SmarttNet is a well established, successful and growing Internet Service Provider with a skilled and dedicated team of creative and technical professionals. We provide co-location, connectivity, online marketing and web development services to clients across Canada and the United States.

As a result of our growth, we are looking for a dedicated and energetic Technical Document Specialist to join our team and provide comprehensive technical document writing skills.

Position Overview

The Technical Document Specialist will be reporting to the ­­­­­­­­­­­Chief Marketing Officer and is responsible for the writing and editing of technical documentation for SmarttNet’s services, products, internal company processes and user manuals. The successful candidate must be able to organize and translate ideas from technical and non-technical sources into well presented and designed technical documents which are created for a variety of audiences.

Core Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain product and service summaries and descriptions
• Develop and maintain installation, configuration, how-to documentation and online help sources for both customers and employees
• Develop and maintain sales and support templates for automated client responses
• Develop and integrate technical illustrations into various documentation
• Develop and maintain product and service white papers for partner and client audiences
• Develop and maintain procedural documents and guides for internal use
• Assist in developing SRS documentation

Secondary Responsibilities

• Review published materials and recommend revisions or changes in scope, format, content, methods of reproduction and binding
• Arrange for typing, duplication and distribution of materials where necessary
• Assist in laying out of material for publication
• Observe service and product development by fellow team members to determine operating procedures and other details for document creation
• Interview development, engineering, marketing and support staff to become familiar with products and services for the creation of technical documentation
• Communicate with clients and partners to help improve documentation and publications
• Create standardized templates to facilitate client, staff and technical writer documentation creation initiatives
• Follow company reporting requirements and provide updates to immediate supervisor on a daily and weekly basis
• Provide assessments and suggestions for improvement of current technical document creation and management
• Perform other duties as required

Job Requirements

• Minimum of 2 years experience in a technical writing role
• Bachelor degree in Journalism, English OR certificate in Technical Writing
• Advanced computer skills in publishing and authorship software including Microsoft Word, Acrobat Pro, Illustrator, and FrameMaker
• Proven knowledge and experience of image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop
• Excellent verbal, written and inter-personal skills
• Highly self-motivated individual capable of working with both technical and non-technical team members
• Demonstrated ability to work within tight deadlines
• Demonstrated ability to complete writing assignments according to set standards regarding order, conciseness, clarity, appropriate style and terminology
• Ability to work without direct supervision and

Asset Skills & Abilities

• Prior knowledge and experience with SCRUM
• Prior knowledge and experience with Agile software development
• Advanced knowledge of HTML, XML and other mark-up languages

Benefits

• A salary range of $40,000- $57,000 based on experience & calculated on an annual basis
• Company sponsored training and skills improvement opportunities
• Extended Health & Dental Care following successful completion of probationary period
• 10 paid vacation days per year
• 5 paid sick leave days per year
• Participation in Social Calendar of community and employee activities and events
• Inclusion in the SmarttNet commission system

The local business results that appear when you search for "Vancouver Hotels" on Google.

As I talked about in a previous post on the Top 10 Ranking Factors for Google Places, getting valuable local citations is the best way to dominate the rankings for Google’s Local Business listings. A citation is where your business name, address and phone number is mentioned (or cited) by another website. Since some Canadian businesses don’t have a website, Google is able to crawl any citations in content that mentions a business, even if a website is not linked from that page. However, having an incoming link from a citation source is preferable, as it is likely considered of higher value and the link can refer valuable traffic to your website.

When ranking businesses for its local business listings (now called Google Places), Google looks at a variety of factor such as:

1. How complete the listing is and which keywords it uses.
2. The level of activity on the listing: visitor impressions, user reviews and map references.
3. How many citations the business has received along with the quality and relevance of the citations.

After you’ve taken the time to fully complete your Google local business listing, you should focus on getting quality citations for your business. This is the most effective way to increase your local search rankings on Google Places.

Top 15 Canadian Business Listing Citations

These are the biggest general business listing directories in Canada, listed by their PageRank. Getting a proper citation for your business with an incoming link to your website from these 15 citation sources will provide a solid foundation for ranking on Google’s local business listings. If you have found other business citations sources to be valuable, you can add them in the comments at the bottom.

In addition to the big guys listed above, there are hundreds of smaller directories for Canadian businesses and their websites. However, adding your website to tons of business directories can be a huge waste of time. Most Canadian directories, free or paid, offer little or no help in building your local ranking on Google. In fact, most of these websites get little traffic apart from website promoters adding their own links and they will send you zero traffic.

To identify a valuable link, I look for directory listings and websites that actually send decent traffic, if only an occasional trickle of visitors. Search engine algorithms are designed to analyze and mimic how people actually surf the web.  As a result, they most highly value links that people are regularly clicking on.

