Happy Friday everyone. As the week comes to a close, we have some wonderful SEO  links for you all to contemplate over the weekend (and if you’re in Chicago like us, check out the fabulous entertainment guides from a nearby community of Chicago apartments - yes, one of our writers compiles those).

From Read  Write Web, the HowCast Iphone application has surpassed 500,000 downloads.

Picasso said it best when he said sardonically “Good artists copy.  Great artists steal.”  A similar concept holds true for online marketing and SEO.  Everyone checks out their competition in order to see what strategies they are using, and some might even copy their rival’s approach exactly, thinking that if it worked for their competition it must work for them - and chances are this will get decent results.

Let’s first define what an alt tag is and where you can find them. Alt tags or “alternative text” are the small text boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over an image or button on a website. They contain descriptive information about that particular image or the destination of the button.

One of the most important tools in your link building arsenal is your address book.  Think about it - pretty much everyone has a website these days, and chances are people in your personal or business network would be happy to link to your website.

Choosing the right keywords is the foundation of any successful online marketing campaign.  By determining what keywords and phrases accurately reflect your business as well as what people actually type into the search engines, you can make your company’s website into a powerful tool that drives more business - and isn’t that your goal in the end?

Hi, we’re Chicago’s Premier Creative Internet Solution Consultants. What?

We often tend to make life a lot harder than it really is. Online marketers and web design companies often need to “Just Say It”. When a new visitor comes to your website for the first time, subconsciously they often ask themselves, “hmm, does this website have what I am looking for?” The fast nature of the web has made us all more impatient. That’s why it is important to quickly and clearly communicate your message.

It is likely that your website has plenty of great images - your company’s products, examples of your work, and more.  However, in our SEO company’s experience, is much less likely that those images are optimized for the search engines.  Accordingly, the rising popularity and market share of Google’s image search as well as the growth of blended search results (SERPs that include traditional listings, images, video clips, blog posts, book content, newswire information, and more) the necessity of optimizing your site’s visual content will only increase in the future - so what are you waiting for?

Twitter and how you can use it for business purposes is quite possibly the hottest topic in the search engine optimization and online marketing fields these days (of course, you can follow our SEO company at @SEOGroup).

We’ve all spoken to online marketing and SEO consultants who have one favorite technique that they think is a no-fail way to dominate the search engine results pages; some of us have even worked with them. However, our SEO company understands that every marketing campaign is different, and that there is no one silver bullet of a technique that will guarantee top results.

The purpose of a map is to show you how to get where you want to go.  A properly organized sitemap created by a top-notch SEO company shows the search engine robots how to crawl through your website and find every page of content, and it can also help your human visitors find what they are looking for more quickly and easily.