to previous levels. The result was that often the seminar attendees had trouble hearing the presentation. I am amazed that no serious consideration was given to the fact that seminar presenters will often return bringing guests who may also return if the food and atmosphere are satisfactory. This is the basis of simple referral marketing.
Even worse was the fact that the serving of the food was also a major distraction. I have presented lunch and learn seminars myself where the staff delivered the food to the guests so efficiently that I barely noticed they were in the room. They had a system of delivering the meals as ordered without interrupting the speaker or the recipient beyond the time it takes to place the food on the table. This system was not complicated. It consisted of 3 steps.
- Provide each guest with a menu/order form that they could mark their lunch selection on in advance.
- Number the order forms to match a chair location when collecting them.
- Deliver the requested food to the guest seated in the numbered location that matched the order form.
How brilliant is that?
This simple system was not applied at this venue. Only step 1 was used. After that was chaos. The waiter wandered from seat to seat bringing food to people who didn’t order it, disturbing them and the presenter asking people if this was their selection or who had ordered the meal. He tried to go on memory and failed. He actually told the presenter after the seminar that the guests had changed seats.
Whether you use marketing systems, customer service systems or tracking systems, the easiest way to guarantee success is to duplicate processes that have proven effective and keep them simple.
The key is that Success in Business is based upon applying easy to use systems and tracking the results to confirm the results.
4 Weeks After Optimization
Approximately 4 weeks ago I began making changes to my site based upon the research I had done on competitor websites at that time. I made changes to a number of aspects of almost every page, notably the titles of the pages and in the meta tags. I also altered the actual names of files and the links to those pages. This process is not complete as it does require a significant amount of work.
Still the results have been significant although not what I expected. Initially I was trying to improve my page rank in the search engines for the following phrases: “Calgary Internet marketing” and “Calgary search engine optimization”. Interestingly my page rank declined and positioning was not improved for “Calgary Internet marketing”. I am not certain why this has happened as Google tends to respond to situations in a rather unexpected way. I have seen this before and expect to see improvement over time. I did not see any change with reference to “Calgary search engine optimization”.
What was exciting though, was and had my website’s position for for the phrase “Calgary Internet consulting” has improved significantly over the past few weeks. I am currently on page 1 of Google for that term. In addition I am on page 1 in MSN searches and on Live.
What I will be doing now is continue to optimize various aspects of all my pages by improving the link names, making additional changes to the meta tags and improving the content by adding improved keyword sensitive language.
I will continue to evaluate the results and hope to see major changes over the next little while. Once I’ve optimized pages to the best of my ability, I will begin a major link campaign. I will keep you posted on results.
