As I research companies’ marketing strategies and campaigns, I review how effective they are with their SEO and SEM and make recommendations for improvement. When I recommend Facebook, some question, “Do I really need a Facebook business profile?”

We’ll get into some quick stats in a minute to let you decide. Because what you’re likely to conclude is, it isn’t whether you need a Facebook business profile, but how should you go about interacting with prospects and customers there. See, many businesses who claim Facebook isn’t doing anything for them are businesses who engage on Facebook in ways that don’t work.

For example, do you act the same way when you go to a live sports event as you would a play? If you were to stand up and cheer for your favorite character or harass the villain in a play, how do you think the other people in the theatre would react to you? Do you think you are creating appropriate opportunities for the audience to want to get to know you? What if you then wanted to sell that same group of people something? Do you think they would buy? Not likely, right?

Facebook Stats

Today, Facebook gets more traffic than Google and Yahoo. According to comScore, they overtook these two search engine behemoths back in August 2010, and not just for Google.com and Yahoo.com, but for all of the sites they own combined.

There are over 600 million people on Facebook and more than half sign on EVERY day.

People spend more time on Facebook than any other website in the world.

So can you leave Facebook out of your marketing strategies? The obvious answer is, “no”.

However, a very important question to ask to make sure you get the most out of your marketing strategies and tactics on Facebook is, “What do people use Facebook for?”

86% – See what my friends are up to
79% – Sent a message to someone
70% – Posted/updated my profile
65% – Looked at profiles of people I didn’t know
59% – Searched for someone that I used to know
55% – Wrote on someone’s profile page
53% – Sent a friend/connection request
51% – Read a blog or a journal
47% – Listened to music
40% – Watched a video

As a business owner or manager, what do you see is glaringly absent? (Queue the Jeopardy music …)

And the answer is … BUY SOMETHING

Businesses on Facebook

So does this mean Facebook is a waste of time for businesses? Let’s take a look at some of the brands that are active on Facebook:

Nike
HP
Notre Dame
Mayo Clinic

I could go on with a lengthy list. There are B2B and B2C companies active on Facebook. There are sports companies, colleges, computer companies, and hospitals. The point is, Facebook isn’t just for one type of business; it has opportunities for all businesses to provide a social presence and connect with prospects and customers. You just need to use it as the audience likes to interact in this environment.

You Need Leads and Prospects Before You Get Customers

People go to Google to search for products and services much like using the phone book. People go to Facebook to hang out and communicate with the people they know. This distinction is very important to know so you develop appropriate marketing strategies using Facebook. How and why people (aka prospects and customers) use Facebook should alter your approach to getting their attention and engaging them in conversation.

Like with any quality marketing campaign, you shouldn’t get started without answering the following key questions:

1. Who are you targeting?
2. Where are they hanging out?
3. Why are they there?
4. What interests do they have?
5. How do you get their attention in a positive way?

If you don’t take the time to answer these questions, you will likely launch a very broad campaign. And broad doesn’t mean you’re casting a wider net to catch more clients; it means you’re casting a wider net with wider holes that they will slip through because you are throwing out a very bland message that doesn’t address their biggest problem or want. So why should they care?

If after reading this you have questions about your Facebook business profile, leave a comment below or contact me so I can help you connect with your target audience on Facebook and get them to know, like, and trust you .. and ultimately buy from you.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

While some people may still be in a funk over their team not making it to the big game, others are buzzing in anticipation about the outcome on Sunday February 5th when Super Bowl XLVI will pit the New England Patriots against the New York Giants in Indianapolis, IN. Plus, expectations are high as usual for entertaining commercials. While the Super bowl and its much-publicized commercials are far from new, the Super Bowl committee’s inclusion of social media for fan interaction is.

The Super Bowl’s Social Media Command Center

With expectations of 100,000 to 150,000 fans showing up in Indy for this annual football game, there are going to be questions about pre-game, game day, and post game lodging, eating and events, especially considering many people may be traveling to the area for the first time. Plus, since the stadium can only hold 70,000 lucky fans, there are going to be many other football fanatics who want to share in the experience while they’re tailgating or at a local sports bar even if it is only through Facebook, Twitter or other top social media sites like the new Google +.

Instead of sitting on the sidelines in this social interaction, the Super Bowl committee chose to establish a 2,800-square foot commend center in Indianapolis earlier this week. They have a team of 50 people engaging football fans in conversation and creating content to promote events around the game and the local Hoosier hospitality. All fans have to do is go to the main Super Bowl XLVI site to get involved.

