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It’s a fact: 18 to 25 year olds don’t vote. This fact has inspired numerous attempts across North America to inspire this critical demographic with targeted events like Rock the Vote and by celebrities like Drew Barrymore making appeals about exercising your rights. Response is typically luke warm.

So why then are there “Vote Mobs” cropping up in colleges and universities all across Canada? Who is responsible for mobilizing the nation’s youth and what was the secret?

For those you don’t know, a “Vote Mob” is a gang of young people who suddenly meet up in rally-like formation, cheering and shaking signs with messages like, “Surprise! We’re voting!” to show Canada’s leaders that they are not a demographic that should be ignored. Vote Mobs are filmed and shared on YouTube via Facebook and Twitter.
So what young star inspired Canada’s students? What rock band finally uttered the magic words to make our youth care who runs this country? Who devised this viral sensation that swept the nation with such force the Conservatives are trying to invalidate special ballots at Canada’s universities? In the end, it was a 40-something politically inclined comedian from St. John’s and he did it by doing what he always does: by dissecting the hearts and minds of Canada’s political leaders.

On Sunday, March 30, Rick Mercer published a post on his blog titled “Vote”. In this short blog post he writes, “It is the conventional wisdom of all political parties that young people will not vote. And the parties, they like it that way. It’s why your tuition keeps going up.” He went on to urge the nation’s youth to “scare the hell out of the people who run this country” by voting this election. That’s it.

Authenticity

Rick Mercer is a political satirist. He loves Canada and he loves everything to do with the politics that run it. He also loves pointing out what’s wrong with our system and the leaders who work within it. Yet, he is impartial. If Rick wants you to vote, it’s because he believes in democracy, not because he wants “his guy” to win.

Autonomy

Rick didn’t tell the kids to hold Vote Mobs. He inspired them because he’s smart and funny and because it’s important to vote. Then he let the idea take on its own life. This is critically important with viral campaigns. Too often I hear clients tell me what their audience is going to do to make their idea go viral. Oh, really? Free will can be a pesky problem. If you put your campaign in a box, it stays in the box.

Aim

Ultimately, the reason why Rick Mercer’s plea worked was because of who was listening. Asking a bunch of politically ambivalent young people to vote is like asking Lindsay Lohan to stop drinking. But the young people who watch the Rick Mercer Report are doing so because they care about politics, at least enough to want to hear jokes about it. And they are the ones who can find others just like them.

What this points out is how important it is to match your audience with your message. You must ask yourself, who is my audience and what do they want? You can’t make an idea fly if the people you are pitching to don’t have wings.

SEO can be an intimidating topic if you don’t know how to write website code. Many of the elements you need to influence lie within the body of the website content like clean code, heading tags, image alt tags, anchor links, file names and meta titles. But the essence of good SEO is about keeping several balls in the air simultaneously and there are things you can do to improve your SEO without knowing anything about how to build a website.

1. Create a Keyword List

Many people want to rank on Google but don’t take the time to really plan out which keywords they want to rank for. If you are new to SEO, choose 5 to 10 keyword phrases you would like to target. Don’t make them too similar. If you are on page 1 for “Canadian venture capital” then you won’t be far behind for “venture capital Canada”. Better to target 5 to 10 very different keywords phrases within your field.

DO – be realistic. You will have better luck ranking for local or specific searches than general ones. Consider “Toronto investment fund” versus “investing”.
DO – prioritize. If you are not ranking for any of your keywords, choose 2 or 3 to really work on. Once you are on the map, you can begin work on the next 2 or 3. Many SEO experts will be actively driving 50 to 100 keyword phrases simultaneously for a client!

2. Have a Blog

Many SEO challenges are won and lost within the blogosphere. More than anything else, Google loves lots of unique content that is updated regularly (ideally daily). A blog is the most efficient way to create new content for your site. Blogs allow you to continually grow the size of your website which is great because Google respects large sites. But be careful. Google rewards hard work, not shortcuts. Don’t fill your blog with duplicate content from another source or with quick articles that aren’t interesting to anyone. Remember that Google sees all – the moment you don’t respect it, it destroys you.