For the local market here in Vancouver, I’ve compiled a list of about 30 decent directories through careful research and tracking, but these links aren’t going to make a substantial difference in rankings in a highly competitive local niche. To achieve that, quality natural links are needed.

Getting Natural Links To Your Website

Even more important than links from directories, Google wants to see natural links to your website from local community websites, blogs and the local media. If you support a local softball team, a community event or a charity, try to get an incoming link from their website. To attract links from local blogs, the best way is to have a regularly updated blog on your business website. From your blog, you can link out to other local bloggers. If your content is useful and you take the time to ask them, many local bloggers will give you a reciprocal link.

To get links from local newspapers, websites and publications, send out press releases and respond to article calls. Typical, the best way to get people to talk about your business and link to your website, is to build a relationship with them. When you meet people networking, at tradeshows and in your business community, ask them if they are interested in exchanging links since both your businesses can benefit.

Creating Effective Local Citations

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when doing link building and completing business citation listings:

1. Consistency – use the same business name, address and phone number on all your listings.
2. Be Patient -  it may take 2-3 months for all your citations to appear at the bottom of your Google Places profile listing.
3. Get Deep Links – try to get some of your local links directly to your content rather than your homepage.
4. Build Links Gradually – Instead of adding all your links and citations at once, add them gradually over time.
5. Include Images – Whenever possible, take advantages of options to include a logo, pictures or videos.

The quantity and quality of links with incoming links from high traffic websites that have relevant content to your website providing the most value. It gets a little more complicated than that, and quality is far more highly valued than quantity, but that’s basically how it works.

So, if you’re like me and fascinated with how Google’s ranking algorithm works (and earns the company billions of dollars each year in profits!) then you will definitely find this infographic interesting.

Click on the image to view the full-size graphic. Infographic by PPC Blog

According to Forrester Research, interactive online marketing is predicted to grow to 21% of all marketing spending by 2014. This would mean the interactive online marketing industry would grow to almost $55 billion dollars per year by 2014. Forrester’s most recent US Interactive Marketing Forecast (2009-2014) predicts the further cannibalization of traditional media and the breakdown in the business models of traditional advertising, marketing and public relations agencies that can’t make the successful jump into interactive online channels.

The survey results were taken from 204 marketing executives at large firms with over 200 employees from a wide variety of industries. Interestingly, Forrester predicts that advertising budgets will continue to decline as less expensive and more targeted online marketing tools enable marketers to spend less money to accomplish their current advertising goals. Instead, the money saved can be better spent on innovation, research and development, customer service, user experience and new technology investments.

Interactive Online Marketing Trends 2010-2014

Some of the key findings in the report:

Interactive online marketing tools are more effective than traditional ones, particularly during a recession. Interactive online tools are less expensive, more measurable and offer better response and interaction with consumers than traditional media.

Consumers want an interactive brand experience and as a result customer relationships are becoming more interactive. Disruptive marketing practices like 30-second television commercials and print advertisements are becoming less effective as today’s consumers increasingly block out advertisements. However, 42% of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Interactive online marketing delivers results and marketing departments are shifting their spending away from traditional marketing sectors. When survey participants were asked which traditional marketing sectors they were moving their spending away from, the biggest decreases (in order) were in direct mail, newspapers, magazines, television, yellow pages, outdoor ads, radio and telemarketing.

The fastest-growing areas of online marketing industry are social media marketing, online video marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and mobile marketing. Search engines, Google in particular, continue to dominate how people find and research new products and services online. With Facebook’s membership now numbering over 500 million users worldwide, having a presence on the social networking site is essential for major brands and smart companies who want to tap the power of social influencing.

Search engine marketing continues to dominate online marketing spending with 59% of total spending. It is expected to grow at a rate of 15% per year and reach $32 billion dollars by 2014. Currently, over 80% of marketers use some form of paid search marketing or search engine optimization. Search volume continues to increase at a high rate and many companies are shifting more of their paid advertising dollars into search engine optimization spending because it is often more cost effective to do so. In total, the bulk of search engine marketing spending goes into paid search advertising.

Measurement is improving for online brand advertising and new attribution models like Microsoft’s Engagement Framework are making it easier for marketers to assess the relative influence of branding events and display ads. While it is much easier to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of PPC campaigns, these new attribution models are making calculating ROI easier for brand advertising and social media marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing is poised to explode with 34% yearly growth over the next 5 years. Many companies are now integrating their paid online advertising and search engine optimization strategies with a social marketing strategy to maximize the effectiveness of all online marketing activities. The biggest trend to watch in social media is the increasing personalization of content, search results and ads delivered to users based on their social profiles, locations and browsing activities.

