Have you ever wondered, “How do I promote my fan page on Facebook?” This article reveals 5 Killer ways to use the power of Facebook to grow your fan base.
Why Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page? You may ask, “Why do I even need a Facebook fan page?” Here’s why: Right now Facebook has an Alexa ranking of 2. They are the 2nd most trafficked website next only to Google!
This means your Facebook page will get indexed faster on Google and other search engines, so if you don’t have a fan page, be sure to create one and promote it.
Here are 5 Killer ways to grow your Facebook fans:
#1: Invite People From Your Facebook Friends List
Do you have your personal friends and professional colleagues segmented into lists on your Facebook home page?
I have a number of lists in my personal Facebook account.
You can invite these lists as groups to your Facebook fan page rather of sending individual invites. This is the easiest and fastest way to jump-start your fan base.
When you click “Suggest to Friends” on your fan page, start typing in the name of your friends list in the filtered friends section; for example, “Social Media Experts.” This will automatically send an invitation to your facebook fan page to all of your colleagues listed in that category.
It’s possible that it may take a while before you start seeing those known faces pop up in your fan page because people are busy. There have been a few occasions where I’ve softly nudged them with an individual invite, but I keep that to a minimum.
As you add more people to your network, remember to go back to your same lists and send the invite to the new people you have added. The names of those who have already been invited will be “grayed out” and the invite will only be sent to your new contacts.
#2: Find People With Facebook Search
The updated Facebook Search feature (see the Search bar at the top of Facebook) gives you a view into conversations of your friends and status updates that may even show you who may be looking for the services you offer.
There is even an option to search “Posts by Everyone,” which gives you a glimpse into conversations of people who may not even be connected to you. After entering a search term, there will be a display, “Posts By Everyone.” This allows you to view conversations from others who aren’t in your friend lists.
Here is a screenshot when I entered “buying a home” in the Search field:
As you can see, there is a person saying “I think we are buying a house tomorrow.” If this person is already in your contacts list, the following is a very easy conversation starter: “Hi ______, I saw your Facebook comment about your plans to buy a house tomorrow. Do you need any help with school information in that particular area?”
There is another person stating that they plan to stay in their house for a long time. This can be a potential candidate for a loan refinance. Again, if this person is already a friend on Facebook, it would be very easy to start a conversation without sounding like an annoying salesperson.
#3: Attract People With Facebook Social Ads
Social Ads provide advertisements alongside your Facebook sidebar which show related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like “Leah is now a fan of The Offspring. Would you like to become a fan too?” It is possible to tailor ads to your friends and their interests, which makes it more appealing for them to take action because you are interested as well.
This strategy requires a small budget, but can be very effective in finding your target market. It is very important to do a Facebook search with specific keywords in your particular niche to find out if it’s being talked about on Facebook (see #2 above).
If you click on “Promote With an Ad” on your fan page, you can start a campaign. You can set a daily spending limit of $10, $25, or other appropriate amount. Because I market mostly to businesses with my keywords (such as real estate broker, loan officer, real estate investor, and so forth) which are in numerous profiles as job descriptions I have been able to use Facebook Social Ads effectively for my fan page.
It’s possible to run your Facebook ads for only 4 to 5 days with a $25 per day budget. Then stop the ad for a few weeks if you like and run the same ad again. This allows your fan page to grow in spurts and I have found it to be very effective in growing my fan base without spending a lot of money at once.
#4: Facebook Fan Page Twitter App
The Facebook Fan Page Twitter application is a great tool that brings your Twitter following back to your fan page. When you post a status update, a link or a photo (you can choose) on your Facebook fan page, there will be an update to Twitter with a shortened bit.ly link back to your fan page. This is just pure genius to drive traffic from another source right to your page.
There are other Facebook and Twitter integration applications; however, this is the one that leads people directly back to your page. This gives them an option to become a fan of your page right at that moment if they click on the bit.ly link from Twitter.
#5: Facebook Fan Box Widget
The Facebook Fan Box Widget is a great feature to add to your blog or website. This widget allows you to show your fan base and allows others to become fans instantly. This is just one way to promote your page across several social media sites. It is important to cross-reference all of your social media sites so others can find you and your websites on other networks.
So what do you have to add to this list? Are you finding other effective ways to promote your Facebook fan page? I would love to hear from you and your successes in promoting your pages in the comments below.
