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!

According to the Associated Press, Google has tweaked their social hub, Buzz in response to privacy concerns.  Gmail users worried that Buzz made their email contacts visible to others.  It did so by turning these email contacts into followers (or in Facebook terms, “friends”), and making this list public.

Google rolled out Buzz earlier this week.  The Gmail service allows users to give status updates and share interests through their email account.  Sound familiar?  That’s because, according to Yahoo and Microsoft, they have been doing it for years.  “Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”  Yahoo makes a strong claim that they were the original.  In a recent tweet, Yahoo posted: “Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/”

You can’t argue with that.  In fact, it seems that Google didn’t even try to be creative by coming up with an original name.

Google has not enjoyed much success in the social networking arena.  Does anyone remember Orkut?  What about Google Wave?  You don’t hear much about them any more, do you?  Google Wave was supposed to kill email and was a trending topic on Twitter for weeks, maybe even months.

Since Google Buzz is fully integrated with Gmail, they have initially added 176 million users (according to com Score) to their new social network.  This is an amazing number for any new social site, even one with the name “Google”.  However, they haven’t had much social networking success in the past and they are already facing some serious concerns with this one.