The use of mobile computing platforms is also surging with 27% yearly growth expected for the next 5 years. Led by the new iPad, iPhone and Android Smartphones, the use of apps and searching on mobile platforms has doubled in the last year. Increasingly, people are using their mobile devices in a similar way to how they had previously used their home computers.

Interactive Marketing Means Building Relationships

As people continue to spend more time online and using their mobile smartphones, marketers will need to be more creative and develop new strategies that capture the attention of consumers. The future of marketing will involve less disruptive advertising and more use of well-designed content and information that provides value and helps solve problems for consumers.

Marketing has always been about building relationships. Now, interactive online tools allow us to build and cultivate relationships on a much larger scale. The marketers and the companies that will thrive in the online marketplace will be those that find new ways to use these interactive social technologies to build meaningful relationships with their customers.

Today Wordpress released its highly anticipated Wordpress 3.0 “Thelonious” update. The new release is a huge step forward in Wordpress’ transition from a blogging platform to a more flexible, full-featured content management (CMS) system.

Wordpress continues to be one of the most popular blogging and CMS platforms with over 10.3 million downloads of the previous version 2.9. This exciting new version maintains Wordpress’ famous lightweight, easy-to-install and simple-to-use user interface.

Some of the key new features:

• A better designed and more easily customizable default theme called TwentyTen
• The integration of WordPress Multi-User so you can run multiple websites from the same administration dashboard.
• Custom background support, easily update your background without modifying any code
• You can now create custom post types for different kinds of content. Previously, the options were limited to writing a new blog post or a static page.
• Easy menu creation and management from the WordPress backend where you can now create multiple menus, categories and custom external/internal links on your navigation menus.
• Custom taxonomies to include more complex tagging and organization of content.
• New developer API to make custom Wordpress themes even more powerful.
• Lighter interface with contextual help available on every screen.

Watch the new WordPress 3.0 video tour to see all the new features:

If you’re thinking of upgrading your current version of Wordpress, you can use the auto-upgrade feature from the Wordpress Dashboard. Fortunately, most themes and plugins will continue to work with Wordpress 3.0 but make sure you backup your database and files before upgrading.

If you want give the new version a try, you can download Wordpress 3.0 at the official website here. The developers have also posted a live download counter where you can see how many people are downloading the new version. At the time of publishing, Wordpress 3.0 had been downloaded 19,702 times (not bad for one day!).

The key to tracking different PPC Ad Campaigns is Google’s URL Builder. Using this handy tool, you can track the conversions and return on investment from your online advertising spending.

To get started, here is how to use Google’s URL Builder for the most common PPC Ad Platforms:

1. How To Track Your MSN adCenter PPC Campaigns:

If you leave your MSN adCenter ad untagged, then your paid traffic will be indistinguishable from your organic traffic from MSN and Bing. To create custom tags for your Microsoft adCenter URLs, enter the information below into Google URL Builder:

1. Campaign Source: bing
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: {QueryString}
(this is a custom tag that Microsoft Adcenter supports for tracking keywords )
4. Campaign Content: {AdID}
(this is another custom tag unique to Adcenter for individual ad tracking)
5. Campaign Name: {OrderItemID}
(this imports your Ad Group ID from Microsoft Adcenter or choose a custom campaign name)

Plug this data into Google’s URL Builder and you should get something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_content={AdID}&utm_campaign={OrderItemID}

Notice that the Google URL Builder may converts the “{” and “}” characters  to character string “%7B” and “%7D”. I’d recommend modifying the URL so that the “{” and “}” characters are intact. Now, login into your Microsoft Adcenter account and ad this custom URL to each individual ad as the landing page URL.

2. How To Track Your Yahoo Search Marketing PPC Campaigns:

Tracking your Yahoo Search Marketing Ads is very similar to the previous example with Microsoft Adcenter. Again, what you need to do is create custom tags for your individual Yahoo Ad Campaigns:

1. Campaign Source: yahoo
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: {OVKEY}
   (Yahoo’s custom tag for tracking keywords)
4. Campaign Content: {OVADID}
   (Yahoo’s custom tag for individual ad tracking)
   
5. Campaign Name: {OVCAMPGID}
   (Yahoo’s custom tag for campaign ID or choose a custom campaign name)

Plug this data into Google’s URL Builder and you should get something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

Now you will need to verify that Yahoo’s custom URL tagging (which only works with Yahoo! Web Analytics) is disabled by going to the Administration tab and clicking on Tracking URLs. Set Tracking URLs to OFF and save your changes. This will ensure that your URLs will not be double tagged. Next, in your Yahoo PPC campaign manager, you will need to enter this custom URL for each individual ad in your PPC campaign as the landing page URL.