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.
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Whether you run a small business from your home or work for a large corporation, you can use YouTube to boost your company. As you probably know, YouTube is a No.1 video sharing community where anyone including you and your business can upload videos for others to view. The trick is to determine the right kind of video to upload, and then finding a way to profit from YouTube viewership.
Using YouTube as a Video Host
Do you already have videos in your business? If your answer is yes, you can easily upload those videos to YouTube, for anyone to view. (Whether anyone wants to view your videos is another story, however, which we’re going to cover shortly.) Aside from making your videos public, there’s one more good reason to upload your videos to YouTube; when YouTube hosts your video, you don’t have to.
That’s right; YouTube is, at its most basic, a giant video hosting website. Instead of taking up valuable storage space on your own web server, you can allow YouTube host your video instead. You will display the video on your own website, of course, but you do it by embedding code for the video in your site’s underlying HTML. The code points to the video on the YouTube site; YouTube then serves the video from its website to appear on your webpage.
Not only you save on storage costs, you also don’t have to pay for all the bandwidth used when visitors watch your videos and YouTube offers unlimited bandwidth. Yes, you still have a slight bandwidth usage when someone views the text of your webpage, but the bandwidth used to deliver the video comes straight from YouTube.
If you run a small business with limits on storage and bandwidth, letting YouTube host your videos can be a real cost saver. And if your video happens to become popular or even viral, you don’t risk having your servers overload and shutdown; YouTube’s servers will handle the load as I said earlier YouTube offers unlimited bandwidth.
Creating an Online Video Presence
What types of videos can your business make for YouTube? It depends on the type of your business and on the way you want to use the Web.
First, look at any existing videos you might have made for use in your business. Perhaps you’ve taped a company meeting, seminar or webinar, or you have a PowerPoint presentation that’s been converted to video. Or maybe you’re a realtor who has recorded video house tours or a motivational speaker who has a speech or two recorded on tape. Any of those videos could make a good beginning point for moving your business to YouTube.
Take the example of realtor. Today, most realtors take digital photographs of the houses they list, and then potential buyers view those photos on their website. But there’s nothing stopping you from using a camcorder to produce a video tour of the house, editing that tour into a short video, and then publishing that video on YouTube. You can then embed the YouTube video on your own website, so that potential buyers can view the video. It’s a great improvement to a realtor’s selling services, and it doesn’t cost you a cent (beyond the cost of shooting the video, of course).
Here’s one more example for you. If your business is a leader in its category, or if you yourself are an industry specialist, you can establish and exploit that expertise via a series of YouTube videos. All it takes is a video camera or webcam pointed at you behind a desk; you then spend three or four minutes talking about a peculiar topic or issue of interest. Think of it as a professional video blog; if you truly know what you’re talking about, it will help to establish your professional credentials and polish your company’s image.
For that matter, there are a lot of different types of videos that can help enhance your company’s image. There may be value, for example, in placing a video online of your company’s most recent sales conference or at least the part that introduces forthcoming new products. Or maybe your company has hosted a seminar or conference that is of interest to others outside your company. These videos can be edited for duration and uploaded to YouTube, where any interested party can view them.
That said; there is one type of video that you don’t want to upload. YouTube is not the place to recycle your company’s commercials. Users will not go out of their way to view something online that they try to avoid in the real world. Unless you have a really clever, Super bowl worthy commercial that people want to view again and again, keep your ads to yourself and don’t upload them to YouTube.
Promoting Products and Services via YouTube
So far, I’ve talked about videos that only broadly boost your company, in terms of enhancing your company’s image. You can also use YouTube more directly to boost your company’s products and services that is, to drive potential customers to your website where they can buy what you sell. To do this, you need to make and upload videos that function as online infomercials, subtly boosting your company’s products and services.
Let’s say that you offer gift baskets for sale. You create a short video for YouTube about how to make gift baskets something that would be of interest to anyone in the market for them. You prominently display your web page address and phone number within the video, and in the descriptive text that accompanies the video on the YouTube site. Because the video has some informational content (the how-to information), it attracts viewers, and a certain percentage of these will follow through to purchase the gift baskets you have for sale.
