The SEO café, or free Google referencing

Would you like to have an answer to your questions S.E.O?

Would it be even better for free?

Every Thursday or Friday between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m. approximately, I invite 2 entrepreneurs (no size of the company) to meet me for free in a Montreal café in the Outremont-Villeray-Rosemont triangle.

What is the SEO café for?

The discussion will revolve around what people are used to calling ” organic or natural referencing“, but which I prefer to refer to as website optimization with a view to positioning their site in search engine results (S.E.R.P.). This relaxed, but very serious, meeting is open to any website owner or person with a project on the internet, whether you are:

• a student,
• an association,
• a self-employed contractor,
• an SME owner,
• CEO of a large company.
• Writer, blogger or
• simply curious about our discipline

Simply make an appointment via the contact form.

( below the article ) I answer everyone’s questions as long as it is SEO, optimized writing, web architecture, keyword research, link building, and possibly Adwords. As most of my clients attest, I image my point with clear examples, I avoid technical terms and use “offbeat” examples to image, to clarify notions that are often vague because they are technical or imbued with hard-skinned urban legends.

Between training and F.A.Q, a free referencing lesson

After the usual presentations and an intro on web optimization, I answer the questions, making sure to distribute the time equally between each guest. I select the candidates as well as possible by grouping them around a theme that brings them together.

Guests will:

• update their general knowledge of the discipline;
• get answers to the questions they have provided;
• to be able to act directly on their site.

The “SEO-Google” at the café is a convivial moment

Each meeting is limited to two guests, around a table of brasserie café, in the summer (this is its originality), this will promote

• the fluidity of exchanges
• Personalization of responses
• the emphasis on the convivial and non-formal side

The place changes regularly but I like the yes but no, the Café Vito, the Succursale, Larue… the tropic.

And you? Have a question?

Do you need clarification on SEO?

Take your place for an upcoming SEO café

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Kristof, member of Doyouse0 Québec, the association of SEOs in the province

Some past SEO coffees

Crickets in my coffee

There are two of them on this cold Monday in December to meet me at the “Yes but No” on Jarry Street. Two young entrepreneurs with a lot of energy in the energy bar market whose time at the Dragon came back to my mind (the pun “elle bonne ta barre Naak” which had made the “business angels” laugh)

A priori under thirty, but for a long time very involved in the development of their cricket protein business in the form of energy bars or food powders (my understanding of the business).

The hour normally devoted to the exercise of the SEO café will get longer as the questions are so numerous and precise.

It is clear that these young people have implemented some basic SEO in their shop site. However, I show them that they have forgotten THE BASICS.

• The architecture of the site,
• the production plan and
• hierarchical keyword targeting.

I insist a little on the very bad choice of CSS that carries their site and that will be a brake on the visibility of the site whatever they do.
It is nevertheless true that this meeting was exciting and that I could follow their future adventures .

Creating a business on the Web

After 4 years of existence of the SEO café, my favorite interlude remains the opportunity for encounters as surprising as they are varied. Brigitte is an illustration of this on this rainy but hot Friday in October.

Brigitte has been navigating the world of the Web for a few years and has rather solid notions of Web referencing and I have for a long time trouble identifying the exact reason for her coming to the Larue café on de Castelnau at the corner of Henri Julien on the border of Little Italy and Villeray…

The thread of the conversation unfolded, her project is nothing less than the creation of a Web agency of her own or in partnership, a creative agency whose spirit would stick to her vision of life and commercial relations. She is looking for skills: SEO developer, search engine-oriented writer, graphic designer who leaves room for text, SEO expert, while she knows her strengths and skills: sales, management and tree structure.

A nice 2-hour SEO coffee/tea that stopped with the closure of the establishment.

An espresso in Cuenca (Ecuador)

I had already given an SEO Café in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, this time it was in Cuenca that I met Juan Pablo Mojica Navarro in his Bead & breakfast which offers a real Italian espresso… Still rare in Ecuador.

With a site project in mind, my usual coffee break turns into a technical discussion.

This “Google local guide”, a great traveller and master in the art of building customer loyalty, would like to free himself from the heavy commissions charged by the big hotel booking sites… Not easy but possible with ultra-targeted local content…

A nice encounter.

A marketing student

Derrick is young, he has one year of study left before his baccalaureate in Consumer Marketing. It is on the terrace of the Pinocchio that we have coffee.

