Montreal’s SEO & Online Marketing Community is Thriving

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Samuel Lavoie

SEO Camp Montreal 2013

For the third year in a row, I’m organizing the SEO Camp Montreal event, a full-day SEO/Inbound Marketing conference taking place in the city. Almost 200 attendees from Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke and Ottawa are coming to meet, speak and learn “in-the-trenches” tactics, tools and strategies from fellow digital agency professionals as well as a south of the border speakers.

This year’s conference sold out before we were able to announce the speaker line-up, which is quite an achievement and shows that we’re still aligned in terms of pricing and quality. We deliberately want to keep the cost of entry as low as possible to ensure we reach small agency folks, consultants and peeps doing SEO for their products or clients everyday. Indeed, it’s not an easy balance between quality (no pitch) talks, low cost tickets and making sure the organization founding the event, non-profit organization W3Quebec, does not register a loss at the end of the day.

A glimpse of the conference

I caught up last week with Adam Melson, one of our returning keynote speakers. Continue reading →

Google Analytics Certification: How to Pass the new GAIQ Test

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Samuel Lavoie

This week I took and passed the GAIQ Test for the second time. Last time was back in 2009 and so with a 18 months certification term I was way overdue. The thing is that Google Analytics will never let you know when your certification expired so you should make a note to yourself if want to stay enlisted in the Qualified Individuals I didn’t do much preparation this time around but I took some notes during the process. These steps and tips should be useful for the folks looking to pass the new version of the test, let me know how it goes!

Continue reading →

Email Marketing Crushes Social Media

Email is a great business tool and when it’s put to good use with great & engaging content, it’s pretty powerful.

A blog post written by the informationhighwayman.com @Bnonn stated 5 reasons why, Email Marketing is crushing it for B2B businesses. I think, Email Marketing is killing it for most business B2B or B2C who are using it the right way.

Rather, it’s because email allows you to make repeated contact, and that contact is “invasive”. It’s in their mailbox—their inner electronic sanctum. That’s very different from sending out a tweet or posting something on Facebook, where they may or may not see it, because it’s just part of a much larger timeline featuring hundreds of other people. Excerpt from: 5 Reasons Email Marketing Crushes Social Media Marketing for B2B

I’ll add that maybe the most important reason why it’s because you own your list, not a third-party platform. For most agency folks, being so busy chasing the latest magic bullets, we often forget how Email Marketing is essential to our client’s web marketing strategy.

It all boils down to how you connect and foster interactions between related inbound channels.

Rich Snippets Testing Tool

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Samuel Lavoie

So finally Google updated their Rich Snippet testing tool so we can all test how Google parse structured markup. The tool has been available for a while Continue reading →

Mike Monteiro: Fuck You. Pay Me.

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Samuel Lavoie

Mike Monteiro, Design Director, and co-founder of Mule Design Studio at San Francisco, CreativeMornings.

A year old but still a must watch (re watch), its gold for those dealing with clients. Also check out the corresponding Continue reading →

Under the hood of Search

Under the hood of Google’s crown jewel: Google Search. Google posted earlier today on their blog, a video on how its engineers gradually adjust the algorithm. For webmaster and business owner, it’s interesting to hear this directly from the search engine.

Google gobbles up Motorola Mobility for Mobile Patents

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Samuel Lavoie

This morning Google anounced that they just bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. With all the latest Mobile patents war between Apple, Microsoft and Google, they were obviously chasing the strong portfolio of more than 17000 patents.

Microsoft was interested in acquiring Motorola’s patent portfolio that would have allowed it to torpedo Android even further. The possibility of that deal brought Google to the negotiation table, resulting in the blockbuster sale. OM Malik on GigaOM

Pissed that they lost the last fight over Nortel’s patents, Google had to do something. They were probably looking to secure their Android platform from rival, which means more control over the “open” platform (don’t be fool). They will be able to deploy Android update much faster or at least to put pressure on these OEMs (HTC, Samsung) not fast enough. They can defend Android much better with that acquisition, as MG Siegler on Techcrunch wrote:

What happens when the iPhone 5 launches and everyone wants it? That includes many people currently using Android phones. After a few months of this, Google grows frustrated that none of their OEMs can release a device that matches the build-quality that Apple puts out there. But wait, they now have their own company they can at the very least use to apply to pressure the other OEMs to force them to do better work!

There is no such a thing as Mobile SEO

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Samuel Lavoie

Remember the old WAP Nokia Phones? A few years back, Google developed a specific crawler for these types of sites as they are radically different. Nowadays, in most of North American and Europeans countries, smartphones are much more the reality. Phones on which sites mostly react as a desktop browser, quite the same technology and without an intermediary server. So why bother with Google for Mobile? Continue reading →