Facebook is second only to Google in search engine rankings, and currently has over 500 million users all over the world. And the best part of all of this? It remains a free site, and you can build a “page” for your business and it costs you nothing. Whether you business is online or offline, building a presence and “branding” it online is easier now that it’s ever been before.

Basic Pages
The first step is to actually build a page on Facebook. This is relatively easy. When you are logged into your personal account, on the left will be an icon that says “Ads and Pages.” Click it, and it will open up any other pages you already have, and take you to a page where you can click “Create Page” and do just that.

Add some photos and other pertinent information, including links to your website to your page. Just like other sites, compelling content is king. You want people to come to your Facebook page, look around, get comfortable, and interact with you by commenting or replying to other comments.

Be sure there are links to your website, and when linking to articles on your site, only show part of the article on your Facebook page. This way, they will click through to read the rest of the article and also check out your website while they are there.

Adding Fans/Friends/Likes
Though Facebook keeps changing what they are called, basically people who “like” your page are fans or friends. What this means for you is that whenever you, or anyone else, updates your page, all of your fans will see it in their News Feed. Also, whenever someone “likes” your page, all of that person’s friends see that in their News Feed, and often you’ll gain more fans that way as well.

There are other ways to gain fans as well:

• Try linking your page to other similar pages. You can do this by adding the other page to your page’s favorites, and you will see a clickable link to do that right under the profile picture on their page.
• Get influential users (i.e, somebody with hundreds or thousands of friends) to invite all of their friends to become fans of your page. Certainly not everyone will become a fan, but you will definitely see lots of growth.
• Use incentives– rewards for liking the page, or relevant contests to bring more people to your page, and ultimately your website. A simple contest with a token prize can often work wonders to spark interest.
• Add links to your Facebook page on your website, on any email newsletter or emarketing tools that you use, and also in a signature link so that everyone email you send becomes a potential fan of your Facebook page.
• Continually update the content and links on your Facebook page. It will go out in every fan’s news feed and direct more people back to your page with every post.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to move your fans to a site you control: your website or blog. But get them hooked on your Facebook updates, and that should be a no-brainer.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Build Your Facebook Page is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

E-mail and social media work great together for marketing your website.

Whenever you are researching how to start and run an Internet business, you should include research into integrating your business with social network sites. There are many ways these sites enhance your email marketing campaign and drive traffic directly to your site.

Once you get your business website going, you should also link in with sites such as the ones mentioned above. While it is true that the social sites such as Facebook and MySpace are less formal, you should still set up your page and profile with the same level of professionalism as your site.

You can use these sites to promote brand recognition and loyalty, which is the main reason why you want to stick with a more professional appearance. You want your customers to recognize you and your products.

Social networking sites give you a level of insight into your customers which has never been available before now. Not only can you get immediate feedback from them, but you can also respond just as immediately to that feedback. On these sites you have the opportunity to directly interact with them.

Once you establish a good customer base, those customers will help you spread the word via these sites. When you have a good “fan base” established, you will see how these sites drive traffic to your website and get more people to sign up to receive your emails.

Speaking of emails, remember your autoresponder tool? Your autoresponder is one of the best tools that you have available to you. Once you have driven traffic from social networking sites to your company website, they have come because they are interested in your product or service. If they choose to sign up to receive your information, they will still need to choose what they want to receive from you. Your autoresponder handles this for you.

It can send them a special welcome greeting thanking them for their interest. These greetings are no longer bland text format. Nowadays you can send them welcome videos with personally recorded messages.

You can also use networking sites for other email marketing such as press releases. These sites have newsfeeds on which you can let your customers – and any one of their friends who can see those newsfeeds – know about any new information you have coming out.

These are just a few ways that social networking sites and email marketing campaigns can work together. So don’t choose one or the other when you can both.

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

How To Make Websites Work With Social Networking Sites is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Twitter has become an important communications tool. Here are some tips to optimize your tweets.

Who would have thought? I have to admit that when Twitter was first launched, I was one of those folks who thought it was downright silly. Who cares that you’re sitting in a coffee shop texting a 140 character status report? Sheesh. Bound to disappear in a few months…

Wow, was I ever wrong. Twitter has taken the world by storm, providing communications for everything from patriots in repressed regimes to emergency information services. And, yes, you’ve still got those nerds tweeting about sipping a latte at Starbucks, too. Oh, well…

Twitter has been a natural magnet for SEOs and Internet marketing tweeple, er, people.  Twitter allows an unprecidented way for an individual or company to get immediate insight from around the world, allow you to break out of your social group (follow friends of friends, industry leaders), grow your channel of distribution and build your brand.

Here’s a list of twips, er, uh, tips to make your tweeting twouble fwee, ah, er, uh, trouble free!

• Don’t follow every conversation. It will drive you nuts. Be selective, but participate. Jump in and out of conversations.
• Incorporate “Tweet This” functionality on your landing pages to encourage, well, tweets! For WordPress blogs, check out the plugin appropriately named Tweet This.
• Ask questions. There’s no better way to get started, make friends and become known.
• Answer questions. Let others know that you are an authority. This is particularly great for companies.
• Bring attention to others, not just yourself. Keep self promotion to a minimum.
• Answer all of your direct messages (DM) and replies (@).
• Tweet brief information that is not worthy of a full blog post, but valuable information nonetheless.
• Tweet regularly, but not too often. Think value, not volume, just like with links in SEO.
• Drop links to valuable sites and information.
• Reweet good stuff. This can be really powerful and can become viral.
• When someone retweets you, thank them.
• Seek out and engage people who retweet in your industry.
• Keep your tweets to about 120 characters to allow room for retweets.
• Tweet with care. Remember, once you tweet something, it’s out there and can’t be deleted.
• Follow folks who you might want to direct message (DM). You can only DM with folks you follow back.
• Follow @spam. This is where you can report spammers by DM. @spam will follow you back.
• Be personable. Even if you are using Twitter for a company profile, make it appear there is a person there, not an autoresponder.

And, chances are you will find yourself monitoring multiple Twitter accounts. Check out the Twhirl client, my current favorite. Not only does it handle several accounts, you can set it up to auto update Ping.fm and Jaiku with your tweets.  Seesmic offers the Seesmic Desktop client, too, which now interfaces with Facebook. And, a lot of folks swear by TweetDeck. Check them out. They’re fwee, uh, FREE!

Read more SEO 101 articles in the SEO Training category of this blog.

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

SEO 101: Twitter Twips, uh, Tips for Tweeps is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

1. Don’t go into it just for the links. You’ll get shot down by the community instantly. Social media is all about conversation and creating advocates for your brand, so share and engage in the conversation. Active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences.

2. Give your visitors a voice. Social media gives consumers some control and a voice. If your site doesn’t include a way for visitors to comment on or rate your content, you’ve got some work to do. A static web site that’s one-way (the visitor can only read it) won’t cut it anymore. Interactive sites are the norm these days, so you need to join the 21st century.

3. Join in on the top social activities. These are currently watching videos and sharing photos. In addition to posting and sharing on YouTube and Flickr, consider adding video and photo sharing to your own site, if appropriate, and create videos that can be shared (see Video Optimization). Just be careful with Flickr. They are cracking down on accounts set up by companies and deleting them. They only want personal use of their service.

4. Social media is NOT a substitute for SEO or PPC. Social media optimization must be integrated into your complete marketing plan.

5. Great customer service. This is a natural outlet to social media. Visitors can leave comments or questions on your site or on other sites like Facebook and you can respond. It is essential to monitor the various social outlets, not only to provide service, but to head off any problems or complaints before they build into something difficult to manage. Among the many tools that I use are Google Alerts and Tweetscan to send me alerts for Google and Twitter mentions.

6. Lock down branding. Combining SEO, PPC and social media can be great for this. Great rankings in the organics, advertising and social presence are a dynamite combination.

7. Grab your Twitter name. Twitter is incredibly powerful for weighting in the serps so use it! Just be sure to grab your name before someone else does!

8. Link to your profile pages. Make sure visitors can find your social site pages. Make your first weighted link to your profile pages a link from your company site.

9. Treat your YouTube videos just like HTML pages. In other words, give them a title, description, tags and make sure the very first thing in the description is the URL you want folks to land on.

10. Last but not least. If you don’t know where to start, go for videos and move on from there. In addition to YouTube, videos can be distributed and shared through Metacafe.com, Yahoo Videos and scores of others. Heck, even Flickr has video now.

