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.
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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.
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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.
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Website domain can play very important role in your SEO campaign, search engines take very valuable information through your domain name. You can be credible, authentic, more reliable, and more valuable for search engines. You’ll come to know how effectively you can take benefit from your domain name.
Why to have Keywords Specific Domain Name
Keywords specific domains, or keywords in domain names are highly valuable to search engines, such as www.d4dating.net where “Dating” is a keywords, but I would always recommend to have brand specific “easy to remember” domains, you can’t have a single keyword or phrase for a website, can you? Then why to have a keyword specific domain name? You can always keep keywords specific files or directories to support your SEO work and be flexible with domain name, since domain name is going to be your online identity and your direct traffic will heavily depend on your domain.
Is Your Website Domain Easy to Remember?
Website domain name is as important as the identity for any brand. There are more than 100 million registered website domains in the world, how many website domains one can remember? Selection of most appropriate domain name for your website is one of the very important aspects of building your image on internet. Why I say most appropriate domain name is just because finding best domain name will be one of the most difficult tasks.
Strategy to Select Best Domain for Your Website
There are three ways through which you can select most appropriate domain name.
- Company Name Based: Example www.hostingheap.com where “Hosting Heap” is company’s name
- Catchy Title Based: Example www.alwaysidea.com where “Always Idea” is title
- Keywords Based: Example www.d4dating.net where “Dating” is a keyword phrase.
Whenever you will select domain, keep these elements in mind and try to select a domain which can help you in search engine positioning and also in online branding.
Google takes Old Domains as Gold!
Google gives more importance to older domains comparatively than newly registered domains, the older the domain better the chances of getting good rankings in Google. Here one thing should be kept in mind that the domain registration details should not be refreshed or updated frequently, if you update or change domain registration information, then there is a chance that Google will consider your domain as new, since there are people who have made it very profitable business, they registered domains and sell them.
Avoid Being Suspect, Get Credibility by Your Domain Name!
Search engine have become very smart, they can track server statistics, domain whois info and compare these information with the available contact information at your website, if information doesn’t match they can give you poor rank or no rank. That’s why it is always advisable that you have same information at website and at domain registration, don’t try to update server information too often or else search engine can take that modification as a change in ownership and your domain becomes fresh once again.
One Year Domain Registration vs Multiple Years Domain Registration
Normally people register their domains for one year even though there is a possibility of registering domains on monthly basis by domain registration companies. Recently the trend has changed now smart businessmen are registering their domains for multiple years, why this change occurred? Why people are investing more money on domain registration?
Newly registered domains are just like infant babies to Google, they have almost zero reliability, credibility factor from their domain registration, there is only one way for those infant babies is that they get themselves registered for multiple years, if they want to be credible and reliable to Google eyes. Google has been always a logical company and there is a logic behind this credibility factor, those websites which are registered for one year or few months can adopt black hat SEO techniques or they can be involved in any short term activity to bring quick ranking, it’s just because they have invested very less amount of money
How Search Engines Treat Sub Domains
Search engines give equal importance to sub domains as they give to domains but there are website which are excessively using sub domains for their promotion. This indicates that very soon search engines will have strict policy related to sub domains.
Domain Name Tips
- Try to select “easy to remember” domain name, after all we all need to increase direct traffic rather hoping from search engines
- If you’ve already taken domain, try to have keywords specific files or directories
- Register your domain name for multiple years (five or ten years)
- Mention your contact details clearly at your website
- Keep the same contact information at website and at domain registrant
- Don’t mess with sub domains but it’s always good to have few relevant sub domains
- Take care of Canonical URLs
- Avoid geographical/country specific domain, unless your target market is specific
- .com is still the most popular domains in search engines and in people
- Don’t modify domain information, it can refresh your domain’s age according to search engine
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