It is cliché, sure, but we’re about to start a new year, and there really is no easier time to set some new SEO goals for your website. You have 12 months and 4 quarters in front of you to track growth and get into a groove of building your business online. Here are a few tips Evolving Interactive recommends for staying ahead of the search engine marketing game in 2012.

1. Keep up with changes – One of the most valuable tools for me this year has been subscribing and checking in daily with Google’s Small Business blog. In 2011, we’ve had the Panda update, the launch of Google +, a push to develop local businesses, and much more. Subscribe and check in daily to learn about the latest changes that Google is making to (hopefully) make life easier on small businesses.

2. Monthly Brainstorming – Make SEO a priority. Obviously, it’s important. As you look at monthly numbers and reports, think about where you want to improve, and set a few goals in place to get you there (or on the right track) by the start of next month. For example, if you’re seeing growth with a few keywords but are stagnant with others, focus your strategies on some new keywords. It’s going to be more valuable if you’re on top for a wide range of terms. Expand the conversation to include others on your team. Maybe some unconventional ideas will be the shot in the arm you need.

3. Monitor your growth – Think of your most important keyword terms. When you type them into a search engine search bar, what do you see on the results? Are you on the first page? Do some research to figure out how you’re ranking at the start of the new year. There are several tools out there that can help you do this. It’s a good idea to check in with the rankings every month or so to see if you are improving or not. A steady drop in rankings may mean your website has other problems, like broken links or missing pages. Of course, moving up means you’re doing something correctly. Part of the initial consultation we offer at Evolving Interactive is a ranking report for the keywords you pick and we recommend.  If you’d like to know more about SEO rankings and how it affects your business, contact us for a free consultation to get you started in 2012.

And since we’re already on the subject of the new year, all of us at Evolving Interactive want to thank you for keeping up with us at the Evolving Interactive Blog this year. We appreciate your guest blog posts, your comments, and your interest. We look forward to writing for (and with) you in 2012. Happy New Year!

Here in Chicago, it’s raining links and blogs. (SEO joke. Sorry.) In our last blog post, we discussed being proactive and original with your SEO campaigns, wowing potential customers with your freestyle, outside the box thinking. But, today I don’t feel like it. With the dreariness of a long Chicago winter ahead, and days like this, here is a list of five SEO strategies that can pass the time and still help you market your business.

Link Building – This is one of our premier SEO services for our clients. It’s the strategy (art) of connecting with relevant sites and having them link back to your site because you have something important to share; like an idea, product, or service. Link Building is my #1 favorite lazy day SEO activity. I turn on a movie or play a few albums, and just plug away at the computer. Most of link building is research, and reaching out to websites. It takes a while, but it is the backbone of search engine optimization. Plus, you can get in the zone and make a lot of progress when not distracted with the dreary outside world.

Blog Writing – Considering our last post, you can look for inspiration in anything to promote your website with a new blog post. A grey day is no exception (re: this post). Grab a hot beverage and just write. Try to keep it loose and comfortable. Come up with a few topics you haven’t blogged about in a while, and give a few reminders and updates to your readers.

Social Media Promotions – From a marketing standpoint, this is a slam dunk for local businesses that are social media savvy. In order to get a few extra followers, likes, and shares; target the people nearby passing the rainy day blues in front of their computers. Offer a promotion that will warm them up a bit. For example, “Rainy Day Special – The first five people to repost this on their wall receive two free movie passes, Starbucks Giftcard, etc”. If you’re running a restaurant or local service, you can give away a little something to get people to call you, as well as promote your company online. (I know this is skirting a fine line between being creative and proactive…I’ll fix that)

Organize Your Monthly Schedule – Don’t do today what you can put off tomorrow. While this seems like the ultimate lazy brush off, it can actually be quite helpful. Take a look at what needs to get done for the month in your marketing campaign. Go to your calendar; mark your time for link building, social media updates, blog posts, and more. Get organized, and it will help you when you feel like be more proactive on the next sunny day. I’d actually recommend doing this once and a while anyway, but why not on a day with nasty weather?

