Writing content for social media is different than writing content for the search engines; however, social media and social networking should be an integral part of your overall SEO strategy. In particular, social news and article submission sites like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon can be valuable sources of inbound links, and any good SEO company doesn’t neglect them when it comes to generating traffic.

“Content is king.” You have no doubt heard this countless times, but it gets so much repeat play for a good reason. When it comes to your company website, as well as your search engine optimization and search engine marketing, your content is the key element that attracts and converts visitors.

However, creating compelling content is not always easy, especially when you are writing for the web. After all, everything on your site has to be optimized for both user experience and search engine rankings (check out our free SERP tracking tool if you want to see how your site is doing thus far).

Everyone knows that links are an important element of search engine optimization - perhaps the most important element.  However, in the quest to get more and more offsite links (which of course, are absolutely essential), many site owners and SEOs neglect internal linking.

Besides creating a solid navigational system for your website, you should have an internal linking strategy - go through each page of content and see where you could logically insert contextual links, which is good for your site’s overall SEO and for user navigation.  For instance, whenever we mention our free SEO tool and our SERP tracking tool, we link to them on the blog.  It seems so obvious, but many people forget about internal linking - and it is probably one of the easier SEO techniques.

The last post touched a little bit on local search, or ensuring that your location is part of your keywords and overall search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategy. However, there is much more to the local search market than that – it is one of the fastest growing areas of consumer search. People are starting to use search engines to discover not only what to buy (product reviews, information about various services, etc.), but where to buy it. Furthermore, consumers are getting much more specific about how they use search engines – they are using more targeted four or five word search strings instead of generalized one or two word queries. For example, Chicago SEO company as opposed to simply SEO company.

To discover how well your site is optimized for key local terms (and more), try our free SERP tracking tool.

A Long-Term Strategy and Dedication Yield Search Engine Success

Our Chicago SEO company knows that the number one attribute of a solid search engine optimization strategy is consistency. The consistent use of keywords, the consistent updates to your site’s content (such as regular blogging), and consistent link building are imperative to your website’s long term success. Furthermore, stellar search engine rankings don’t happen overnight; rather, page one rankings are the product of a long-term plan and dedication (as always, you should use our free seo tool to see how your current SEO strategy is working).

Even the big names suffer from search engine optimization woes, as evidenced by this article at WebProNews. In the piece, writer Jason Lee Miller goes in search of information about the Polaroid T730 Compact 7mp digital camera, which has recently popped up on Google’s Hot Trends. However, when he Googled the product, he received some surprising and frustrating results, even from major online retailers (perhaps they should try free seo tool to assess their sites before they aggravate more potential customers with unsuccessful searches).

The vast majority of publishers have some kind of editorial calendar to help them organize the new articles and content they produce on a regular schedule. Your website should be no different – since search engines favor fresh content, you’ll want to update it often. In fact, consistent updates are key part of the search engine optimization process.

However, coming up with topics to write about can be tough and writer’s block can strike at the most inopportune times, so coming up with a basic editorial calendar - a rough schedule that defines what you are going to cover at what time – is a great way to keep the content flowing and your SEO strategy on track. You should also try our free seo tool and SERP tracking tool to determine how well your current strategy is working.

Online reputation and brand management is a rapidly growing industry, and search engine optimization is a huge part of it – you can emphasize positive reviews, good press and articles, and your own website (obviously) by positioning them at the top of the search engine results pages, and you can bury negative mentions by sending them to the bottom. Try our free seo tool and SERP tracking tool to see how well your site is optimized to reflect positive press and reviews (and more).

Your website should be constructed with SEO in mind – after all, you need a solid foundation in order to build something great, and good search engine optimization is a key component of a solid foundation on the web. Start by considering what search terms are bringing people to your site – are they relevant to your business? Try our free SERP Tracking tool to determine how highly your site is ranked for your key terms.

Focus on terms that accurately describe your company or goals and concentrate on those; for example, if you are a Chicago area building company, you would want to optimize for terms like “Chicago builders”, “Chicago contractors” and other related phrases. Furthermore, it is usually best to optimize for phrases that reflect how people actually speak, such “office furniture” instead of “office furnishings” or other more casual phrases. You can use our free seo tool to see how your site is doing right now.