DO – include your blog as part of your main website, not linked to an offsite blog.
DO – use valuable keyword phrases wherever possible within your posts and post titles. But not at the expense of readability. Note that I did not title this article “Toronto SEO Company Offers 5 Tip to Improve SEO” or fill the article with random mentions of the city I live in. Try choosing 1 of your keyword phrases and writing a blog post exclusively about that topic (in this case, SEO!).

3. Use Social Media

Google tracks the relationship between websites and inventories the content and keywords of each site as it goes. It cares about the size and importance of sites that link to each other. For example, if you make a Facebook status update about investment funds and then link to your website about investment funds then Google sees that relationship from a high ranking site (Facebook) which improves the ranking of the site it’s linking to on the keywords  “investment funds”.

Each time you link to your website using relevant keyword text, Google counts that as one backlink. If you tweet 10 times a day, that’s 10 backlinks. The difference between social media backlinks and other website backlinks is that Google sees them as timely. This works in your favour if you want to rank quickly (see SEO Moz’s experiment where Twitter links outranked traditional backlinks) but they don’t last like other backlinks. The answer is to pursue both!

DO – use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to link to your website and blog.
DO – rotate through all of your keywords, giving equal weight to each in your social media updates and links.

4. Use Online Directories

Submit yourself to online business directories. The point of this is to gain a link from their site to yours so if they don’t offer a live website link, skip it. Try to focus on the free ones but also pay for directory listings if they are relevant to your industry. Use Google to find out what directories rank well for your keywords and submit to them.

DO – use as many relevant keywords in and around your directory link as possible. If they let you write a description of your business at all, pack it with keywords.
DO – watch your analytics to see how many click throughs you are getting from the paid directories. If the cost is high and the SEO rank is low, it may not be worth it.

5. Google Place Page

Google Place pages are a great way to secure a place on page 1. A Google Place page shows details about your business including location, photos, reviews and description. These results are shown when location based search terms are used such as “Toronto hair salons”.

If you have a physical location for your business, a Google place page is a no brainer. To be ranked well for your place page, be sure to “claim” the page as the business owner and fill it up with descriptions, photos and anything else that sells your business.

DO – get lots and lots of reviews. The pages with the most positive reviews rank the highest. Google Places will pull reviews from other sites like Yelp and OurFaves but users can also enter reviews right into Google. Get your favourite clients to write reviews to get your Place page ranking.
DO – learn how to add your business to Google Places

6. “Momentum” Press Releases

A momentum press release is a release created around keyword topics and submitted to an online press release company who then distributes it on your behalf for a fee. Press releases could be about an new product or service, a unique approach to what you do, a new location and anything else that is remotely like news.

The purpose of these press releases is not get press coverage from publications, but to get “picked up” by hundreds of online news sites that post press releases on a particular subject. This gets you hundreds of backlinks on specific keywords of your choosing over night.

Google likes activity. Within the online world, if you are updating, adding, moving, growing; these are all good in Googleland and online press releases are a great way to indicate just that.

DO – make the investment to use good online press release services like PRWeb.com or Marketwire.com
DO – focus on just one longtail keyword phrase. Trying to stuff too many topics in one release will muddy your results.

7. Blog and Forum Comments

An easy backlinks building strategy includes commenting on relevant blogs and forums. Within your comments, include a link back to your homepage or landing page to build page rank for that page.

Commenting on other relevant blogs drives traffic to your site and potentially adds valuable backlinks to your bank. I say potentially because many blogs have a “no follow” tag on their user links to avoid SEO spamming.

Commenting in forums are another great way to build backlinks. Forums archive their content forever and rarely have no follow tags on their outbound links. Ask questions, answer other user questions, add your 2 cents worth. Include your website link in your signature.

