Stories about businesses that have experienced huge amounts of success marketing themselves with social media are all over the media lately; everywhere you look there is another profile of a company that used MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube for fun and profit.  Social media marketing and social media optimization are the latest buzzwords in the search engine optimization and internet marketing world.

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.

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.

Here are our Chicago SEO company’s favorite posts from around the web this week:

First of all, SEOGroup is now on Twitter!

Search Engine Land has a great post that covers Social Responsibility and Small Business and participating in the local community in a constructive way (beyond just offering their goods and services) can help a business rank more highly and add more positive listings and reviews in the SERPs. Besides, in addition to those extremely valid reasons, doing good can be its own reward.

Michael Jordan is one of Chicago’s local heroes, so this Friday our Chicago SEO company is taking a look at search engine opimization and online marketing though His Airness’s eyes. First of all, he would definitely be a white hat SEO; furthermore, he’d probably always be open to new techniques, ideas, and other creative marketing methods.

The search engine optimization and online marketing industries have a lot of jargon - some of which actually has meaning, some of which is mostly buzzwords thrown around by “glass-jawed” SEOs so people think they know what they are talking about. So without further do, here are the ABCs of SEO and SEM - in other words, 26 terms that our Chicago SEO company thinks matter most.

One of the most important talents that all types of marketers must possess is creativity, and online marketing is no different.  Creative copywriting is a particularly important skill, especially for link-building.  After all, in order to get links your site or blog has to be worthy of them.  Here are five tips that will make your copy more creative and compelling:

Before our Chicago SEO firm or our Chicago web design company starts work on a project, we create a unique plan (every client and their search engine optimization and search engine marketing needs is different, after all) and define our goals. Besides getting our clients on page one of the search engines results, we also tailor our strategy to fit their market, because while there are some SEO techniques that apply to every campaign, every industry has its own idiosyncrasies. These unique elements are especially important to consider when working on off-site SEO, or search engine marketing.

Creating optimized content that pleases both the search engine spiders and the human visitors is a major part of search engine optimization; however, it is only part of the battle when it comes to conquering the search engine results pages.  This is because once you write that copy, compose that perfect blog post, or shoot that amazing video, you have to promote it.