“I feel the need…the need for speed!” said Maverick, said Goose, oh yeah, and said the millions who search for something online each month. While we all couldn’t be cast in Top Gun, we all empathize with Tom Cruise when it comes to his desire to go fast. Don’t believe the hype? After three seconds of waiting for a website to load, 57 percent of users will abandon it.

In order to boost your website in the SERPs (search engine results page), you must focus on implementing a high quality content marketing strategy and a viable link building campaign. Search engine optimization, or SEO, involves producing highly useful, engaging, and informative content on your website—as well as building links on authoritative external sites that point to your domain.

Actions speak louder than words. This holds true whether you're trying to raise good kids or get your employees to do the things required to be a high-performance company. This timeless adage also applies to the world of marketing. Take Google for example. One of the funniest examples of a company saying one thing and doing the opposite was when Google punished itself for investing in advertorial blogs (paid links) to promote Chrome, its web browser.

Most people are familiar with the phenomenon that is stock photography—and if you aren’t, welcome to the internet. In our industry, we’ve had the opportunity to analyze hundreds of websites and we’ve seen it all: the good, the bad, and the… weird.

Last summer, I was lounging on my couch, browsing the black hole that is Facebook, trying to avoid the profiles of high school friends that have recently had a baby, when I kept chugging down my (un-sweet) iced tea and peeling off the layers down to my (free) college event shirt and norts (Nike running shorts—you’re wearing them). When I contemplated taking an ice bath in between messaging my bestie and stalking a crush, I realized that my air conditioning was in fact broken.

If SEO is like building a house, your website’s site code and structure is that house’s foundation. When you optimize the structure and code of your company’s website, you help ensure your content is ranked by search engines and found by customers. That’s why when we sign on new clients at Blue Corona, one of the first things we do is analyze their site code and structure for errors.

Even though some people might refer to it as the fanny pack of the online marketing world (I think it's more like the mini-van), Salesforce.com's recent acquisition of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion dollars should send a strong message that email marketing is here to stay. Whether Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget for its email technology or something altogether different doesn't matter.

Trying to improve your marketing ROI without proper tracking is like trying to run a marathon in flip-flops—it’s absolutely possible, but ultimately not as efficient. At Blue Corona, we believe that better information equals more traffic, leads, and sales and we make use of a variety of in-house and third-party tools to track our and our clients’ marketing strategies. Unsurprisingly, one of those tools is Google Analytics.

We’re all pretty familiar with the factors that search engines used to determine which websites come up on top. Both Google and Bing have published extensive Webmaster Guidelines detailing the best practices to help search engines find, crawl, and index your site (as well as the best practices for getting your site penalized).

What’s beautiful about working for an online marketing company is that the industry is constantly changing. There’s always a new software to master, Google algorithm update to analyze and evaluate, off-site strategy to test, and more. And this week, the new thing is Zillow Digs. Some of you are probably thinking, "I still haven't figured out the point of tweeting and now you're telling me that there's another site I've got to learn about and start using? Yeeeaaahhh, that's not going to happen."

To blog, or not to blog? Over the years, my team and I have helped more than 150 companies accurately track their advertising campaigns and optimize their presence online in order to get more leads and sales. To say it's been rewarding would be an understatement.

Since the birth of SEO, online marketers have stressed the importance of having text on your website. “The Googlebot can’t read images,” they warned. For the most part, the advice to have lots of text on your website still stands. In fact, in a recent video by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, he explicitly says that Google still wants plain text.

As a business owner with a beautiful website you’re proud of—especially in today’s digital world, which is increasingly filled with junk—there’s no doubt you think about the number of people seeing your awesome site.

For local home service businesses, not many advertising and marketing strategies can beat the web. It doesn't matter whether your goal is increasing brand awareness, improving customer service, or generating more leads and sales, all of the most cost-effective and efficient options are online. It should come as no surprise then that contractors investing heavily in online marketing are reaping enormous rewards.

UPDATE (Wednesday, May 22, 2013): Search Engine Land announced today that Google Penguin 2.0 is now live. If you haven't done so already, log in to your Google Analytics account and see how your traffic looks.