DO – include relevant keywords in your name on blog comments. For example, I wouldn’t list myself as “Angie Caunce”, I would list myself as “Angie, Toronto SEO Expert”. That name link then becomes a link to my SEO page.
DO – contribute to the value of the forum or blog. Do not say, “hey, check out my site.” That’s just annoying. Offer your expert opinion and share your knowledge. With that comes trust and followers.

It Doesn’t Take a Techie to Win a Tech War

You can significantly effect your SEO results simply by having a plan and consistently executing it. You don’t need a degree from MIT to do it, you just need the desire and commit the time to following the suggestions I’ve offered here.

Let me know how it goes! Which method are you most likely to try?

Yellowpages.ca has rolled up its sleeves and put some hard work into improving its online offering, but God bless them, they didn’t hire us and it still sucks. What you really want to know is will a listing in yellowpages.ca improve your search engine optimization?

The answer is: marginally and at a high cost.

Since I hammered Yellow Pages in the spring on their sales techniques versus performance (see Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow: Why You Can Pass on Yellowpages.ca), we’ve been getting more and more traffic from hapless souls wondering if their advertising dollars are being put to good use.

For those businesses, I wanted to focus this article on what exactly an online listing in Yellow Pages gets you from a SEO perspective.

How Directory Listings Increase Your SEO

Directory listings give you valuable backlinks. And the higher ranking the site, the better the quality of the backlink.

To determine ranking, first Google evaluates the directory site itself. Google determines the site’s page rank by considering the number of indexed pages, its popularity, traffic, keyword density, and its own backlinks velocity (the number of web properties linking to it). If the directory site ranks well on a chosen subject then websites that link out from it will get a boost in ranking on that subject.

The strength of the boost is determined by the quality of the link itself. For example, if a high ranking site provides a link to you that is full of relevant keywords (either in the link itself or in the surrounding text), the impact is higher than if the link has generic, non relevant text in it. The more content on the directory site that relates to your business, the better.

How Does Yellow Pages Rank?

Yellowpages.ca has a PR 7 which is nothing to sneeze at. The site has 2,600 Google approved backlinks and a breath-taking 3.1 MILLION indexed pages. In layman’s terms, yellowpages.ca kicks online ass.

And yet, they fail to rank in Google for the industries the serve. This begs the question, how badly do they have to not know what they’re doing to manage that? They should rank in their sleep. Their lunch order should appear on page one.

But, alas. It doesn’t.

A Real Business Example: Cosmetic Dentistry

To get us out of the abstract, let’s choose the highly competitive field of cosmetic dentistry to shed some light on the digital performance of yellowpages.ca

I go to yellowpages.ca and enter “cosmetic dentistry” and “Toronto, ON” as my region.

I’m choosing Denistry On Wynford as my example because it is a full listing with all the Yellow Pages bells and whistles including website, ad, video, and photos. Dentistry on Wynford clearly cares about their marketing and have used all the opportunities offered to them through yellowpages.ca

The first thing to note is that there is very little content on this page. This is the primary reason why Yellow Pages doesn’t rank for anything. They can’t because they are not about anything. Google loves content. The more words talking about a subject you have, the better Google will rank you for that subject.

But on this listing, any real information about the business (and therefore, on the subject) is buried beneath the fold and is very tiny and stilted. Instead of giving businesses 2 paragraphs or so to describe themselves and what they offer, they are forced to conform to one word answers in cookie cutter categories dictated by Yellow Pages like “Business Hours” and “Brands Offered”. These categories are the same if you are in furnace repair or stereo systems.

Next, if you were to look at the source code, you’d see that it is a javascript jungle in there with no heading tags whatsoever. Google looks for linking text and H1-H6 tags (headings) to get a sense of what the page is really about. Yellow Pages uses custom CSS class names like “business name” instead of standard heading tags, hurting their SEO.