Sports Fan Love Their Social Media

If you’ve ever been on Facebook or Twitter during game day, you’ve probably seen a number of posts from your circle of friends cheering on their team to victory virtually. Sports fans are some of the most intense social media participants. Want proof?

1. In 2011, the only event to receive more Facebook posting than the Packers winning Super Bowl XLV was the death of Osama Bin Laden.
2. There were 9,420 tweets per second about the Denver Bronco quarterback Tim Tebow’s 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime to beat the Pittsburg Steelers outpacing other notable news like the Royal Wedding and the passing of Steve Jobs.

What does the Super Bowl and social media have to do with your business?

Although your business may have nothing to do with football or the Super Bowl, there are some lessons you can learn here about the importance and use of social media in your marketing plan.

First, regardless of your industry, your prime prospects and customers are spending time on social media sites engaging in conversation sometimes for hours a day. If you aren’t engaging them there, your competition likely is. Who will your prospects and customers remember when they are researching products and services and making buying decisions? Get involved. Engage in conversation. Get them to know, like and trust you. Get them to buy.

Second, if your target market is already engaging in conversations about a specific topic or event, don’t take a passive role; take charge. Create an event around the scenario. Provide quality content. Ask engaging questions. Include bonus offers. Your prospects and customers will become fans. And fans are loyal, vocal supports.

If you are a social media rookie and want to compete at the championship level with SEO and SEM, don’t let fear and frustration hinder your success. Social media is integral to growing your visibility, credibility and profitability.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

Most SEO experts will tell you that having quality external links is probably the best thing you can do to help your branding site rank well with the search engines. But exactly what are external links and how do you need to manage them?

External links are hyperlinks that point from one domain (the source) to another external domain (the target). They can be links coming from external websites back to your site or they can be links going from your website out to another website.

Here are three things you must consider when you set forth on a strategy of increasing your number of external links.

1. Understand how search engines and human visitors determine the quality of external links.

While you have greater control for creating outbound external links than inbound links, both strategies require you to focus on certain types of sites if you want to benefit from the best SEO practices, and if you want to create the best experience for the prospects and customers visiting your site. Here are the characteristics the search engines use to consider the quality of the external link (and in many cases, so do your site visitors):

• The popularity of the linking page
• The relevancy of the content between the pages
• The trustworthiness of the linking domain
• The number of domains linking to the target page
• The anchor text used in the link
• The amount of variations that the source domain uses as anchor text to the target domain
• The ownership relationship between the two domains

2. Embed your links into keyword-rich anchor text.

When linking from your site, when possible, embed the hyperlink link in anchor text that matches the target keyword phrase for the page. For example, we are writing a blog about external links so we would embed the link into the phrase “external links” like I did at the beginning of this post instead of anchoring it to a phrase like “click here” or some other non-targeted keyword phrase.

3. Check your external links occasionally.

The Internet is a dynamic, virtual marketplace. Sites come and go; page URLs change. The links you create today may lead to sites that no longer exist or have pages with new URLs tomorrow. As a result, you may have a number of links on your site that don’t provide any value to your prospects and customers visiting your site. Plus, linking to dead domains or to pages that no longer exist can hurt the usability of your site and its SEO. Here is a Text Link Checker Tool you can use to check if your external links are still connected to active pages so you can make adjustments accordingly.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

This is the second half of our two part series on website indexing strategies to improve your website ranking. In part 1, I discussed the importance of updating your website content regularly, using the metadata fields in the backend of your site, and pinging the search engines to let them know when you have new content to share.

If you aren’t familiar with website indexing, it is what search engines must do with the significant amount of content on the Internet to be able to return fast, relevant responses when people submit queries using their services. There are specific strategies you must follow if you want to rank well for specific searches. Ranking well often results in more targeted traffic. And who doesn’t want more traffic to their website, right?

Here are strategies 4 through 7.

4. Link back from posts on social media and bookmarking site.

Some of the most popular social media and bookmarking sites include Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Digg. Posting your site, your blog posts and your articles to these social sites with links back to your branding site gets your page indexed quickly with the search engines since they are considered reputable sources. This helps direct the search engine spiders to come crawl your page for new and relevant content, plus it creates an additional pathway for potential customers hanging out at these sites to click thru to your site.

5. Submit articles.

If you’re blogging or writing articles for a company newsletter, repurpose your content and submit it out to the top article directories. The two key words here are repurpose and top. The search engines like unique content and they don’t like many of the article farms that popped over the last few years. Plus, the article directories don’t like promotional materials.

If you’ve written a piece that you have posted on your blog or in other online locations, consider making some changes to it so the title and some of the body content is different. Plus, if you’ve ended the piece with a promotional pitch, you’ll need to re-write it so the article is educational instead of sales-oriented.