He is still looking for his way and is keenly interested in SEO, but he has trouble finding his way between Google products and web optimization parameters: Adwords, Analytics, social media management and SEO. We review the different aspects of web jobs that revolve around web marketing and talk about the different benefits of these specialties. Common necessary qualities, a sure pen both in style and spelling, daily assiduity and the obligation to stay up to date with one’s knowledge. He leaves pumped up for the south bank from where he moved to meet me.

A questioning editor

Claudine is a young writer who works to combine travel, happiness and work. She has realized that her articles published on the Web would benefit from being more “search engine oriented” and is looking for answers at the SEO Café on the ability to technically optimize her texts.

It is still at the Perko that our conversation takes place and that I apply myself to answer his questions knowing that an hour is very short even if we reduce the referencing to onpage optimization…

Charisma to spare

I met Dominique Maheux during the anniversary of the coworking space 6cent1. A dynamic contact with this lady business and management coach with impressive professional experience. Beyond her natural charisma, she had the masterful idea of calling her company “DataSapiens”, could she do more eloquent and more creative?

So we meet a few days later in the Mile-End at the “toi et moi”, a warm bistro (minus 20 outside it was a good choice) that takes me out of my habits. His site is the basis for observing our conversation that sets the fundamentals of SEO, which are unfortunately not very respected… I forget to take the photo of our meeting…

Entertainment and a musician editor

Claudio is a Sagittarius musician and writer who runs a cool blog. I meet him at Perko, a fashionable café in Villeray and very popular with students, while Nathalie du Cirkazou meets me at Oui mais Non. The former has the desire to add optimized writing to his service offer and I keep from the two hours spent together an impression of professional and ethical proximity.

Nathalie is concerned about visibility in the search results for her site Cirkazou.com at the service of circus artists. Time always flies too fast in my SEO café.

A writer who did her homework

Line is a writer and blogger, her reputation precedes her and she makes a good living from her writing. Before arriving at our Yes but No appointment, she read my articles on search engine oriented writing, took notes and listed her many questions in a very Cartesian way. We debate it without seeing the time pass.
Fascinating, we don’t see the time pass and it’s by running that she flees the place, delighted to the point that she will leave me a nice testimonial on my google business page the next day.

Françoise: the greener you die.

Françoise talks to the pebbles, caresses the flowers and only sees life in a 100% eco-zen light. Her project is imprecise, she comes to educate herself, she says, because she is also fascinated by computer neurons – in her words –

We have a pleasant time, very offbeat and less studious than usual. The SEO café is made up of beautiful encounters, surprises and characters that take me out of my daily life and do good to my weeks.

Michèle, Journalist

has momentarily interrupted her career to give birth and see her 2 children grow up. She resumed her freelance work from the perspective of web writing. In these few years of parenthesis, she says she has seen her profession change radically to see paper editorials slide towards the all-web. SEO copywriting is a must!

We are at the small walk on St Denis Street a little before the school leaves… In addition to my recommendations, I advise him to read a few books on SEO.

Patricia dite Troupi, Editor / Blogger

Patricia is an editor in Paris, she takes advantage of my tour in France to invite herself to a small brewery in the Montparnasse district. She knows and practices blogging as an SEO lever and has read a lot on the subject. We only confirm her achievements and refine her notions of internal networking that she only practices intuitively and without the logic of reinforcing the themes as it should be. A few weeks later, she will write me a series of high-quality texts and will become the reference as a blogger for the agency.

Marc Laporte of avantech.net and

more than a programmer specialized in Intranet / Extranet / Corporate Wiki / WorkFlow / Project Management / Virtual Community / Community of Practice / Collaborative Site & Forums.

He is a seasoned employee of internal corporate networks and manages a team of 6 people. He reached me through the “SEO café” form, saying he was “intrigued by my approach”.

Intrigued?! I was just as surprised by the qualifier!

Organized, his questions were noted and annotated, fascinating and very friendly, we spent 2 hours at the “Oui mais No“, a café in Villeray with a surprising and heterogeneous décor near Jarry Park.

Eve is an employee of a small clothing store

and fashion accessories in the St Michel district of Montreal, the store recently launched an online store http://www.roxylama.com .

Many choices are debatable, she is aware of it, a look that lacks pep, a questionable logo with amateur clipping, a free platform that does not have by default the control of SEO tags, semantics and the appropriate micro formats. It needs on-page optimization benchmarks and define its priorities, because the work is considerable.