Or maybe you’re a business consultant and you want to promote your consulting services. To demonstrate what you have to offer potential clients, you create and upload some sort of short video a motivational lecture, perhaps, or a slideshow about specific business practices, or something similar. You use the video to establish your expert status and then display your email address or web page URL to solicit business for your consulting services.
Or maybe you have a full-length DVD for sale. You excerpt a portion of DVD and upload it to YouTube, with graphics before and after (and maybe even during) the video detailing how the full-length DVD can be ordered.
Likewise if you’re a musician with CDs to sell, an author with books to sell, an artist with paintings or other artwork to sell, or a crafts maker with various crafts and such to sell. The musician might create a music video to promote his CDs; the author might read an excerpt from her book; the artist might produce a photo slideshow of his work; and the crafts maker might upload a short video walk-through of pieces she has for sale. Make sure you include details for how the additional product can be ordered, and let your placement on YouTube do the promotion for you.
As an example, Charles Smith Pottery offers a series of instructional videos on YouTube that demonstrate how to use a pottery wheel. Interested viewers can then access the accompanying website (detailed both in the video and in the video’s description) to learn more and to see what products the company has for sale.
Another example is t he San Francisco Electric Tour Company, which offers Segway tours of the San Francisco Bay Area. The company created an entertaining demo video about the Segway and their tours and then uploaded the video to YouTube. Interested people can view the video and then contact the firm to schedule a tour. It’s quite synergistic.
Then there’s John Pullum, a hypnotist and mind reader who provides corporate entertainment and motivational speeches. He’s uploaded videos of several of his appearances to YouTube; they’re both entertaining and informational regarding the services that he has to offer. Any viewer who likes what they see can then go to his website to learn more or to arrange an engagement.
The key is to create a video that people actually want to watch. That means something informative, useful, or entertaining. It can’t be a straight commercial, because people don’t like to watch commercials. It has to provide value to the viewer.
Once you get the viewer hooked, you lead him back to your website where your goods or services are for sale. It’s a two-step process watch the video, then go to the website to learn more or buy something. If your video is interesting enough, viewers will make the trip to your website to close the deal.
Shooting for YouTube: Proper Production Values
When you’re producing a video for YouTube, keep in mind that the video will be viewed in a small (320 x 240 pixel) window on the viewer’s computer monitor. It won’t be viewed on a high-definition widescreen TV; it won’t even be viewed on the full computer screen. No, your video has to be compelling when viewed in that small YouTube video window.
What this means is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on sophisticated video values. Skip the HDTV recording, skip the widescreen aspect ratio, may be even skip the ultra-expensive lights and makeup. Make your video good enough to be viewed at a 320 x 240 size, and don’t waste your money on production values that won’t be visible to the viewer.
In addition, keep that size in mind when deciding what to shoot. Don’t bother with crowd scenes; all those people will be too tiny to see in the small video window. Instead, compose an image that has maximum impact in the small window. What works best, more often than not, is a large subject against a simple background. That might be nothing more than the speaker full-frame against a light background; it’s a big image with good contrast, which is what you want.
You should, however, spend a few bucks for onscreen graphics. You want a title for your video, appropriate subtitles throughout, and your company’s phone number and website URL. These graphics need to look professional, and be large enough to read in the YouTube video window.
You can shoot a video for YouTube using professional video equipment, a consumer-level video camcorder (shooting in digital video format, of course), or even a computer webcam. Many video blogs are shot with simple webcams, just a person in front of the camera, talking about the subject at hand. You’ll probably want to transfer the video to a computer for editing, of course; any consumer-level video editing program, such as Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie, should do the trick.
As to length, YouTube lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long. If you have a longer video say, a half-hour seminar on tape you can simply edit it into several shorter segments. In fact, shorter segments are generally better; I recommend keeping your videos to three minutes or less. Anything longer and you’ll start to bore people and lose viewers. Even if you have a 10-minute video, you might want to edit it into three or four 2- or 3-minute segments. YouTube viewers have a short attention span, and you need to compensate for this.
Uploading Your Videos to YouTube
The hardest part about uploading a video to YouTube is creating and editing the video. The uploading process itself is so simple a CEO can do it.
First, however, you have to make sure that your video file meets YouTube’s requirements, which are as follows:
- MPEG-4 format video with either the DivX or XviD codecs
- MP3 format audio
- 320[ts]240 resolution
- Frame rate of 30 frames per second (FPS)
- Length of 10 minutes or less
- File size of 100MB or less
If you shot your video with a digital camcorder or computer webcam, it’s probably in the right format to begin with, so there’s no conversion necessary. Your only concern is to stay within the length and file size limits.