When submitting your articles to directories, it’s best to focus on some of the top directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles with links in your author bio pointing back to your branding site and links from the social media and bookmarking sites pointing to your articles than to spin your article out hundreds of article farms.

6. Create internal links on your website.

When you’re writing content for your web pages, blog posts and other content on your site, included links to other internal pages on your site. For example with my SmallBizMedia.tv business, we’re an SEO and SEM company helping small and medium sized-businesses connect with their target customers online, improving their visibility, credibility, and profitability. By linking the words SEO and SEM in this post to our internal pages we’ve alerted the search engines about new content and we’ve linked from two of our keywords, helping improve our ranking for them, as well. This is a helpful strategy as you launch new pages. Plus, this helps direct interested readers to the pages where they can access additional information and services of interest.

7. Comment on other top blogs in your niche.

Every niche has blogs that command attention with the target audience. This is where many of your prospects and customers spend time. By posting insightful comments on their posts, you show your unique perspective on a topic of interest with target readers and you create a link back to your branding site for the search engine spiders and readers to follow. This improves your website indexing resulting in an improvement for your website ranking.

If you have questions and want help, you can leave a comment below or contact us at SmallBizMedia.tv.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

Website indexing is what search engines must do with the significant amount of content on the Internet to be able to return fast, relevant responses when people submit queries using their services. They constantly scrub online content to rank it according to the relevance for keyword searches. Proper indexing strategies help your content – web pages, articles, blog posts, etc… – rank well. Ranking well often results in more targeted traffic. And who doesn’t want more traffic to their website?

Due to the length of the total post, I’m going to split these seven methods into two posts. Here are the first three strategies to help you rank high on search engines when your target customers are looking for the services and products you provide.

1. Update your website content regularly.

Search engines love websites with fresh content. If they notice that your website is going stale, their spiders will spend less time crawling your site. This doesn’t mean you should regularly change the static pages of your site. This will confuse your prospects and customers. A site that ranks well because it feeds the search engine algorithms, but converts poorly because its content is confusing won’t help a business grow. However, you can update the following:

• add new pages if you expand your product and service offerings
• add blog posts regularly
• update your keywords in your meta descriptions, title tags, header tags, and web page content

2. Use your metadata fields.

In the backend of your website, you have fields for entering in meta keywords and meta descriptions. Meta keywords are the keywords that the website has loaded into the back end in the “meta keywords” or “keywords” field. These are not visible to a website visitor, but are to the search engines. Although Google states they don’t use the meta keywords since so many people stuffed them with words that weren’t relevant to the page or the site, the other search engines like Yahoo and Bing do use them.

All search engines, Google included, currently review the meta description field. The meta descriptions are descriptions websites have loaded into the back end in the “meta description” or “description” field. Like meta keywords, these are not visible to a website visitor when they are viewing your site, but they are visible to the search engines and to people when you share your web pages on other social media sites. Well-written meta descriptions should be 160 characters (including spaces) or less, include a page-relevant keyword phrase, and give people a good understanding about the content on the page.

So use your meta keywords and meta descriptions, but use them wisely. Many sites don’t use these fields, use them only on their Home page, or use the same set of meta keywords and the same meta description on all pages. And if you use them, don’t stuff them. There have been some debated examples of Google negatively ranking sites that engage in keyword stuffing.

3. Ping search engines.

While the search engines have their strategies for going out and looking for relevant content, it’s best if you help them notice you. You can do this be creating an XML site map or by using a ping service like Ping-O-Matic.

An XML sitemap is different from the HTML sitemaps you have seen on websites. XML sitemaps tell the search engines the pages you have on your website and which pages you want them to crawl. Yes, in some cases, you may have pages you don’t want them to pay attention to, but that is another post. If you are using WordPress, you can upload a free plug-in. Otherwise, have a professional web developer assist you with setting this up. Your XML site map will tell the major search engines when you have new content like we discussed in the first point of this post.

Pining services were used by bloggers as a way to notify the search engines when they loaded a new post. You can use these pinging services, too. Ping-O-Matic is one of the top services. Even if you don’t have a blog (although you should if you want to rank well for your target keywords), you can use the service. Simply load your Home page URL or other page that you’ve recently updated into the field where they ask for your blog URL.

In the second post of this series we will discuss the other 4 website indexing strategies to help improve your website ranking. We’ll discuss linking from social media and bookmark sites, article submissions, internal linking, and posting comments on other top blogs within your niche.

If you have questions and want SEO help, you can leave a comment below or contact me at SmallBizMedia.tv.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide