Facebook has become an incredible online community that is a gold mine for everyone interested in advertising or creating brand awareness. Not only does Facebook have over 100 Million active users, but it has a lot of great ways for business owners to reach these users in a legit way. Below we are going to talk about the core advertising methods you can dabble in on Facebook and how you can make the most of them.
Facebook Profiles
Creating a profile is the most basic thing you can do on Facebook and it’is required if you want to do anything else such as create a group or fan page. Make sure you completely fill out your profile because a full profile looks much more interesting than an empty one. You can also add your website URL in several locations and be sure to discuss about your business/brand and plug your website URL in the appropriate spots as mentioned.
Then you have to start adding friends to your profile every day, the current limit is 5,000 friends but this may be lifted in the future. If you add 20 friends a day which would take you possibly 5 minutes, in one month you will have 600 friends! From my testing you will have to type in a CAPTCHA or anti spam code for the first 10-15 friend adds, but after that it seemed to go away and it was much quicker to add friends. I wouldn’t recommend adding to many friends each day because it will come off as spammy.
Now that you have your profile created and optimized, you are able to create a Facebook group or even better a Facebook page, both of which we will go over below.
Facebook Groups
Groups were available before pages and are more of a place for users to discuss topics such as logo design or automobiles. It’s almost like a mini forum. The benefits for group owner is that they are very viral and you can bulk invite all you friends to join your group. The problem is they are not indexable by Search Engines and not available to view unless you are a member of Facebook.
I would recommend creating a Facebook group for your business, but frankly Facebook pages are really where it’s at and you should focus your efforts on your page instead of your group.
Facebook Pages
Facebook pages are all about business and have many of the same features available in groups, but with some extra key features available. The main advantage of pages is the fact that they are indexable by Search Engines and available to view even if you are not a member so promoting the page is easy.
When creating your facebook page make sure you use your most important keyword as the page name so that it shows as the page title, making your page more SEO friendly. Like you did with your profile, fill out your Facebook page with all important information about your business, website URLS and so on.
The best way to promote your page is to offer some sort of discount offers, coupon codes etc, if you are not a major brand. This way you give people a reason to become a fan of your page. Once they become a fan you can send updates which is the best part of having a Facebook page for your business.
Facebook groups may work well virally, but so do Facebook fan pages. Whenever someone becomes a fan of your page it shows up in their profile and looks something like this: Person’s Name, Became a fan of Your Business/Brand/Company Name.
So if you give your fan page a good jump start it could really take off. The number of fans you can have has no limit and some pages have anywhere from several thousand fans to over 5 million fans!
So if you want to focus on one thing I would highly recommend you to create a Facebook fan page, instead of a group and putting all your advertising efforts towards the Facebook page.
Facebook Applications
The introduction of Facebook Applications is most likely the most popular move made by Facebook to date. They released their API so developers and business owners could cooperate to create fun and cool applications that engage users. The applications created so far vary in purpose; some are cool games, some are useful and some are directly related and tied into businesses.
Many popular applications have thousands of monthly active users and that information speaks for itself, so if you want to read and learn more about how to create a Facebook application, I highly recommend you to check out the Facebook Developers page. Once you have created an application, be sure to add it to your profile and to your Facebook group and page!
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are a great way to really boost your exposure using highly targeted CPC and CPM Advertising. You can target users by age, gender, regional, interests, and even attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.
The best part is you can also advertise an external website or a Facebook page. So if you created a fan page earlier for your business and you are looking to build up your facebook fan page you can do so easily by driving the traffic from your advertisements directly to your page.
So join Facebook today and start working on your Facebook promotions, because if your competition is not on Facebook already, they will be soon!
If you have any question in this regard, don’t hesitate to ask. You can contact me through our Contact form or just send me an email at Wahid@wahidqazi.com.
Read More
It would be difficult not to notice the astonishing growth of Facebook over the last few months. Facebook now has 31 million members across the world and its growth has been so large that several people are talking of it as the new Microsoft.