To upload the video, click the Upload Videos link at the top right-hand corner of any YouTube page. This displays the Video Upload page; you now have a little paperwork to do.
First, enter a title for your video. Make sure it’s descriptive without being overly long. Next, enter a description for the video; this can and should be longer and more complete. (And don’t forget to include your phone number and website address in the description.)
Then enter one or more tags for the video, separating each tag by a space. Tags are keywords people use when searching; use as many tags as necessary to capture all possible search words and attract as many potential viewers as possible.
Now pull down the Video Category list and select a category for the video. Click the Upload a Video button when you’re ready to proceed.
Step two of the video upload process is where you specify the file you want to upload. Click the Browse button to open the Select File to Upload dialog box; navigate to and select the file you want and then click Open. This loads the filename into the File box on the Video Upload page.
With all of that done, the final step is to click the Upload Video button. YouTube finds the video on your hard disk and starts uploading it; the progress is shown on the Video Upload page. Once uploaded, take note of the video’s URL (to link to from your site and use in promotional material) and the embed code (to embed the video in your own website). Your video is now ready for viewing!
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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.
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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.
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Three Pronged Google’s Jaggar Update was the scariest of all Google Updates so far, it’s the longest period update and affected almost all websites specially those on competitive keyword or phrase. Majority of SEOs and Website Owners dislike this update, since they had to change their strategies.
I personally like google not only because of its volume and popularity but for its continual efforts to improve and maintain search engine quality of results. In search, google always comes with new and innovative ideas. Here is a latest updates that google does recently, it’s another step toward better results.
Here is a list of elements in Jaggar Update:
- Reciprocal Link Exchange (RLE) Abuse
- CSS SPAM
- Blog SPAM
- Redirect Domains or Pages
- Pirate Sites or Matter
- Inbound Links (IBL) Repetition
- Outbound Link (OBL) Irrelevancy
- Top Domain PR Weight
- Keyword Stuffing in Alt Tags
- Hidden Text
Reciprocal Link Exchange (RLE) Abuse: is cross linking between two or more websites for building link popularity, it doesn’t matter the websites are relevant or not, they are cross linked just to improve their PG. NO more cross linking now, jaggar update has really treated RLE website badly. Bulk link renting, link farming, FFA linking and irrelevant linking are also the type of RLE abuse.
Solution: Stop RLE link building strategy. Build one way linking through partnership programs, directories relevant category listings and relevant industry portal registrations.
CSS SPAM: is that CSS, which is created for misleading search bots and visitors, playing with CSS and deceiving search engine bots is NO more worth at least with google bot, webmaster use CSS to invisible text with website visitors, invisible text or near to invisible text by any mean is SPAM.
Solution: Use CSS for better formatting not to deceive search engine bots.
Blog SPAM: is that blog which is not updated and created specially to promote website.
Solution: Make blogs and maintain them regularly, try to use your blogs as guideline or help to your business rather just promotions.
Redirect Domains or Pages: are those domains or pages which are used to forward visitors somewhere else it could be in same domain or different domain.
Solution: Don’t redirect your domain or pages unless you have restructured or updated your website. Use 301 a permanent director, if you have restructured or updated your website.
Pirate Sites or Matter: are copied sites or matter from somewhere without permission, it could be from same domain as well then it will be mirror copy that’s also SPAM.
Solution: If you can’t manage to keep fresh content then there are free content distribution websites available which provide fresh content free of cost, use content from there.
Inbound Links (IBL) Repetition: IB links are links pointing the same domain pages. If one page is linked with too many times by different positions and with different or multiple keyword or phrase, it’s considered to be SPAM practice.
Solution: One or two multiple links (one could be text based and another could be image based link) are OK to same page, don’t go beyond the limit.
Outbound Links (OBL) Irrelevancy: is linking with irrelevant websites or categories, it’s wastage of time and money to be linked with irrelevant websites.
Solution: Find relevant category related to your website and ask for placements both paid and free directories and portals available with plenty of categories.
Top Domain PR Weight: is the index or default page exists in root directory, when you type www.mydomain.com this page comes to show its content, google has started considering this page’s PR only, rest of the pages got very less consideration to google now.
