By Christine Churchill

I have some exciting news. Two people who I greatly admire are joining Jim, Mike, and the rest of the KeyRelevance team. The soft spoken and intellectual Bill Slawski and the energetic Li Evans are now on board and I’m extremely happy about it.

The travel and client schedule of the last summer convinced me it was time to make some changes. I like having a small company, but the workload was stressful. When your daughter looks in your eyes and says “Mom, you work too much” you know its time to hire.

Bill and Li are established search experts and are well known in the community. They are positively brilliant on search marketing and they are also a blast to work with. I’ve also know each of them for a long time. Years ago when I was on the SEMPO Board of Directors, I frequently used Bill as a sounding board. My position on the Board was to represent smaller SEMs and I would bounce ideas off Bill and always know we were mentally in-sync. I first met Li a few years ago through the High Rankings Forum where I am a moderator. Li was an active contributor and always impressed me with her original creative responses to discussions.

Okay, enough rambling. Here’s a little background on Li and Bill.

Liana (Li) Evans is well known in the search industry for her energy and creativity. Li specializes in social media marketing, blog optimization, link building and viral marketing. She has a background in both Public Relations and information technology and is a regular speaker at industry conferences including Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld’s PubCon. Li also is the creator and main contributor to Search Marketing Gurus and writes for Search Engine Guide and InformIT.

William (Bill) Slawski is a much respected SEO who was one of the founders and administrators for the Cre8asite Forums with my dear friend Kim Krause Berg. Bill is also a featured columnist at Search Engine Land on search related patents and research and writes a monthly column on small business issues. Bill speaks regularly on search engine algorithms and search engine optimization at industry conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and Webmaster World’s PubCon. Bill has the gift of taking complex issues and explaining them in layman’s terms and is also the creative force behind the popular blog SEO By The Sea.

We’re thrilled to have Bill and Li as part of the company and now maybe with more help we’ll be able to post more on this much-neglected blog.