Where there are members there is the potential to get customers, promote your business and drive traffic to your site or eBay listings. After playing around with Facebook over the last few months, I have come up with a list of ways in which it can be used to your business.
Connect with your business contacts
It is possible that your colleagues and business contacts are on Facebook already. Invite them to become your friends and join your company’s professional network (if you have one – see below). Facebook is a lot more friendly and interactive environment than other social networks like Linkedin and can be used to form closer bonds with your contacts.
Build a profile for your company
To create a grip on Facebook, create a profile for your company and a company network. This will let you to do the following things:
- Ask your business colleagues, and customers to become your friends, creating a facebook network around your business.
- Make postings which will appear in your facebook friend’s newsfeeds. These can be about special offers and company news such as job postings.
- List your items in the facebook marketplace (see below)
Promote your Blog
If you have a company or personal blog, this can be imported into your facebook notes. Your posting will then appear in your newsfeed and that of your friends.
Facebooks notes settings can be accessed from the applications menu in the LHS of your profile page.
List your items in the marketplace
Facebook has a marketplace where items can be listed for sale. This is free and could be used promote items for sale on your website or eBay. Products such as Ztail, make listing items on facebook marketplace easy.
Write an Facebook application
Finally, if you think that there is a real opportunity for your business on Facebook, you should look into developing an application. Applications can help you develop friends and drive traffic to your website. Last.fm were one of the first companies to boost their business through a facebook application.
The sign the Facebook is a force to be reckoned with is that there are facebook only businesses developing. An example of a business which uses facebook is Social flowers, which enables facebook members to send each other flowers.
Read More
Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it’s all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses:
- To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
- To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
- To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers
Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they’re a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.
There’s a few good rules to follow when writing meta descriptions that take advantage of their use in pulling in search traffic:
- Always describe your content honestly – if it’s not as “sexy” as you’d like, spice up your content, don’t bait and switch on searchers or they’ll have a poor brand association.
- Character limits – currently Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165 and MSN up to 200+ (they’ll go to three vertical lines in some cases). Stick with the smallest – Google – and keep those descriptions at 160 characters (including spaces) or less.
- Write with as much sizzle as you can while staying descriptive – the perfect meta description is like the perfect ad – compelling and informative.
- Just like an ad, you can test meta description performance in the search results, but it takes careful attention. You’ll need to buy the keyword through PPC so you know how many impressions it received over a given timeframe and can track your CTR.
- Unlike an ad, the motivation for natural search click is frequently very different than that of users clicking on the paid results. Don’t assume that a successful PPC ad will transition into a good meta description (or the reverse).
- It’s extremely important to have your keywords in the meta tag – the bolding done by the engines can make a big difference in visibility and CTR.
- You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple – when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.
So, we’ve now completed the triumvirate of on-page basics with title tags, meta descriptions and URLs. If you’ve got some valuable meta description writing techniques, please do share.
Read More
Many people in SEO groan at the thought of meta-tags.
After all, meta-tags for ranking is dead for SEO, isn’t it?
Not quite.
In fact, meta-tags have begun a startling revival.
A couple of key points about why you should consider taking meta-tags more seriously:
1. Google duplicate content filters
Google has had real problems this year in determining what may or may not be duplicate content.
Sites with generic, or absence of, meta-description tags, may find themselves going supplemental, or simply not showing properly for their content.
Heck, even well-known sites such as SEOmoz and Threadwatch may have issues here.
Going supplemental is an invitation to traffic loss, so take pre-emptive action by setting up unique meta-description tags on your pages.
2. Clickthrough rates
There’s no point ranking for good keywords if the description under your search engine listing sucks.
Absense of a meta-description at best leaves search engines looking for a random sampling of text that may be relevant.
Why leave it to chance?
Increase your clickthrough rates from listings by actually better controlling the text with the listing by setting up unique meta-descriptions tags for your pages.
And try to ensure you include a marketing hook very quickly in the description tag.
