Vancouver SEO

I’m gonna say emphatically “Yes”, as I’ve been following my special vanity SERPs for “Keith Greene”.  My main competition is a christian rock singer from the ’70s and a chef who once appeared on Hell’s Kitchen.  Google still thinks I mean the non-Irish spelling of “Greene”, but what’s interesting is my online SEO resume ranks on page 1 for “keith greene” on Google.com (New Jersey proxy), but not on Google.ca (my home country):

Google.com results for "keith greene"

Google.ca results for "keith greene"

I host on Godaddy, which I gather the server is somewhere in the US, so this makes sense, but I’m a little disappointed in Google for not being able to recognize what country I’m from..  how rude!

Well, I’ve finally moved on from my previous job as the Senior SEO Strategist for Fiver Media.  For those unfamiliar with Fiver, allow me to give some history.  Fiver Media is a marketing company who’s client is Morris Mohawk Gaming, the sole licensee of the Bodog Brand in North America.  I started at Fiver about 2 months after Bodog.com was seized in a patent dispute with 1st Technology, and they had changed their domain name to Bodoglife.com.  I started as a Junior SEO, and one of my first jobs was SERP reporting, which I did by hand, and literally took hours as I searched the top 100 results for non-branded terms, only to type “not found” into my spreadsheet.

But, things changed fast at Fiver, and nearly two years later, we were back on top for most of our non-branded queries, and I had moved up to the Senior SEO Strategist position (aka “Head of SEO” as many email references called me).  I learned a lot, quite quickly in that environment, and had some incredibly knowledgeable and way-to-intelligent-for-their-own-good teachers to guide my path.  I wouldn’t change that for the world, but as they say “all things must pass”, and I moved on like my predecessors before me.

Obviously, I’m not going to give away too many secrets on how our small IM team was able to take a brand new domain and position it almost back to where it was before (there are no 301 redirects when someone else owns your domain!), but what I will say is that anyone who is still in denial about the power of a Brand in search are going to soon have a very harsh awakening.

So, the question that may be on your mind…  ”Is this the end of your battle with Google?”  Fear not, friends and readers, for I’m right back in the saddle starting up an internet marketing arm for Thirdi.com.  Thirdi is a small boutique company that provides software and CMS systems, mainly for not-for-profit organizations.  It was started by a young go-getter named Matt Friesen, and it looks like its going to be a lot of fun.  I will be contributing SEO Tips and Advice on the Thirdi Blog titled “Senses”, so if you want more SEO related stuff, feel free to visit us there.

We’ll also be doing consulting, and Search Engine Optimization at reasonable rates, if you’re interested… or if you happened to lose your domain name in some legal dispute and want to know how to regain your non-branded search traffic!