Our SEO company has a variety of clients, and their understanding of SEO and internet marketing ranges from pretty impressive (especially for a non-SEO professional) to well, not so impressive (hey, that is what they pay us for).  Therefore, we’ve compiled a list of the common questions clients ask about the search engine optimization process, along with some relatively-jargon free answers.

As we said yesterday, today’s post is all about creating authority content because after all, authority content is a key aspect of a solid search engine optimization strategy, because it is beloved by search engines and humans alike. However, creating solid, authoritative content is not that easy. Accordingly, here are ten types of articles or blog posts that help boost your authority - and your reliability, credibility, and therefore your site’s link profile.

Everyone is an authority on something, whether it is search engine optimization, web design, or more esoteric topics, such as the history of the crossword puzzle or how to speak relatively obscure languages like Basque, Zulu, or Tibetan.  One of the tickets to success online (especially in regard to blogging and spreading your brand and message, a.k.a. brandstreaming) is to build a website and blog with authoritative content relevant to your field.  However, that is easier said than done - to borrow from Chris Garrett (creator of the Authority Blogger program himself), authority sites are the hardest but the most worthwhile.

Every niche has its echo chamber, and if you are a blogger or any other kind of web publisher, you are probably lying to yourself if you say you’ve never contributed to it. It is difficult to resist writing about the latest breaking news, developments in your field, or the hot new products, after all, and it is only human nature to take an interest in things that others find exciting or useful (why else would social news and voting sites be so popular?)

The search engine optimization and internet marketing fields tend to have a particularly loud and repetitive echo chamber.

Here our SEO company’s favorite articles and blog posts this week:

Search Engine Guide has begun a series of posts that cover the seven building blocks of a destination website, and they are chock-full of solid advice and tips, especially their first point about great content and expert information.

Any baseball fans reading our SEO company blog are probably familiar with Harry Caray, one of Chicago’s most iconic sports personalities, and announcer the St. Louis Cardinals, Oakland A’s, the Chicago White Sox, and most notably the Chicago Cubs. In fact, the Cubs are playing as we write, so it seemed fitting to make Harry Caray the subject of this week’s “what if _____ was an SEO?” post.

Everyone wants to get their content on the front page of Digg, Reddit, and other social news/voting websites; after all, those websites can drive huge amounts of traffic, lead to the creation of dozens (if not more) back links, and of course, help your website get to page one. Moreover, one of the many tricks that a savvy internet marketing company should have up their sleeve is experience with and strong profiles on popular social media sites, as well as knowledge of the various niche social networking, bookmarking, and content-sharing websites.

Many bloggers and internet marketing types profess the importance of commenting on other blogs in order to get your website on their radar, share your relevant information, and simply to join the ongoing conversation that is the web (especially the social media and blogosphere elements). After all, “markets are conversations” and no where is there a bigger or more worldwide conversation than the internet.

Search engine optimization and internet marketing are both an art and a science.

The Science of SEO

The science aspect, obviously, is the more technical side - the components that must be part a site’s code for the search engines to crawl it properly, keyword placement and density, and most importantly, the actual development process of the website. Since SEOGroup is a division of a web design company, we believe that search engine optimization should be considered from the beginning of the website development process in order to achieve the best possible result.

Last Wednesday we posted the “ABCs of Search Engine Optimization“; this week it is our parent web design company’s turn to feature the alphabet with the “ABCs of Web Design“.  Of course, web design and search engine optimization are closely intertwined - after all, a proper SEO campaign involves on-site optimization as well as off-site marketing and link-building techniques.