Website Maintenance – This is another thing you should do every once in a while anyway, but it can be tedious, so better to get it done without the allure of the great outdoors (of Chicago). Go through the back end of your site, and make sure everything is working properly. Make sure each link on your site is working, that your 404 page is in order, and update your content with some fresh, keyword rich text.

These tips should help maintain your valiant SEO efforts while keeping your occupied mind off of the rain, sleet, and hail of the longest season. Happy internet marketing!

We are almost at the two year anniversary of our SEO Blog on the Evolving Interactive website. In the search marketing industry, a lot can change in a period of weeks, let alone two whole years. (Check back with us on January 14 2012 for a special blog post.) However, even in this ever changing industry, there is a golden rule that everyone, SEO’s and small businesses alike, should follow. Optimize your website for your customers first, and the search engines second.

In the early days of search, the black hat tactics that made a website look juicy to a search engine seem archaic and obvious now. Keyword stuffing, putting colored keywords on a same color background, spamming comment boards (this still happens, sadly and comically); and the list goes on. All of these tactics were used to help boost the strength of a website that really had nothing to offer to people / potential customers once they got to the site. As search engines caught on to these “strategies”, SEO’s on both sides of the white/black hat debate made more conscious efforts to make customer websites user friendly. It’s no good for your business to have people stopping by, getting frustrated or confused, and never becoming a customer.

So as tempting as it is to over optimize your site for Google’s spiders, the rule of thumb is to put yourself in your customer’s mindset when optimizing your site. Think, “What makes me stay on the site?” Here are a few quick tips to make the searchers and the search engines happy.

Homepage Content – This is the most important place on your website to have great content, including your hot keywords, major products / services, and contact information (especially name, address, and phone number). New clients with an idea about SEO have asked me to re-write content using a ton of keywords, the full list of services and service areas, etc. The basic idea is correct, but keep in mind the average online attention span. You want to grab new users with a quick description about your business and services, something that makes them want to look at other parts of your site for more specific information (like service areas and products). If you write this content with a few of your star keywords, it will also entice search engines.

Meta Description Tags – This is a short description written into the HTML of your page, not seen by the searcher. An early black hat tactic was to stuff this area with as many keywords as could fit. Like the homepage content, it is important to have this be a well-written, concise description about your overall business. Keep in mind, you can (and should) have a unique description on each page. While search engine bots will crawl this description for relevant keywords, there is a more important function that applies to the searcher. Sometimes, on the results page, a snippet of your meta description tag will appear underneath the link to your page. If this section is filled out with all keywords, the site can appear spammy. On the other side, if there is no information in the tag, the search engine may pull content from the landing page. Since you have the chance to control the content shown, make it a quick, enticing sales pitch to attract searchers to your site. (Note: Keep it under 165 characters)

Layout/Design – Users can’t help but be attracted to a clean, easy to use website, with well-placed content, photos, and easy to find links to the rest of the site. Think of the difference between Myspace at its worst versus Facebook at its always. Myspace had space for flashing photos, links scattered across the page, and a slow loading speed, to name just a few of their critical mistakes. Facebook came along with a simple color scheme, a more user friendly navigation, and no trouble loading. Think of this when planning the layout for your website update, or your new site. Clean and cool will keep the visitors you get, instead of scaring them off.

The end goal of all SEO is to attract more customers and increase business growth. Granted, attracting the search engines will help to attract the potential customers. But you want them to like your website when they find you.
For more information on search engine optimization or SEO consultation, contact moc.evitcaretnignivlovenull@ofni or call 312-454-4550.

Of all of the various SEO strategies, link building shares time between being the most tedious and frustrating, or the most effective and rewarding. In most cases, it is all of the above.  Link building is the on-going process of reaching out to other sites that share interests or subject matter with yours, and having them link back to your site. I liken it to having one of these sites “Like” or “+1” your site, in that it is essentially a vote from one site to another, to be taken into consideration by both search engines and searchers.

With this in mind, the benefits of effective link building are great. The more “votes” you have pointing to your site from relevant sources, the better. Search engines tally these votes and factor them into their algorithms when sorting sites in search results. The sites with the most links from the most relevant, authoritative sources will appear at the top. In the case of searchers, you want to put your site out there as best you can. So if they can find out about you through a search engine query, fantastic. If a potential customer finds your website through a partner site linking to you; equally fantastic.

