SEO Training in Toronto- Courses for Learning PPC

With the growth of search engine optimization and marketing and the ever growing demand for SEM and SEO experts who could help augment online marketing campaigns, more marketing and web design professionals are looking for SEM (ppc advertising) and SEO training courses to learn about the latest search engine optimization & marketing techniques.

As an early SEO and PPC adopter, I learned search engine optimization and marketing techniques by working on an online property, as I mentioned in my post: Back to the Future, and by trying new methods to improve search engines rankings and increasing traffic. As at the time, there were no formal SEM (pay-per-click) and SEO training courses, the only option was to go after trial and error methodology. The advantage of training yourself on SEO and SEM is the trill and self satisfaction of learning new SEO techniques and getting to put your thinking hat on. However, the disadvantage is that you learn at the cost of time and possible mistakes you make along the way which could potentially prove very costly in PPC advertising (AdWords, YSM, MSN adCenter).

How to Learn SEO & PPC?

Even though there are not many universities and colleges that offer SEO and PPC training courses, you can shorten the learning curve either by reading various SEM and SEO blogs online (check my blogroll for some good sites), read books on the topic (e.g., Search Engine Marketing Inc., Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, SEO Bible) or talk to SEM SEO Experts to learn the basic and advanced search engine marketing techniques. Please note that there are many myths around search engine optimization. So, don’t put your trust in what you read unless you have tested the ideas and have seen their positive or negative impacts.

If you would like to learn search engine optimization and are looking for PPC & SEO training courses in Toronto, you can try search engine strategies Toronto workshops or SEMPO courses. You can always try to pick my brain as well.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, Toronto-based SEM, SEO, PPC Expert

Related Article: SEM Expertise Needed to Be an SEM Expert

Google Search Based Keyword Tool - SKTool

Google just announced the introduction of its new keyword search tool. Google's new free keyword suggestion tool is called Search-based Keyword Tool (SKTool).

Whether you use keyword research tools for SEO or PPC advertising using AdWords, YSM (previously Overture), MSN and adCenter, you can benefit from Google's new and free keyword tool.

The Search-based Keyword Tool helps you leverage search query data relevant to your website's content by giving you keywords that Google believes are relevant to your site but are not currently part of your AdWords campaigns. By using this new tool, not only you can prevent any missed opportunities but also can work on improving the Quality Score of your AdWords campaigns by selecting keywords that Google finds most relevant.

So, What is Search-based Keyword Suggestion Tool?

This tool provides you with keyword ideas that are relevant and specific to your site. Google analyzes the landing page on your website and suggests keyword queries that have occured on Google properties over the past year. The suggested keywords are organized into subcategories.


In the first look, the tool looks like Google AdWords External Keyword Research Tool, however, SKTool combines the knowledge of your website together with Google's query database to suggest relevant keywords for your AdWords campaigns.

The keyword tool looks at the content on each page within your website and pairs keyword suggestions with specific pages that Google believes are most relevant. Of course it is important to use your own judgment before selecting any of the suggested keywords and not to put your faith in the hands of machines ;0).

The tool also offers average bid required to place your ad in the top three position of Google search engine results pages. Another cool feature of this new keyword tool is that it checks for deleted, paused and negative keywords in your AdWords account to ensure they do not suggest any duplicate keywords.

What could make Google search-based keyword tool so special is its ability to provide you with the top keywords across all categories and not just the keywords related to your website. Once the tool is out of beta, it could be the new best friend for PPC and SEO professionals.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM Expert

SEO vs. PPC Promotion Strategies

Marketing SEO vs. PPC Promotion StrategiesSEO or SEM? This is a question you might have asked yourself. You have the budget to allocate either to SEO market your products and services or take advantage of PPC advertising to promote your website.

When deciding on your marketing strategies, there are many factors that you need to take into consideration.On the first look, SEO seems to be the perfect answer as it could attract as much as 70% of the searchers whereas your PPC promotion could draw only 30% of the search volume. Search Engine Optimization has other benefits as well.

SEO Benefits
• Once you have a high rankings on search engines, you can start getting traffic without directly paying for that traffic.
• Generate Possibly higher CTR.
• Gain more credibility among searchers.• Once you rank high organically, more people find your site and link back to you.

However, there are some challenges with SEO. First off, there is no guarantee that your site get first ranking even if you implement all your SEO strategies. Secondly it usually takes a while to be able to gain high rankings on search engines results pages (specially on Google, Yahoo and MSN). Thirdly search engines algorithms could change and impact all your SEO efforts. Fourthly, you have less control over messaging and the selection of landing pages. Fifthly, A/B or multi variant testing would be way more complicated.

PPC Benefits
By incorporating Pay per click advertising into your website promotion strategy, you will be able to put your message in front of your audience at the exact time they are looking for. Some of the benefits of pay per click advertising are:

• Quick time to market.• Flexibility in changing messages.
• Quick measurement of response.
• Easy A/B or multi variant testing of ad copies and landing pages.
• Ability to target audience in specific locations by geo-targeting.
• Set and control daily budget.

The challenges with SEM (PPC) advertising is that you need to keep paying for the traffic. As mentioned before it also only attract about 30% of the traffic.

So, let’s ask the question again. Should you allocate your marketing budget to organic SEO or sponsored PPC ads? The answer is both. Depending on what your objectives are or how urgent your marketing needs are you might decide on how to allocate your budget.

No matter which strategy you are using it is important that you track their performance by designing KPIs to measure the success of your SEO and PPC initiatives utilizing your Web Analytics application.

