StepForth Web Marketing is excited and proud to announce that on Tuesday, Ross Dunn, StepForth Web Marketing CEO/Founder was named as one of two finalists in the 2009 Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce Business Awards in the category of “Young Entrepreneur of the Year” (pdf).

The award “honours a business owner or founder under the age of 35 who has excelled in business; exemplified leadership and entrepreneurial skills; and demonstrated exceptional vision that has contributed to business success”. The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony taking place April 21, 2009 at the Fairmont Empress. Read more…

A big thanks to the wonderful Abby Prince from WebProNews for interviewing Matt Cutts explaining what the new Canonical tag is for and why it was created.

For all our Canadian readers out there, if you find yourself collecting Air Miles, searching Yahoo may help you get that free flight just a little bit quicker.

The Air Miles Yahoo Toolbar was recently launched, and for every 50 searches performed using the Air Miles toolbar you will earn 5 Air Miles, up to a maximum of 30 Air Miles per month. Read more…

Google is developing a service to try and impact electrical energy consumption by allowing users to easily track their energy usage.

PowerMeter software will tap into the information provided by “smart meters” installed currently on many homes. It will display to customers exactly how they are using power and relate it to specific appliances in the home to help them to pin point the biggest contributors to their consumption.

Read more…

Last night I was looking through some of my favourite You Tube videos and stumbled across something of which I was completely unaware. You Tube is muting sound from a lot of user’s videos.

I am a huge Lord of the Rings buff and avidly seek related content on You Tube. One of my all-time favourite videos is called Namarie, a recitation of Galadriel’s lament. This is a poem taken from the Fellowship of the Ring book, recited in spoken Quenyan, an Elvish language created by J.R.R Tolkien. The original audio consisted of a reading by the person who posted the video, over a background sample of the Lothlorien track from the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack.

This was one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces I have ever seen on You Tube and I have watched it often. I say “was”, because as I found out last night, You Tube has completely ruined it by removing the audio. Read more…

Today at the SMX West conference, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft just announced a new tag that will have a major impact on reducing the amount of duplicate content issues found online and it will help website owners reclaim valuable link popularity.

In this article Canonical URL Links by WordPress specialist Joost de Valk he explains the tag and reasoning behind it. I will give a quick synopsis myself below but his article has some more detail if you need it. Read more…

At least a few times a month I get asked various questions about why a search engine ranking looks the way it does.

For example, someone might ask me how they can influence the description and/or title that Google gave their website in their search engine ranking. But easily the most prominent question is “what are those links that show up under some #1 rankings? How can I get those?” Read more…

This week Google announced the addition of a new feature for its Google Mobile Maps application called Google Latitude. The enhancement allows people to share their location via GPS, cellular tower triangulation, or manually. Check out the video below created by Google to learn more about this cool technology that may not be new to the Internet but Google has upped the ante by embracing it:

Check out “Google’s Latitude Has Vast Marketing Potential” on Search Engine Guide to see where I think Google could take this technology in the near future.