Bored with the commonplace/typical “Process” or “How We Work” sections found in most studio or agency websites, our creative intent was twofold: To defy convention and to demonstrate our process in a way that is creative, amusing and downright unique.

Jam3 is known for work that is elaborate and visual, so collaborating with the very talented Dean West to transform our process into a series of over the top, epic photos was natural. Each person depicted in the Process collection is employed at Jam3. This is an important representation, as our people are the most integral part of the wonderful work that we produce.

Our Process collection aims to attract the people who understand the concept; who get our creative style and who want to be a part of the worlds we create.

Last Thursday, we invited a couple hundred of our clients and industry friends to launch the collection of photos and consume some alcohol at a sweet event space on King West. (Photos and video of party to come soon)

Check out the whole series in higher resolution here.
(Be sure to click on the photos to zoom in and see them in full detail).

We’ve never spent a dime on advertising and we continuously rely solely on our own SEO techniques and word of mouth referral to elevate ourselves to the top of search results rankings. The result? Jam3 is the number 1 Google search result for “Flash Development Toronto” and “Flash Web Toronto.” We can also proudly tell you we are on the first page of results for “Flash Toronto”, “Web Design Toronto”, “Web Development Toronto.”

This is no accident. We practice what we preach when it comes to SEO; we know what and how often we need to update content to enhance traffic and drive viewers to our site.

While  there is no silver bullet in SEO, you can create hundreds of “meta shrapnel” embedded in your site both on the surface and within the meta layers of the code. Since we’re not knowledge hoarders, we want to share our findings and tips with you. Below you’ll find common causes for poor search result rankings and six tips for turbo charging your SEO.

Common Errors:

• Keywords not being used properly in page meta titles and copy structure.

• No or even miscoded image alt tags as well as missed opportunities for photo caption text and unrealized organic search potential.

• Poor usability, information architecture and misleading web copy that can also in turn create user confusion and lead to ‘bounces’.

• Missed opportunities to communicate one thing: bad design, poor writing.

• Site credibility factors: little items such as terms and conditions, legal and up to date copyright years.

• To make matters worse, many web sites simply are not doing the basic ‘passive’ search engine optimization techniques.
• Having a non-existent site map to facilitate crawling and navigation.
• Overdoing anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because it looks like automation. Google isn’t kind to automation.
• Depending on Twitter and Facebook alone to boost inbound links. Google robot ignores them.

SEO Tips:

• Use WordPress as a blogging platform. Google loves WordPress.

• Take the time to employ best practices in page optimization – adding captions and permalinks for pages.

• Recommend verbose folder and page nomenclature to improve click-throughs and semantics

• Be sure to name your images accurately and use natural keyword placement. Just don’t overdo it keyword stuff. That’ll get you red flagged in no time.

• Add opt-in RSS feed onto the main page for all consistently-updated content.

• Make the effort to review site activity quarterly to monitor analytics and make necessary changes to keyword, meta-data and media feeds.

Hopefully these suggestions help you beef up your search results ranking, and if you’ve discovered any tricks we didn’t include, share them with us. We love to learn.

Last night’s Inter-Action was hosted by our production partners Spy Films. We were one of the speakers and the topic we chose was to describe just how crazy a project I Prophesy was to develop. The other other 2 presenters were the incredibly talented Vincent Morisset and Colin Moock. Vincent spoke about several of his projects with Arcade Fire and showed a very cool short interactive film called “Colorblind Clyde” which uses Bicolorama. Colin Moock showcased some of his multi-user work with Megaphone built on his Union Platform.

For those of you who don’t know about Inter-Action here’s the gist from the mouth of one its co-founders, Amy Miranda.
“Inter-action is a bi-monthly thinktank/discussion group/task force for interactive thinkers. It’s comprised of you. People in the industry. From Agencies to Development partners – creatives, developers, producers etc. So, this is a time to get together, have a drink and chat about what we’re up to, where things are going, and how together we can continue to push innovation locally. Collaboration, is a good thing. We like it.”