Gilles St Pierre, passionate about epigenetics:

A recognized specialist, speaker on the subject, he has published articles on various portals (including slideshare) that have met with a large audience, he is thinking of launching his own blog. Which platform? What are the free ones worth? are some of his questions.

Gilles had joined me a month before to discuss the indexing of pages by Google, and the variable positioning of its articles. He finally crossed the StLaurent (from the South Shore) to probe a little more into the mysteries of SEO…

Freshly arrived from Tahiti, Jean Claude Gorin is a creative director. He has been working in advertising and visual identity for 20 years. The book he shows me is impressive!
On his island, he never needed SEO, or a website for that matter.

Life is there as you imagine it: quiet, everyone knows each other and the competition in their sector of activity is weak.
He discovered in Montreal a tough competition in a very protected sector and more visibility could help him really take off.

Where do you start? The task is vast, especially since its portal is not the best coded…
JCG-oxygen.com

A product to sell and a site to optimize

Chana is a nurse by training, I had met her at a networking event of the réso group some time before.

She works in specialties such as hormone therapy, biological testing, nutri-therapy, medical stress management, foot reflexology and a lot of other things that I don’t understand. (Everyone has their own job!)
She is looking for a winning strategy to promote her small site and make it profitable during its development, quite a challenge… yet possible in his case!

I suggest a combination of Adwords campaigns on very controlled queries and therefore at reasonable costs, his product being a super niche in which competition is almost non-existent.

During this time, she would develop her content and improve her dotclear platform after adequate SEO web training.

Received in turn

The month of September is all about the proximity of my office in Villeray. It was at the Café Larue, at the Riviéra both on Jarry, and at Vito at the corner of Gounot/De Gaspé that I received:

Yasmina, Valérie, Zannath, Mikaël and Alain finally Channa. I don’t have everyone’s photos…

Special meetings for me because 2 of these people are talented writers and their backgrounds are very different from mine

Web Writers Not SEO

Yasmina is a writer, she writes for the traditional press and webzines, she blogs regularly but her texts rarely come out in the SERP and for good reason, the notion of meta tag is unknown to her…
This will be an opportunity to discuss “the structure of web writing and SEO basics” that it lacks.

Alain is also in the editorial business, a journalist by trade, he now writes solid texts for marketing, with his sidekick Mikael with whom he runs an original marketing agency.

We compare our experiences as writers and we realize that beyond the SEO tagging of the text, our visions of the very structure of a blog are radically opposed. When the journalist thinks strictly of “chronology of the event”, I oppose my purely “lexical” approach when I optimize the sites entrusted to me.

This interview reveals to me the origin of this fundamental error of the basic blog and why all these smart sites that are offered to me as a contract remain so invisible in the SERPs.

A directory-magazine of architects and designers

Valérie soon launched a major project to create a directory of architects, designers and urban planners.

Very active, she is setting up a team to take care of the site and the animation of the web communities on which she hopes to make visits take off.

Between the magazine of the trends of these trades and directories of professionals. Valérie is getting informed so that her project gets off to the best possible start. I recommend the most solid written and web references of SEO 2014.

And a niche project

Zhannat Ospanova is a professional with a solid business background, she evaluates the intangible assets of companies; a web-wide niche!
Its clients are commercial interests, private and public companies in a variety of industries that span all economic sectors.

Pure Internet Candid, she knows that she will have no choice: Eventually she will have to open a portal… She hopes it will be useful and effective.

Received in turn

Laurent, Jeff and Remi in different cafés in Villeray and the Plateau…

The issues addressed are increasingly related to the candidates’ personal files.

• A real estate developer, who asks me for my opinion on the SEO capabilities of a new CMS
• A marketing agency that wants to train its team and wonders what to choose between $3800 weekends and 4-hour express training… via “webinair“
• A psychologist adept at technocurious hypnosis, webmaster in his spare time and jack-of-all-trades who wants to make his website alone
• and the return of Eric, a translator who, thanks to the time of day and the heat, makes the SEO café turn into an S.E.O. brasserie (not to mention the football world cup which lengthened the debate…)

Between the desire/need for visibility and the real desire to train in the specialty, I met great entrepreneurs who made the exercise as pleasant as it was friendly.

I welcome Anne to the brand new Larue & fils café on Jarry Street, opposite the metro of the same name.

Anne is in the middle of a career change, she is finishing her therapeutic massage course, she is looking for information on the ability of free web platforms to ensure sufficient visibility to ensure a volume of work for her new business.

Free website and SEO?

