And we just couldn’t be prouder. This is exactly the kind of list that I really want to make. After all, it’s niche, it’s now and it’s, well…Canadian.

Not only that, but being mentioned in the same post with the likes of fellow Vancouverite Darren Barefoot and border-jumpers like Malcolm Gladwell and Tara Hunt is just damned cool in it’s own right.

Let me be the one to say what Sean is too humble to: His is the Number One Word of Mouth Blog here in Canada, such is his commitment to the concept. Glance at the right to my categories and you’ll notice that it’s a topic I revisit regularly, (although the small number of examples since the switch to WordPress aren’t much of a sample size) but not with the same vigor and attention to detail as Sean Moffitt of Buzz Canuck. Keep up the good work Sean, I’m learning a lot from you, from all the way over here on the West Coast, and I’m glad to know that you drop by the blog from time to time for a read.

Cheers!

And now, I republish Sean’s carefully researched list of the Top 20, in his words, to give us all a bit more Google Juice:

The Top 20 List:

David Jones @ PR Works
Kate Trgovac @ My Name is Kate
Colin Mckay @ CanuckFlack
Mitch Joel @ Twist Image
Michael Seaton @ The Client Side
Michael Ferguson @ Home is Where You Hang Your @
Leesa Barnes @ Podonomics
Ken Schafer & Company @ One Degree
Joe Thornley @ ProPR
Tamera Kremer @ 3i
Darren Barefoot
Susan Abbott @ Customer Experience Crossroads
Jordan Behan @ Tell Ten Friends
Susannah Gardner @ Buzz Marketing with Blogs
Stuart Macdonald
Matthew Ingram
Mark Evans

Canucks Emeritus- well-informed Canucks who’ve fled across the border:

Malcolm Gladwell
Grant McCracken @ This Blog Sits At The…
Tara Hunt @ Horse, Pig, Cow

Of and of course myself, foolish oversight, damn that’s 21 now…

Word of Mouth is alive and well in Canada. Big thanks to Sean for leading the pack.

I’m about to be away from my desk for a couple of days, so you’ll be spared my rhetoric for a spell.

In the meantime, I wanted to invite you to sign up to receive my email newsletter, which should be dispatched shortly after I return from my trip. There’s a subscribe form for you fill out, and each issue will come with an unsubscribe link if you’re not seeing the value you were looking for.

Regular readers might see some cross-over material from blog posts, but it will be fun content nevertheless.

I hope to return to lots of wonderful new subscribers, and perhaps even some suggestions for newsletter content. Thanks in advance, and I’ll post again very soon!

Cheers,

Jordan.

Namely, because their name is mentioned in it. But I use that simply as an example, to point out the importance of keywords and headlines when it comes to ranking at the top of the search engines.

Please, don’t get me wrong: Value to your site visitors and potential customers in your content is number one. But they will never be exposed to that value if you do not make some attempt at positioning yourself in the search engines. What this means is that you have to take a bit of extra time to be sure that your headlines, topic, and content all jive with your keywords, and the overall message of your writing. This is true of your site content, and it is true of your blog posts as well.

It’s a bit more work, and some would argue that this advice infringes on the natural creative process. Alas, you are not alone in this quest to publish both for your readers and for the various search engine “spiders” that crawl through your data and give you a ranking based on the now most homogeneous word in the English language, “relevance.” The evolving meaning of that term is a topic for another day, but the short version is that Google ranks sites based on several criteria with an algorithm that is top secret, ever changing, and very difficult to outsmart without cheating, which will subsequently get you unlisted.
Imagine for a second: The grey, old, daily newspaper reporter, who is charged with the task of composing the perfect headline in each piece he writes. He used to have just one criteria: “What will make people want to keep reading?” Now, he too has to consider whether the headline matches the story, and whether he words in said headline are likely to find their way to the top of the search engines. It’s not impossible, it just takes a bit more effort, and adding a dash of science to your already delicious recipe of creativity.

Now imagine the progressive blogger who crafts each post with such precision as to have it attached to the popular tags of the day, and hopes that each of her posts will be “dugg,” on digg, resulting in a landslide of traffic and popularity for her site.

If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to have that kind of diligence, or even have to understand everything I just said in that sentence. (If you did understand all of that, then you should know that to my knowledge , I have never been “dugg,” and this is the first post EVER where I included Technorati tags) I too am learning as I go, and having a lot of fun in the process.

Blog on, friends. Blog on.

Taggy, taggy bo-baggy: SEO, digg, content, blogging