Making the default main content a video (or worse a graphic image of a print ad) with no supporting text is a mistake. While Google likes the interactive qualities of video, if there is not enough supporting text and the video itself is not optimized, its impact on ranking is nominal.

Google’s new Caffeine algorithms really likes user interaction. Yellow Pages has implemented a review system but the system has no reviews. They have Facebook integration but have no “Likes” on their pages. They can tell me how many millions of users they have every month until they turn blue, but a site with no signs of life tells me there is no engagement. And why is there no engagement? Because there is no content. In other words, what’s to like? A list of brand names?

Of the items in the listing tabs, they are all things that are considered supporting content to Google, not primary content. The only content Google can read from an image is the alt tag and the name of the image file. That means, from and SEO perspective, the ad, photos and website preview are all useless. The only relevant content is the business details which are stark at best.

Does a Listing In Yellow Pages Help My Ranking At All?

What you need to know is the most valuable thing yellowpages.ca has to offer you is a live link to your website. Despite their SEO ineptitude, they have achieved a PR 7 and a link from a PR 7 site is a big deal. Even an indirect link (which is what they offer) will raise you up in Google’s esteem. Because this is the only real SEO benefit they offer, I find it particularly disappointing that the linking text says “Website” rather than keyword anchor text like “Toronto Cosmetic Dentist” or even the name of the business.

Our business example Dentistry on Wynford is on page 2 of our “Toronto Cosmetic Dentist” Google search. This is just as likely because of the total online marketing efforts the business has made as on their investment in Yellow Pages. Of the Toronto cosmetic dentists who invested in a premium listing on yellowpages.ca, less than half of them appear on the first 5 pages of Google.

The Cost of Backlinks

When I say Yellow Pages doesn’t rank, I mean at all. It is vital to note that within our example of “Toronto Cosmetic Dentistry” not a single Yellow Pages listing showed up in the first 50 pages of Google results. There are between 10-12 results per page which means Yellow Pages didn’t show up within the first 500 search results.

It also important to note that over 30 online business directories did show up in the first 20 pages of Google. So what you should perhaps ask yourself is how much is a PR7 backlink worth to you? An online listing in Yellow Pages can cost you anywhere between $200 and $1,00 a month depending on how many areas you want to cover. For $2,500 a year, you could likely get listed on all 30 of the ranking directories (good for any search performed with “Toronto” in the keywords) and you would gain 30 backlinks for the price of 1. Many directories are free because they make their money from Google content advertising, not from the businesses they list. And there are many opportunities for backlinks from PR7 and higher websites that are free if you know where to look and what to do.
So, the answer is yes, Yellow Pages does improve your Google page rank. But at what cost?

Click here for more information on our SEO services and how we help build rank within your budget.

If you want to learn more about how to supercharge your web presence, join our Meetup.com group, Toronto Intro To Online Marketing. Our intention with this group is to educate businesses and marketers so they can make intelligent decisions about their online marketing. See you there!

Join us on Wednesday, January 12, 2011 and learn how to Create the Perfect Storm of Digital Connectivity.

In this free one hour presentation, we will discuss the 8 pivotal elements that lead to online success and drive your web goals. Our hope is to educate marketers, business owners and not-for-profit agencies so that they can make intelligent decisions about online marketing. And a little networking never hurt any of us!

Our presentation will cover everything from email marketing to search engine optimization and focus on making your website a powerful sales tool to drive revenue. We will discuss social media marketing and how to use it, not just to build a following, but to drive your business goals.

Whether you are brand new to online marketing or looking to fill in knowledge gaps, this series will have you thinking like an expert in no time. Whatever your background, this first of a series of presentations will teach you everything you need to know about succeeding online.

After the presentation, we will have a question and answer period where you can ask general or very specific questions.

When: January 12, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Where: 349 Carlaw Avenue, Suite 300

rsvp@amalgamdesign.com or join our meetup.com group – Toronto Intro To Online Marketing and RSVP for Create the Perfect Storm of Digital Connectivity.

Looking forward to seeing you there!