Solution: Register your top domain in directories, portals to get maximum incoming links to your top domain and keep fresh content at top domain as well.
Keyword Stuffing in Alt Tags: is considered SPAM, this is a technique in which keyword or phrases are put in atl tags without considering that they are relevant or not.
Solution: Put relevant keyword or phrase in alt tags if keyword or phrase doesn’t suite then don’t try to put it forcefully.
Hidden Text: is invisible text that is kept to feed search engine rather to show website visitors. In this technique text color is kept same as back ground color, as a result text cannot be seen by human visitors.
Solution: Don’t use this technique, if you have applied it, remove it as soon as possible. Instead of keeping your text hidden, make everything visible to visitor and try to use keyword or phrase in caption, heading, sub-heading, bold or linked.
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
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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.
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It is seen many times that website rankings get stuck and some times started going down. Is it due to lack of SEO knowledge? Weak link popularity? Poor content? Pathetic coding? There must be a way to get things going. In this article you’ll come to know what makes your web ranking stuck and how to improve your rankings!
Search Engine Minimization!
The term search engine optimization is not valid specially after Google’s Florida update, in that update google introduced a new term called “Over Optimization” and it’s very well known today. Well there is no measurement tool to analyze either the practice is optimized or over optimized that’s why SEO should go for search engine minimization, what is search engine minimization? Search engine minimization is a technique that deals with basics and its primary purpose is to get the website listed in top 500 website rather looking directly for top 5 placements.
Focus on the Competitors!
When your website rankings stuck and you are short of ideas, what to do? How to move forward? The very first thing you should do is to not worry, but don’t get relax it’s time to keep an eye on your competitors, observe the top 5 competitors and the top 5 above of your rankings that means 10 for each keyword, look at them and try to find out either there is something missing what you are doing or your competitors are very intelligent enough. Your competitors can make you learn the best lesson sometimes.
There are certain areas in search engine optimization which should be improved with time, if you don’t take care of those elements, your website will be out-dated and miss-fit in front of your competitors, since all your competitors are fighting for top positions.
On Going Content Improvisation
Look at the content either your website has fresh original content with balanced keyword density, content is still king, never ignore the value of quality content, you can compare keyword density balance with your competitors.
Active Link Building Campaign
The more inbound qualified links your website has the better position it will get, never let your link building campaign die, link popularity is like oxygen for life, try to find out more relevant and qualified incoming links, permanent and one way links will be obviously preferable than temporary reciprocal links.
Optimized, Validated and Error Free Coding
Your website code is one of the very important element of your search engine ranking, you must check your website code for quality assurance periodically, sometimes everything looks fine but you never know your competitors, they might be doing something very special which you might have ignored.
Some other Tips to Get an Extra Edge over Your Competitors
- Increase domain registered period for at least next five years
- Keep the same address at website and at domain registration
- Apply proper formation technique such as H1, H2, Bold, Bullets…
- Don’t miss Alt tags
- Don’t miss title tags for image base links
- Proper directory and file structuring
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It’s a two part article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about mistakes you should avoid in link building, how to categorized your database and create your own master database for link building campaign.
Few Lessons from Your Competitors!
If somehow you are finished with your database and you require more incoming links for your website, you shouldn’t worry about it as far as your competitors are there to guide you. You can easily see how many links are pointing to your competitors from search engines. Google doesn’t show the real figures but you can take it from Yahoo and Msn, now what you have to do is to find out where exactly your competitors are linked and start putting your competitors’ incoming links to your master database with all required fields.
After you finished with all your competitors, don’t waste your time start submitting your website.
Important Aspect of Incoming Links:
Incoming links are evaluated on certain criteria and weight, there are four major aspect of incoming links on the basis of them each links are considered more valuable.
- Link Age
- Link Text Relevancy
- Link Page Relevancy
- Link Domain Relevancy
1. Link Age
Link age is one of the factors your website or webpage is going to be tested through, the older the links are the better they will be reliable.
2. Link Text Relevancy
One relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, you better guess how important is the link text relevancy, here relevant link text means the title of the link and very next paragraph after title.
3. Link Page Relevancy
Page relevancy is also very important factor, your pointed links should be placed on the relevant pages. The overall page content should be relevant with your page.
