The Ocean Agency

So this week, our Chicago SEO company made a big change. Really, it’s not that big, but it has made a big difference in how we think about writing for SEO and for communities.

Until this week, our department had been using Yahoo! Messenger, which incorporates a lot of features that we didn’t really need (stock ticker, news, Y! Voice) and was invasive to our PCs and workflow.  Our manager Timothy suggested the switch to Yammer, which our department promptly adopted. And… pardon the creative spelling here… we loooooooove it.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it functions similarly to Twitter: you update your own status, and it is shared in a feed. But you must have a company email address to join, and only people from your company are included in your network and can see your updates. Your company’s feed is private. Yammer also has a desktop application, so you can keep it open in a window and view your coworkers’ updates. For us as a company, this is incredibly useful for two major reasons:

At our Chicago SEO company, we content developers spend hours struggling over the perfect words for the homepage of websites we create. Organization and layout are crucial, and we consider every possible connotation of each selected word. To put an exclamation point or not can be a serious point (pun intended) of contention! And all this careful attention pays off– we nail down the message in just a few sentences right there on the first page that the average visitor sees.

But what about the inside pages? As a content developer or business owner working on a site, do you still consider every word carefully? Do you monitor the consistency of tone and message closely? As views of a page decrease, does your attention to its content, too? It shouldn’t.

A complete website will have finely-tuned content on every page. Here’s why: SEO companies know that usable, optimized content drives an SEO campaign and that users, like Google, recognize quality content.

We obviously talk a lot about SEO content at The Ocean Agency – making sure we’ve got keyword-inclusive <h2> tags, bolding the right keywords, linking the right way. It’s all part of the effort to increase page rank and drive site traffic. Lately, I’ve seen a shift in SEO strategy from doing the right technical things to creating plain good content, and that’s really what it should be. Junta42 wrote a cool blog called 100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010 with folks like Seth Godin and Jason Falls chiming in. The biggest takeaway that I saw: quality content trumps frequent crappy content. Enter editorial calendars.

SEO Editorial Calendars = Quality Content