If you are ranking, tell search engine users why your page is so relevant for their query.
3. Ranking
Google doesn’t appear to use meta-keywords to rank webpages/sites.
But Yahoo! does.
Yahoo! still commands a respectable 30% of US search traffic, and even where the market share is really small (such as the UK), strong Yahoo! rankings can still prove very cost-effective.
So add some spice for Yahoo! Search by focusing on your meta-keywords tag.
No, I’m not advising you keyword stuff the tag – but at least make the effort to set up keywords in your tag that Yahoo! can process that for ranking purposes.
Overall
All too often people can get fixated on the details rather than the bigger picture. Decent meta-tags are a part of that bigger picture.
This is especially when it comes to clickthrough rates. After all, what’s the point of ranking for competitive keywords if you leave clickthroughs to chance?
Search engine users want a quality experience – offer them that by taking care of the details of your site that can help work best in the big picture.
Read More
How many of you think this way? Let me repeat my question, is getting top positions about more hits to your website? I guess all will answer in YES, but the truth is a bitter reality, thanks to “Google alert”.
Getting King’s place doesn’t mean more Money!
In the same manner getting top positions doesn’t mean more hits to your website, when a website comes at top place in search engine, what it shows? It has three things to show, page title, description and website address. Site title and description help searchers to motivate (to visit) or reluctant (to leave).
Hard to justify with different Industries every time
It takes years to understand one business properly, how can one expect from SEOs should understand all industries? YES, SEOs understand their JOB very well, most SEOs understand the common sense of business.
To Understand clients’ industry/business and its term is just like giving them the best outcomes, it will not only help to communicate with Clients but this way SEOs can help them in correct direction.
Why to Thanks Google Alert!
Google Alert is a very effective utility of Google, it tells us about which websites are hits with search keyword phrase/s, it really helped me knowing the fact that not all top ranked website/s are hits, it’s about the best description tag that turns searchers to click on that website/s, it doesn’t matter where website/s ranked, you can experience it by yourself, http://www.google.com/alert is a free service, create your alerts and whenever you get alerts, try to search with those mentioned keyword phrases and see the position of the hit website/s.
How important is Description Tag?
Description tag can turn searchers to be visitors, so you can guess how important description tag is! Bringing websites to top positions require a lot of things including healthy content, good link popularity, easy navigation, logical site structure, clean html and relevant title/description tags.
SEO efforts are not just to bring websites to top, bringing website to Top is just one of the elements of SEO efforts. A SEO involvement is the 2nd heaviest involvement than website owner.
Understanding Clients Business…
- Understand clients target audience and market
- Select the best keyword phrases according to product/services, keeping target audience in mind
- Focus on the most relevant keyword phrases
- Re-check all keywords by “Reverse Engineering Process“, either the selected keyword phrases give the exact traffic your clients require or not
- Write “Title”, title belongs to keywords, try to include relevant keyword phrase within the limit of 60 to 70 Characters
- Write “Description Tag“, description tag is very important bringing traffic and converting visitors into customers, it belongs to products and services, write is according to products and services, it has to be central idea of the page and site
Motivate SE Searchers!
Searchers are never the less important than Visitors, it’s easy to motivate visitors than searchers, a visitor visit a page but a searcher view collectively not more than four lines of title, description and website address.
Do you know?
- Who your searchers are…
- What they must be looking for…
- What description your website is showing off after search…
- On Which page your searchers are directed…
If you still miss some answers of above mentioned questions, you should be able to find out all, after knowing all answers, you can easily motivate your searchers to hit your website.
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in branding and promotion, pioneer of SEO industry in Pakistan, and has trained dozens of quality SEOs.
Read More
Who doesn’t want to get Top Ranking Positions in Google? 1st Page Placement in Google is NOT difficult, you need to follow Google Optimization Guidelines, and this Article has Summary of the Seven Fundamentals for Google Optimization.