4. Link Domain Relevancy
Link domain relevancy is something that can’t be ignore, if your pointed incoming links are placed on the relevant domain and relevant page they will be highly appreciated and have more weight than your competitors.
Incoming Link Types and Styles:
Link type and style are very important, you should try to maximize their effectives and values in favor of your link building campaign, each link has different value and weight to search engine, and I’ve defined almost all types of incoming links with their styles. I’ve distributed links in five groups with descending order.
1. Title Anchor Links: Title anchor links are area or content focus incoming links on any particular page
2. Title Hyper Links: Title hyper links are those links where the actual linking area is title
3. Description Text Links: Description text links are those links where the actual linking area is description
4. URL Links: URL links are those links where the actual linking area is their website addresses or URLs
5. Static Links: Static links are placed on plain SEO friendly pages that have plain URLs, they are considered very important links
6. Dynamic Links: Dynamic links are placed on dynamically generated pages and considered to be less important
7. One Way Links: One way links can be either dynamic or static but they will be only incoming links, they won’t be linked with your domain
8. Reciprocal Links: Reciprocal links can be either dynamic or static but they will be linked with your domain, if you don’t put their links to your website, they won’t put your link at their website
9. Vote/Rank Base Links: These types of links vary with their reputation, people gives votes or ranks to links and on the basis of those votes/ranks their link position vary
10. Lifetime Links: Lifetime links are those links which will be active for life time as long as the domain is there
11. Periodical Links: Periodical links are those links which will be active for certain period (such as 1 year or 2 years) after that they will be no more, usually these types of links are paid links
12. Same Window Open Links: Same window open links are those links which open in the same window or they refresh themselves
13. Blank Window Open Link: Blank window open links are those links which bring you to blank windows and open the pointed links on them
All these link types and styles have different meanings and values to search engines, being an SEO you should try to utilize your best available resource and try to focus on the right direction rather getting just links coming to your page.
I hope this article will help you in developing a successful link building campaign, since I’ve tried to explain almost all types of links with their values and weight according to search engine.
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There are just 12 simple steps to follow basic Search Engine Optimization for SEO starters, expertise and in-depth knowledge of these steps can take you to the expert level as well, this article has just an overview of the basic SEO.
- Research and select appropriate keywords to target
- Effective page Title Tags
- Effective and optimized META Description Tag
- Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
- Integrate search keywords within Website copy
- Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible
- Effective Alt Image attributes
- Effective and optimized text navigation menus
- Link titles and anchor link effectively
- Set up search engine friendly site architecture
- Creation of search engine friendly sitemap
- Robots.txt and its META tag
1. Research and select appropriate keywords to target
- Collect the business terms
- Check keywords relevancy with industry and conversion
- Check competition
- Check count on word tracker and Overture
- Make estimate traffic chart using Google Adwords
- Distribution of keywords on the basis of their weight
2. Effective page Title Tags
Title tag is the most important tag, almost all search engines evaluate webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page as well, and search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.
3. Effective and optimized META Description Tag
Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.
4. Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
Keywords tag has lost its value, search engines keep getting smarter, they have set their own criterion to identify web pages with their relevancies, they take each word as “keyword phrase” that is presented at webpage and they keep those words in priorities with their densities. There is no harm in utilizing this tag for marginally better results.
5. Integrate search keywords within Website copy
Since a very early stage of search engine revolution, search engines were able to evaluate website with relevance to their content, though they were not very efficient and intelligent like they are these days, but they were able to read the content at website and content still plays very important role in top ranking positions.
6. Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible
Usually a website is designed keeping few elements in mind such as user friendliness, attractive design, beautiful flash animation, easy navigation, client specific or functionality oriented. In fact all these elements are very useful and important but what benefit is your web site if it has no visitors, search engine compatible websites are designed and developed keeping search engine policies and algorithms in mind, which enable websites to be easily crawled and understood by search engines.
7. Effective Alt Image attributes
Alternate text commonly referred to as Alt, is a text description that can be added to the HTML tag that displays an image. The ALT text is displayed by the browser when the cursor is moved over the picture. If pictures are turned off in the browser, the Alt text is automatically displayed instead.
8. Effective and optimized text navigation menus
Navigation is a very important part of any website; it gives guidelines to website visitors and directs them to relevant part of the website.
