Melissa Blevins

Bing has undergone significant changes over the past year – a new logo and web site, fluctuating roles and responsibilities, shifts in the economy, and a broadening diversity of client work.

Binger Emeritus - Melissa Blevins

Our most recent staff change was the resignation of Melissa Blevins. She has been working virtually from a home office in Colorado Springs for the past two years and has done a fantastic job. Through her relocation and travels to Beijing, she has been dedicated and shown amazing follow through in managing clients, projects, and different timezones!

While we’ve been very thankful that we were able to extend her role with Bing after her move westward, Melissa has decided it’s time to look for other opportunities closer to home. We’re confident her professionalism will take her far. Thanks Melissa, for your commitment to Bing through the years and good luck to you in your endeavors! Take care of Martin the cat and Robert for us!

With so many changes going on, we decided to hold a roundtable to address the direction of the business, explore opportunities, and get each other’s perspectives on how things are going. Our HR consultant, Rosalie Catalano, facilitated the discussion and kept it on track through our banter. Several things stood out as we enjoyed our Current Cuisine lunches.

• We value our communication channels and enjoy working in “unstructured” structure.
• Each of us brings a dynamic value-add to their position, and we utilize each other’s strengths to explore opportunities.
• Our ability to adapt to changing needs is a company strength.
• Maintaining a healthy work/life balance is important to all of us.
• We strive to be an efficient extension of our clients’ marketing teams.

Keeping a watchful eye on things like the economy, competition, and other variables that are potential threats on the business, we feel that we have stayed the course to keep our clients satisfied as well as our internal customer. In what turned out to be a mini SWOT analysis of Bing, we seemed to come away knowing it’s not a perfect company, but it has unique strengths that we all contribute to.

Recently we’ve discovered a few more Bings out there – besides Microsoft’s. There are several similar, small design agencies across the country that share our name. And, upon the release of Microsoft’s search engine, some of them are changing their names.

We’re not.

Because, our “Bing” means more than just “eureka!” It’s part of our history.

Here’s some Bing trivia for your Thursday:

Our agency was established in 1979 by Bob Bingenheimer. At that time, the agency was known as Bingenheimer Design. Bob “retired” in 2000 and sold the agency to an employee, Nick Gaskins. As the new owner, Nick shortened the name to Bing.

For more information about Bing, visit our site.

I’m not a designer, so this may be old, old news … but I wanted to share a handy website with y’all. Lipsum.com is a great website for generating Greek (or, placeholder) copy.

The site allows you to input a number of paragraphs, words, bytes or lists that you’re looking for and … voila. Custom Greek copy to use as placeholder.

The majority of web traffic is driven by major commercial search engines.

Need some help populating at the top of search engine results?

Here are 10 quick techniques you can do to improve your search engine optimization. Now, these may not be the TOP 10 things to do, but they are certainly 10 EASY things you can do. And let’s face it, you need to start somewhere.

1. Create a website title (title tag) – Make it specific, relevant and include keywords … but keep it under 66 characters (that’s all Google will display).
2. Create page titles – Create different Title and Meta tags for every page of your website. Different tags are essential to get highly targeted traffic. Think about how a visitor will search for your site. Incorporate the keywords your would input into their Google search bar in your Meta tags.
3. Use headings – Not only does it organize content and help readers, using headings also helps search engines find what your page is about and convey the importance of the text inside of the header tag.
4. Publish Content – Make sure your web pages are content rich, and that your copy includes the keywords you want to be searched/found for. SEO experts like Steve Wiideman recommend having at least 400 words per page. Updating content frequently will also help your search results.
5. Tag your Assets – If you’re using images and video on your site, make sure the media files are named and that the titles are relevant to your site. If you use a photo sharing site like Flickr, take it one step further – upload the images to Flickr, tag them with keywords and descriptions, and then link to the images hosted on Flickr for your site. You can also describe your images by using alt tags. This attribute provides value in the same manner as meta tags.
6. Check Your Links – Use a free site like Link Checker to make sure you don’t have broken links in your site. Also ensure web pages are W3C Compliant to see if you have any bad HTML coding throughout your website.
7. Add Links – Create a web of links between your pages, connecting related content. Search engines will be able to provide visitors the relevant pages they are looking for in their search – and that can help convert them from a visitor to a customer. Also add links to other websites that include relevant, related content.
8. Submit your site to Google – Enter your URL at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You only need to do it once!
9. Things to avoid: Flash based openings or “text as images” – these can’t be searched by Google.
10. Call Bing. We can conduct a free site analysis to help get you started.

If you have additional EASY tips, please add them in the comment sections.

Joe Gauder is a contributing author to this post.

Last week one of our clients, Management Excellence Inc., was in Colorado Springs to manage the Sonitrol National Dealers Association Conference. Bing provides graphic support for portions of the conference, including an awards ceremony on the final conference date.

So when our client, who is based in Yellow Springs, needed items shipped to them overnight – we took it one step further. Hand delivery.

Keep that in mind, folks. If you’re in the Colorado Springs area, we deliver. Especially if you’re at the Broadmoor.