3. How To Track Your Facebook Ad Campaigns:

With Facebook’s growing influence in online advertising, running PPC campaigns on the Facebook platform can be very lucrative for certain businesses. If you don’t set up a custom URL for your Facebook Ads then they will appear in your Google Analytics data in a similar fashion to clicks from your Facebook Page or links posted on Facebook. That’s not very helpful if you’re trying to track return on investment (ROI), which is especially important for Facebook Ads which can be a goldmine for some businesses and a moneypit for others.

1. Campaign Source: facebook
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: (here can you place your targeted keywords)
4. Campaign Content: (this can help you differentiate your ads if you’re running multiple ads)
5. Campaign Name: (choose a custom campaign name)

You completed URL will look something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=seo&utm_content=ad1&utm_campaign=facebook-seo

Next, enter this information as the landing page for your individual Facebook Ad ads and campaigns and you won’t have to rely anymore on the mediocre analytics provided by Facebook Insights.

Conclusion

I highly recommend to customers that are currently using Google Adwords to try out these other platforms. While the search volumes are nowhere near Google’s, the cost-per-click is often much lower and the advertising competition is less intense. This can make it much easier to convert your paid traffic spending into conversions that a solid return for each dollar spent.

Now, with custom tracking you can see for yourself if these platforms are worth your advertising dollars by measuring your exact return on investment in Google Analytics.

Today, David Mihm released his influential 2010 Local Search Ranking Factor survey. This year 34 search engine marketing experts provided their insights and the result is some very valuable information to help you gain a better understanding of how Google’s Local Algorithm ranks listings.

The Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors:

Based on the collective insights of all the search marketing experts, these are the top 10 factors that stand out from the survey:

1. Claiming your free Google Places listings obviously has a huge impact. Fully completing your profile with all the requested information will provide the foundation to achieve a high ranking.
2. Having a business address in the city being searched is a crucial factor. Well-optimized listings from suburban locations can also rank well in the search results. It is recommended that you use an physical business location rather than a P.O. Box or residential address.
3. Choosing the right business categories is highly beneficial. As categories are becoming more customized it is important that you target the most effective and relevant categories.
4. Adding your targeted product/service keywords in your Google Places Business Title still seems to be an effective way to rank. This is likely to change as it is against Google’s listing guidelines. Ideally, your keywords should be part of your official business name. Othwerise, it is best to avoid keyword stuffing in the title.
5. The quality of the off-page citations and incoming links to your business website is one of the most powerful ranking factors. Citation sources include Internet Yellow Pages websites, local directories and blogs. This factor will continue to rise in importance.
6. Customer reviews can be very helpful. Having good reviews may not make a significant difference in your rankings but it is a  huge factor in converting visitors into leads and sales. Reviews on third-party websites like Yelp can also influence local ranking.
7. The proximity of your business address to the center of the city continues to hold sway. In competitive markets, this can be a significant factor but is likely to decline in importance as Google improves its local listing algorithm. You should also use the dominant local area code as your primary phone number rather than a toll-free number.
8. Having your product and service keywords in your page description tends to work very well. Keep it mind that your business description should still read naturally to your potential customers.
9. Adding photos to your local listing remains an easy way to increase your visibility on Google Places. Not only will they help your ranking, photography and company logos make your business look more professional and trustworthy.
10. Another important factor is having your business included in user-generated content like MyMaps, KML files, geotagged images and videos.

Other ranking factors are discussed in the survey, including: new service area features, the value of coupons, the dangers of using multiple Google Place pages and the quality of location check-ins from FourSquare and Gowalla.

While creating an effective Google Places page is important, keep in mind that Google wants to display the most relevant and engaging content to searchers. In addition to having a quality Google Places listing, your website should be full of useful information and have lots of natural links from local sources (i.e. links from within blog posts and articles – rather than artificial links from directories).

You can read more about Google Places listings here, or read the full 2010 Local Search Ranking Factor survey.

However, if you want to search Google more objectively to see how your own website is ranking, for example, then Google’s personalized search can be very frustrating. Your website may be coming up first for important keywords when you are searching, but you’re not getting any traffic from these keywords because for everyone else you’re nowhere to be found on the first search results page. Fortunately, Google has made it easy to opt-out of the personalized search.

Disabling Personalized Search For All Searches

Here’s what you need to do:

1. First make sure you are logged out of your Google Account if you have one.
2. Next, perform a search on Google and then click on “Web History” in the top right corner of the search results page.
3. On the Web History page select “Disable customizations based on search activity” and you’re done.