At Evolving Interactive, our SEO analysts have developed the foundation for effective link building strategies that we put to work for our clients. We personalize each campaign, attaining the links that are most suitable for our client’s respective industries. Over the years, we have honed these strategies to understand which links are the most effective, and yield the best results. There are several ways to get a valuable link to your site. Here are a few examples of the links that will help boost your sites visibility and page rank.

Blogs 

As every industry has its experts, there is no shortage of places to find valuable updates and opinions on any subject. Search for the people making the updates in your industry, and follow their blogs. After reading a few of their posts and joining in on the conversation, send the author a message asking if you can write a guest blog post. This is mutually beneficial, as they will get a fresh perspective and some new content for their blog, and you will have the opportunity to link back to your site. The author may not always agree, but some will, and it is a good idea to build your relationship with these bloggers by swapping guest posts. Even if your guest blog post is rejected, many of these blogs have comment sections that will link back to your site, so join in on the conversation.

Press Releases

If you have a product or service to promote that has topical or current value, you can write and submit a press release. Many sites accept press releases, and this can be a good opportunity for a link back to your site. Most press releases are informative with a promotional element, and this line has to be walked carefully. The type of sites that will receive and post a press release will be high in value, with expert resources, so it is a valuable target in a link building campaign.

Quality over Quantity

There are thousands upon thousands of sites that will provide you with free links that can incrementally boost your page rank. It’s a good idea to submit to these types of sites that are relevant to your industry. However, 100 links from these types of sites won’t be as valuable as one link from a high ranking site like The New York Times or a .gov. Spend time searching for link opportunities from high ranking sites. They are much more difficult to get, but will make your website look like an authority to the search engines and its users.

Link building is an ongoing process, and takes a lot of patience and organization to be really effective. It is one of the most important aspects of SEO, and professional SEO’s never stop searching for ways to improve and expand their link building strategies.

If you are interested in learning more about link building strategies and their benefits, contact Evolving Interactive at moc.evitcaretnignivlovenull@ofni or 312-454-4550.

Google has been making (its own) news over the past two weeks, but it’s all been good news. Google is calling more attention to the efforts it has put in to streamlining the local search experience from the business owner perspective. While Google has always been the leader of local search, it has been no secret that many in the SEO industry, as well as business owners, have had more than their share of frustrations trying to optimize and manage their local profiles. Now, it would seem those times are a-changin’.

First Google announced that it was introducing a new support feature for its Google Places page. For place page owners and operators, this new help system provides a walk-through of possible errors that could be wrong with your listing. The checklist will help owners troubleshoot. For the more experienced local optimization types out there, there will also be the ability to send a note to a Google Analyst who will respond to the issue. Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo have had service support in place already; though neither have the volume of searches that Google sees.

Next, Google unveiled another new feature that will pre-emptively help Place page users. Google will now send an email that will notify of changes being made to the listing by outside sources. Google has always used valuable data providers like Yelp or Insider Pages to gather information about a business, as well as feedback or changes provided by any Google user on the local pages themselves. Now, when impending changes will alter a listing, a business owner will receive an email explaining the impending changes. Google says this is to keep business owners from having to log in to places every time there is an update, in an effort to keep the most recent and relevant information at the pages forefront. Business owners will still have the opportunity to log-in and manually override these changes with the edit option.

These changes come at the end of a long summer of Google Places in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. As Google tried to promote a new feature regarding businesses open or closed statuses, the story that actually got called into question was how easy it was to report a listing closed. With no support at the time, business owners would have to check in often with their listing to learn if a disgruntled or misinformed customer or competitor took it upon themselves to close their business (on the Places page). After a stunt by a local expert, Google addressed the flaws. But with these new support systems in place, these flaws should be much fewer.

With all of the changes happening to the local world lately, Google may be protecting its position as the leader with these support features. Google has never ignored its users; it simply just doesn’t have the manpower to handle every request that is asked of local support. The real hard pill to swallow was that it seemed as though it was ignoring users helpless against never ending “pending review” statuses, never arriving verification postcards, and unheard cries for help in the forums. While it will take a while to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts, local users should appreciate that the efforts are being made, at least for now.