In most cases, when SEO and PPC are used together as part of an integrated marketing strategy they could create a great synergy that could create your company with competitive advantage.

SEO Benefits from PPC
As I mentioned in my post on SEO and Personalization, SEO can indirectly benefit from PPC advertising. By getting more visibility through PPC advertising, you increase the chances of getting backlinks from your audience which in turns helps improve your PageRank and SEO ranking in the long run.

In addition, by analyzing your PPC campaign you will get a better understanding of what keywords contribute to your ROI best. Then you can use those keywords to optimize your website for.

PPC advertising also create more awareness and branding for your site which in turn could help you lift your response rate.

Having multiple listings on the first page of search engines you can further reinforce your message and build credibility for your business.

PPC Benefits from SEO
When your website ranks high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, your ads could start getting higher CTR as people find your site more credible.

Additionally a well optimized page could help improve your Quality Score for your PPC ads. This is getting more and more important as SEO and PPC are getting more and more interconnected.

Before spending time and budget to invest in your SEO strategies, you can run test PPC campaign to identify the pest performing phrases.

Both PPC advertising and SEO are excellent strategies for marketing your website. However, to be successful in a competitive industry you need to utilize the synergy between PPC and SEO. The key is to know when to emphasize on one and when to rely on the other or when to employ both. SEO is most effective when you are trying to reach long term objectives whereas PPC is most effective when you need immediate traffic.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM SEO Expert

Google AdWords & AdSense Pay Per Click Fraud Detection

Just heard the latest news on Google PPC Click Fraud Detection and Prevention. Click Forensics announced that Google will be accepting click-quality e-reports generated by the Click Forensics’ Fully Automated Click Tracking Recognition (FACTr). This means that Google AdWords advertisers can now submit click fraud reports to Google in an automated fashion through FACTr click fraud auditing service.

Click Fraud Definition
Click fraud is a type of Internet fraud that occurs in pay per click search advertising (e.g., Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing – previously Overture) when an individual, a group of people or an automated script (click bot) imitates a legitimate user by clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having any interest in the offer advertised in the clicked ad.

Types of Click Fraud

Publisher: a publisher may try to profit from AdSense ads being clicked.

Competitors of advertisers: A competitor may wish to harm another competitor who advertises in the same market by clicking on their ads on Google, Yahoo or their content networks. The objective here is to increase the cost to competitor as advertiser has to pay for irrelevant clicks. This could potentially cause the competitors ads go dark if their budget is limited.

Competitors of publishers: A publisher’s competitor may want to terminate the relationship between the publisher and the pay per click programs by making it look like the publisher is clicking on its own ads to generate revenue. The objective is to dry the AdSense source of revenue for competing publishers.

Click Fraud Detection & Tracking
Pay per Click advertising networks such as Google AdWords or Yahoo try to put fraud prevention technologies into place to prevent click fraud by all parties; however, it is difficult to detect which clicks are legitimate and which ones are fraudulent.

Click fraud – or invalid clicks as Google likes to call it – is not and should not be liked by any parties. Advertisers do not want to spend their valuable marketing dollars for invalid or fraudulent clicks. Publishers resent having to pay refunds for clicks that are not initiated by them. Google and other search engines, even though could have short term monetary gains, are also trying to stop click fraud as it could diminish their revenue in the long term if advertisers lose faith in the pay per click system.

That is why search engines are trying to build click fraud detection and prevention software and reporting systems that help track possible invalid clicks and reimburse advertisers for the invalid clicks.

The pay-per-click industry has been lobbying for tighter laws on the click fraud issue. Some companies have developed software for click fraud tracking and detection and are developing relationships with advertising networks. Such solutions fall into two categories:

Analysis of advertisers' web logs – The first approach is the process of analysis of the advertiser's web logs to get an in-depth insight of the source and behaviour of the traffic in order to detect the potential click fraud. The limitation of this approach is that it relies solely on the honesty of the middlemen in detecting click fraud.

Third-party click fraud management services - Third parties such as Click Forensics offer web-based solutions (utilizing single-pixel images, JavaScript or cookies). The objective is to highlight suspicious clicks. However, the problem with third-party solutions is that such solutions see only part of the traffic of the entire network. Hence, they can be less likely to identify click fraud patterns that span several advertisers by click bots. In addition, search engines claim that the third party click fraud management services can be overly aggressive when judging traffic to be fraud.

Click Fraud Rates
Depending on who reports on it, click fraud rate can vary. Google claims that on average less than 2% of all clicks through Google’s systems are click frauds whereas some of click fraud management companies report click fraud rates as high as 20%.



Google believes that the majority of invalid clicks are already detected through their automatic and manual click fraud detection technology and team.



The Future of Click Fraud
The good news is search engines are becoming more transparent and now seems to be ready to cooperate with third party click fraud auditing service providers such as Click Forensics. They are also working with other companies to establish industry standards for click fraud protection: Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Click Measurement Working Group.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEM Expert

Not for Profit Conference - 2008 NFP Seminar by CMA

I will be speaking at 2008 CMA Not-for-Profit Conference on October 7, 2008 here in Toronto. The objective of this seminar is to share with the non profit organizations ways to develop an inegrated marketing strategy and to showcase innovative concepts in the not-for-profit industry.


The audience for this event will be marketing and management teams from non for profit organizations and agencies.

In this speach I will cover how search engine marketing and search engine optimization can be a powerful tool for marketing managers while web analytics can provide executives and management teams with insight on their marketing campaigns.

I will also touch base on Google Grants for non-profit organizations can be utilized for fundraising.

Learn more about this non-for profit conference.

Nima Asrar Haghighi - SEM SEO Expert