Temporarily Disabling Personalized Search

If you want to only temporarily disable personalized search results, this is also possible. Try this:

1. If you don’t have a Google Account already (the one you would use for Gmail or Google Analytics) then sign up for an account.
2. Make sure you are logged into your account and then perform a search on Google.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the first search results page and you will see the link for “View Customizations” at the bottom.

4. On the Search Customization Details page, you will see link a few lines from the bottom where you can view your search results  “without these improvement”. Click on that link and you will now be shown non-personalized search results for your most recent search only.

There you go! You can now search Google more objectively.

Google Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use tool offered by Google to help business conduct split and multivariate (3-way or more) testing. It provides you with a powerful tool to increase your conversion rate with its easy testing system. To give an example of just how powerful this tool can be for your business, let’s look at one of the most famous examples of conversion split-testing.

How Barack Obama’s Campaign Used Google Website Optimizer

One of the reasons for Barack Obama’s landslide election win in 2008 was his use of social media and conversion testing to fine-tune the effectiveness of his message. Instead of relying on a team of political experts to make all the decisions, his campaign employed multivariate testing to see which message actually best resonated with voters. His web analytics team was a fronted by Dan Siroker, a former Google employee with extensive conversion optimization experience.

The centerpiece of Obama’s campaign was his online social community My Barack Obama. Primarily through online donations at this website, Obama raised a record-breaking $500 million dollars from 6.5 million donations. The average online donation was $80 and many donors donated multiple times. In September 2008, Obama’s website had it’s biggest month of the campaign, raising $100 million dollars from online donations.

Image-Based Conversion Testing

To maximize the effectiveness of his campaign website, Obama’s analytics team used Google Website Optimizer to run multivariate tests on important pages throughout the website. On the pivotal campaign sign up page, where the initial contact is established with potential supporters, a multivariate test was run to compare the following three call-to-action images:

Of these 3 images, which do you think would be the most successful at motivating people to sign up and support Obama’s campaign?

The Get Involved call-to-action on the left was the original image which the other 2 images were tested against. The Change call-to-action image in the middle resulted in 3.85% more people signing up to support the campaign. But it was the Family call-to-action image that was by far the most successfully with 13.1% more people joining the website.

Button-Based Conversion Testing

The web analytics teams also tested four different combinations of the Sign Up button to see which would be most effective. In addition to the original Sign Up call-to-action button, they used mutli-variate testing to compare buttons with the call-to-actions Learn More, Join Us Now and Sign Up Now. Any guesses as to which button was most effective?

It may not be what you think. The Join Us Now was marginally more effective with 1.37% more clicks and the Sign Up Now was slightly less effective than the original with -2.38% drop in clicks. But the Learn More button showed a substantial conversion improvement with 18.6% more clicks. The result was that by these small seemingly minor improvements to the call-to-actions buttons Obama’s campaign was able to substantially increase the number of potential voters who signed up to support his campaign.

What Can You Do With Website Optimizer?

Google Website Optimizer can  be an extremely effective tool for your business. Even without a substantial increase in your web traffic, multivariate conversion testing can increase the amount of sales or leads that you generate from your current amount of traffic. If your website’s call-to-action messages aren’t optimized in a way that fully engages your potential customers, you’re leaving money on the table.

You can use Google Website Optimizer to not only compare call-to-action images and buttons, but also to compare different versions of headlines and marketing copy. Using this powerful conversion optimization tool, you can take the guesswork out of online marketing and start making data-driven business decisions that will maximize your revenue.

SmarttNet Team at the BBOT Tradeshow

Update: The Burnaby Board of Trade’s annual Business Creating Business tradeshow was a huge success! Thank you to everyone for visiting our booth and meeting our web marketing team. To view the event photos taken by local photographer Mark Kinskofer, please visit the BBOT Photo Gallery.

We are excited to have a booth at the Burnaby Board of Trade’s 5th annual “Business Creating Business” Tradeshow. The Tradeshow will be held on Thursday, May 12th from 4 – 8 pm at the Delta Casino Hotel & Conference Centre at 4311 Dominion St. in Burnaby (beside the Willingdon Street exit from Highway 1).

There will be over 50 exhibitors including the Better Business Bureau, Burnaby RCMP, Business In Vancouver, Canadian Western Bank, Public Works and Government Services Canada, SFU, Sun Life Financial, West Plateau Golf & Country Club and Tourism Burnaby.

If you’d like to attend please print out this free visitor pass. We hope to you see you there!

Map to the Delta Casino Hotel & Conference Centre:

View Larger Map