We approach the problem using “common sense”.
If it’s free, it can’t reach the quality of “handmade” in terms of coding or in terms of meta tags. The fight over her field as a professional is such that I advise her to invest minimally in the free WordPress CMS but under Génesis ($100) plus solid hosting $5 to $10 / month, then it’s her sweat that she will have to spend producing a quality site…
In short, the basics of clean referencing.

New change, given the difficulties in coordinating 2 people! At the Café Java downtown (Berri UQAM), I only meet Elian, the only elected official capable of keeping his appointment. Elian, a multi-entrepreneur, a “business brewer” who intends to set up a dream team to launch a web agency.

Web jobs

The subject is out of the ordinary and provides an opportunity to discuss the interactions of the different web professions and the potential communication difficulties that this can pose between the web professions.

Between the graphic designer who doesn’t want to see a line of text and the SEO consultant who is obsessed with content, there are trade-offs that everyone will have to consider.

It is at the café In (in Villeray (Liège and St Denis) that I welcome, Louise and Manon.

• Louise is a luxury product consultant
• Manon runs several companies including Symbiosens, web creation and corporate image.

Google + and content

As she says herself, Louise “starts from a long way” and needs landmarks in the jumble that is Google local or + products.
She would also like a “roadmap” in the process of creating her future website.

Manon comes specifically to improve the visibility of a homework help site she designed (https://www.reussiteplus.com/) and her question revolves around the enhancement of content.

It’s at Vito’s in Villeray that I welcome Paule and Gwen this week.

• Paule has a blog “wordpress.com” with more than 120 articles on fashion! His questions are numerous, we will summarize them simply by “how to receive visitors”

• Gwen is a WordPress trainer, she teaches at the CEGEP de 3 rivières, she sometimes feels cramped when her students confuse WP and SEO and ask her specific questions about it…

Lack of reference points in the discipline

Paule’s blog is not hosted by her own, she uses the interface of the free blog WordPress.com (in premium version) which seems not to provide the control of the metas, my recommendations will surprise her on several levels…

As for Gwen, I try to address “the problems of SEO strategies to adopt when you own a website”, a vast subject that deserves a few more coffees at Vito…

The Paris beurre is definitely the preferred place for the SEO café since it hosts for the 3rd time in a row the weekly meeting that is gaining in popularity in Montreal. My guests are two rather seasoned entrepreneurs whose common point is to be the owner of websites reduced to the rank of a showcase or online business card.

• Patrick, real estate broker, and real estate investment consultant or coach,
• Eric, at the head of a high-profile translation company in Montreal, his site is aging but his clientele is stable.

A touch of fresh white, the questions are asked

• Patrick would like to distinguish himself from his Remax colleagues and wonders if his site could surpass the brand itself…
• Eric is resolutely in the process of redesigning and is wondering about the choice of platform.

Probably the best atmosphere since the beginning of the initiative and an excellent level of communication leaves us hovering

I still receive guests at Paris beurre, the French restaurant near the Outremont metro station

• Melissa, young notary, member of a large Montreal law firm
• Robert, young personal trainer and nutritionist
• The third person didn’t show up (Not cool)

It is around a snack that the discussion begins

• Melissa wonders if putting photos adds anything to the result of the site in
• Robert is in the reflection phase before launching his website, and is wondering how to choose his domain name
• Faced with the problem of coordination and logistics

Welcoming the first 3 guests at the Paris beurre in Outremont, we take advantage of the very first rays of sunshine of the year to sit on the terrace.

• Ginette who runs a travel agency in Montreal
• Nancy Photographer from the Feddel Photographer Agency
• Xavier, financial investment advisor, without a website

SEO issues addressed:

• Ginette from Equinoxe voyage, wonders how to face the steamroller of her web competition in the travel sector
• Nancy is thinking of redoing the company’s website and would like to optimize it at the same time
• Xavier needs general benchmarks in web optimization to prepare his site for the future

Let me thank you so much for today’s SEO Coffee Meetup! You convinced me to deepen my knowledge of Internet referencing.
I will look for the necessary funds to train my team internally.
I absolutely want to refine my knowledge of SEO, you make this discipline exciting

The hour (almost 2) we spent talking opened my eyes to many important points that I need to prioritize.

I liked your frankness and honesty! … And I absolutely don’t want to be one of those who undermine the SEO consulting profession. I will do everything in my power to honor him with my efforts.

In short, I learned more with you in 1 hour than in 1 month with my previous interlocutor unfortunately!