9. Link titles and anchor link effectively
Link title is displayed text by the browser when cursor is moved over the link.
An Anchor link is a little different from a hyperlink, a hyperlink directs to a complete webpage but anchor link directs to a specific area of a particular webpage, it may be at same page or different page or even at different domain.
10. Set up search engine friendly site architecture
A Website’s information architecture can greatly affect on its search engine visibility. Specific page elements, such as the site navigation scheme, and design technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, can interfere with search engines ability to spider a site.
11. Creation of search engine friendly sitemap
A site map helps visitors navigate large, complicated sites by showing its entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram of the Web site for Web designers.
12. Robots.txt and its META tag
Robots.txt is a file placed on your server to guide the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.
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It’s a two parts article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about “What is SEO Copy Writing? Why Content is Still King? How to Balance Copy Writing Keeping Users and Search Engines in Mind? Who should I Write for Search Engines OR for Visitors? And Well Targeted Written Content is more valuable”
How to Develop a Successful SEO Copy Writing Strategy
There are five very important elements to develop a successful SEO copy writing strategy, a certain amount of content at website need to be updated periodically.
- Research the best keywords for your business / services
- Analyze the content of your competitors
- Logical distribution of selected keywords through out website
- Writing for those selected keywords
- On going fresh content
All these elements are very important and need healthy amount of time, there can’t be a standard because each strategy is unique and different. The more you study the better you’ll be able to produce.
Dos and Don’ts of Writing
When it comes to write for your website, you need to have your target audience in mind rather to facilitate search engines, respect your site visitors and educate them about your offered products or services. There is a list of dos and don’ts of writing for search engine.
Dos
- Try to use keywords in upper top 2000 characters including code
- Start paragraph with keywords
- Start sentence with keywords
- Use keywords in headings and sub headings
- Use keywords in bullets or as numbered
- Keep textual alternate navigation at bottom
- Have a breadcrumb at complete website and try to include keywords in it wherever possible
Don’ts
- Avoid using keywords at images or pictures
- Avoid using keywords in deep paragraph, since deeper use of keywords will have lesser value to search engines
- Avoid using pronoun for replacing important keywords, since pronouns won’t be of any value to search engines
- Don’t have link title for text based links
- Avoid keeping duplicate content on different pages of same website
- Never use copied OR pirated content at your website
SEO Copy Writing Techniques
- Search the relevant words (keywords) which are searched the most : Finding right keywords which correctly represent your company/products/services as well as they should be searched
- Try to focus on the words (keywords) when writing : Whenever write, keep focusing on keywords, try to repeat keywords but keeping the visitors in mind, your copy should be written for your visitors
- Unique/Original Content : Writing original and unique content is one of the most important aspect of your successful copywriting, the moment you upload your content try to make your content crawled by search engines, so that you can have the copy rights of that content, since search engines will take that content original which they crawled first, if your original content is copied and search engines have crawled that copied content first they may find your content as pirated, that’s why it’s very important to make your content authorized and copy right by search engines
- Fresh Content : Search engines give a lot of value to fresh content, since more frequently updates make your website more attractive to site visitors
- Focused and Relevant : Focused and relevant content is highly appreciated by search engines comparatively to those sites which are scatter or not focused
- Selectable and Visible Content : Search engines can’t read text over images, they also dislike hidden text, they can easily read selectable and visible content at website
- Proper Formatting Techniques : Search engines are able to recognize text formatting such as headings, sub headings, emphasis words, slogans, tag line, paragraph title, picture title…
- Short and Compiled : Short and complied content is always liked by site visitors as well as search engines, but as far as the quality of the content is concern it should not be compromised on the length of the content
- Keyword Utilization : Keywords should be used in “Title, Description, Headings, Sub-Headings, Bullets, Numbered, Bold, Italic, Underline, Hyperlinks, Anchor links, Alt Attributes, Link Titles, Table Names, Picture Names, File Names, Directories Names”
- Keywords Specific/Topical Writing Technique : SEO Friendly copying writing is a topical writing where keywords should be treated as topics, and writer should write about that topic, so that search engines can get attracted towards that topic / keywords
Now you know what it takes to write for website, you might be one step closer to improve your search engine rankings. You just need to follow the all mentioned guidelines that are listed in this article, if you have any question or want to have a personal training, write to me at Wahid@wahidqazi.com
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