Google optimization is about following Google guidelines, Google likes ethical SEO practices, those SEO practices which are to help website owners as well as Google and it has published guidelines for SEOs here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
Top 7 Fundamentals for Google Optimization
- Fresh and Original Content
- Clean and Validated Code
- Easy and Accessible Navigation
- Good Interlinking of Web pages
- Healthy and Relevant Incoming Links
- Domain Age and Registered Period For
- Same Contacts at Site and Domain Registration
Fresh and Original Content
Google love fresh and original content on web page, selectable content/text copy of your web page, google can’t read content on images or at pics but if your website is completely based on images so there’s a solution for you, you can use your slogan on ALT tags.
e.g.; “<img src=”image source” alt=”Search Engine Submission | Submit Your Website on 100 Search Engines With a Single Click. “>
Clean and Validated Code
Clean and validate code helps google to crawl deeply, try to put content at the beginning of your web page, ignore nesting, javascript or comments, in fact try to shorten the text format with the help of external CSS.
Easy and Accessible Navigation
Text or image base navigation helps google to read, google bot can’t read javascript, dhtml, flash base navigation, try to avoid using these practices which google doesn’t like. Keep your navigation at top or left side of the web pages, make sure to add a sitemap page which will guide web surfers and web bots to read each and every page of your website, if you have huge website then make sure to add at least all main categories’ links at sitemap page.
Good Interlinking of Web pages
Web links are like roads and streets at website, make sure all website’s internal links are text base or image base, with relevant content.
Healthy and Relevant Incoming Links
Google likes referred websites, specially referred from quality and relevant resources. The more referrer links the more top rankings. Here one thing should be remembered that one relevant incoming links is better than hundred irrelevant links.
Domain Age and Registered Period For
Google started keeping new registered domains in sandbox since April 2004, in sandbox almost all new domains kept on probationary period for 6 to 8 months, in some cases for longer period, Sandbox domains don’t get good rankings.
Google also likes to rank better to those domains which are registered for longer period like for 5 or 10 years, because whoever registered domains for longer period shows how much s/he is serious with her/his business and most probably won’t do SPAM with those domains.
Same Contacts at Site and Domain Registration
Google likes true businessmen and a true businessman doesn’t misguide his website visitors, google likes those websites which have physical mailing address to their contact pages and google compares it with that physical mailing address which is used in domain registering.
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
Read More
Interesting comparisons between Organic and PPC listings, everybody wants to know which is of more worth and value, I would say that both have different preposition and benefits. Here is list of elements between both organic and PPC with their pros and corns.
Organic Listings
- Long Lasting Effect
- Slow Results
- Low Cost
- Less Control Over Ranking
- More Clicks Than PPC
- No Management
- No Monitoring
- Assumption
- Gigantic Exposure
- More Text Space
- Uncontrolled Title And Description
PPC Listings
- Effect Depends On Budget
- Quick Results
- Expensive
- Complete Control Over Ranking
- Less Clicks Than Organic
- Complete Management
- Complete Campaign Monitoring
- Authentic
- Limited Exposure
- Less Text Limitation
- Controlled Title And Description
I’m sure, this comparison will help you take better decision and best use of your hard earned money, both these marketing are very effective in different scenarios, if you have big budget you must go for PPC first and also keep organic as secondary marketing for long term. If you have small budget then organic would be an excellent choice with some paid listings in directories and industry related portals.
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
Read More
Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.
Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!
Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.
When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?
What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?
Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.
- Validated and Optimize Code
- Rich Content
- Unique URL of Each Webpage
- Plain URLs
- Proper Internal Linking
- Healthy Incoming Links
- Text Based Navigation
- Neat Table Structure
- Good Directory and File Structure
- Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
- Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
- Robots.txt
What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?
Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.
- Broken Links
- Invalid Code
- JavaScript
- Orphan Links, Images and Files
- Under-construction Page/es
- Pop ups
- Redirectors
- IP Tracking
- Dynamically Generated Pages
- Frames
- Same Background and Font Colors
- Multi Nested Table Structure
Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.
Best of luck 
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
Read More