Keep in mind that many of the top traffic sites these days are social media sites and that Web 2.0 is really about empowering users, not promoting you. And, take note that social search is different than web search because in social search, it’s about sourcing information from trusted people as opposed to general information that is dished out by a search engine.

Once further tip – using cloud tags can give you an idea of what is generating conversations as well as alert you to trends. I use one on my own blog, but there are a ton of other WordPress tag cloud plugins available.

Until my next list of inspirations, good Internet marketing!

Social Media Tactics is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

It was magic. It was innovative. It was fun.

It had power! Thousands of musical artists and acts got their careers started with music videos and a lot of forgotten acts were rediscovered. For example, a simple weekend marathon of the old Monkees TV show resulted in the once trashed group getting together for what turned out to be the biggest summer tour of the year 1986. New records by the group, more reruns and the rebirth of a made-for-TV band followed.

But most of all, MTV was exciting!

That’s where I see social media today. Like MTV in the beginning, social media is all of the above with innovative features being rolled out right and left and the ability to connect with folks around the world 24 hours per day. It’s like magic!

But, again, most of all, it’s exciting!

And, it’s now a part of SEO, which some have also likened to magic.

Unlike MTV, which was one-way, social media is about interaction. You connect with folks who connect with other folks and everyone provides user generated content and links that help bolster your SEO, traffic and conversion goals. You do this through photo or video sharing, news and networking sites as well as blogs.

There’s the power!

And, like the young MTV viewers of the 1980s, social media users tend to be cutting edge, comfortable about innovation and technology. Using sites like YouTube, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us, etc. just comes naturally.

So how do you tie your SEO efforts into all of this excitement and power?

1. Tune in regularly. Join some of the social media sites and commit to participate every day. Yep, it’s very time consuming, but there are no shortcuts.

2. Have a hook. Like an MTV VJ, learn what is popular in each specific community and segue your content and participation in that direction.

3. Be anonymous. Just as you voted for your favorite MTV videos using different phone numbers (remember that?), don’t make it obvious that you are promoting yourself. That’s a big breach of etiquette. Promote from a different IP and account. Get your friends to help. If your office is participating, be sure they all cast their votes and submissions from home and NOT on the office IP. Too many coming from the same IP address can get you into trouble.

4. Become a groupie. Connect with influential users of the service. Later, take a look at their friends and see who else might make good connections.

5. Vote for your fave. Cast votes for good, quality content, not just yours, every chance you get and Stumble at the same time.

6. Have variety. Let’s see…rock or rap? Submit quality articles, content or videos from a variety of sources. If all you do is submit your own, you’ll be labeled as a spammer or your submission will just get killed.

7. Promote. Got a new gig? Social networks are great for introducing your blog to your network of friends.

8. Get subscriptions. We’re not talking 16 Magazine. Social news traffic is short term. What’s on the front page is gone tomorrow, so to keep some of those viewers coming back, get them to subscribe to your feeds.

9. Use Twitter! No, Flock of Seagulls hasn’t released a new album. Twitter is what you’d call a mini instant messaging system. I have to admit that when Twitter first came out, I thought it was kind of silly – 140 characters to alert your friends about what you were doing? Didn’t make a lot of sense, but it sure does now. Tie your Twitter account into your social accounts to let people follow you automatically. For instance, you can use a WordPress Twitter plugin on your blog called Twitter Updater to automatically send a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit a WordPress post. A similar web-based service, Twitterfeed, can be used as well. Facebook has a Twitter application that you can install that will feed blog entry status to your Facebook status updates. Twitter is also great for customer or visitor communication. Feel free to follow The Web Optimist on Twitter.

10. Name the band. Register your company profile on all of the social networks. Grab your company name as quickly as you can to prevent someone else from doing it and pretending to be you.

Where to go from here? Once you are established as a reputable social media user, you’ll find that connecting with the Linkerati, influential social media linkers, bloggers and journalists, will be easier. Your doors will open wider. Hey, make a video!

So, it’s an exciting time to be in social marketing and SEO. Let’s just hope social media keeps its focus on what it is and doesn’t do an MTV on us.

I miss my MTV!

Social Media & SEO: I Want My MTV! is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO