Do you have a Facebook page? I sincerely hope so, because facebook is an excellent instrument for luring customers to your website.
Here’s a few tips to get you started.
It’s past time to start considering your business Facebook page as basically a “secondary business website”. It sincerely has become that powerful. Facebook has a lot of features that can help you connect to people through your friends. Using the messaging system, the events calendar, and the news feeds you can expose your brand to a significant swath of of Facebooks 500 million users.
Here are some practical steps you can take to improve your facebook presence and drive traffic to your business.
1. Take some time to choose a good name for your page. Once you decide commit to it. Changing your facebook name is not unlike changing your business phone number. It makes it harder on your friends to refer people to your page.
A good name will stick with people and make it more likely that they’ll pass it on to their friends. Don’t stuff the name with generic keywords. It won’t work. Your name will be long, hard to remember, and spammy looking and even if you can get people to “like” you they’ll be more likely to hide your all-important news feed.
A good name should be specific. Facebook hates being played. They can be mean. If they think your page is a liability they’ll disable your ability to update your page making it a lot of work to contact your fans and killing any marketing benefit you were hoping to get from your page.
Don’t get greedy.
Use your company name in the page title and don’t be misleading.
2. Take the time to do it right. Fill out the info tab.
At this point I need to address a common misconception about Facebook. Don’t expect a significant SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, benefit from you’re facebook profile. Facebook obfuscates external links so Google won’t pass page rank to them or, in some cases, can’t see them at all. Facebook works very hard to keep link spammers off their site, and this is a very effective way to do that. The real marketing strength of Facebook isn’t in it’s SEO potential. It’s real power is it’s popularity. Facebook has become so large that it’s become an outstanding networking tool. Once you’re comfortable using Facebook you can use it to drive actual business to your firm!
There are ways get some benefit to your website search presence, though, if you know what you’re doing. An important factor in your search engine ranking is the “domain authority” of the site’s linking to you. Facebook uses something called a “nofollow tag” on their links to keep Google from passing “page rank” to your site, Google DOES follow these links and can pass the linking site’s “domain authority” to you. This is why getting a link on Wikipedia can benefit your website even though their links use the same “nofollow” attribute.
It won’t hurt to include keywords and links on the info page. Include all your important information:
- Links to your own sites or other relevant resources
- City, state, and address, which are important fields for local searches
- Company overview, mission, and products, which become relevant when folks do product searches
Make sure to include your phone number and links to your “buy now” pages. Remember… over time this page will bring in prospects. Make it easy for your Facebook visitors to contact you or, better yet, buy!
3. Use status updates to post links to your website and other relevant sites. When it comes to getting Google to notice your facebook presence this is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Your status posts are sent out as news updates to your fans and are posted on their pages, too.
There are two kinds of status links. It’s important that you use the right kind of link to get a benefit.
Raw URL: Facebook will auto-link the text directly to the URL when you post the raw URL in the text of a status update. This is the best way to do it because the link goes straight to your site. Try to use an actual URL wherever possible.
Attach Link: Attach links seem really cool because they automatically pull down all kinds of cool information from the page you’re linking to, including a thumbnail image. This method gives you the option of changing the anchor text of the link. In this case you should avoid using attach links. These links don’t go straight to your website. Instead they pass through a facebook URL. The search engines won’t be able to follow them properly.
4. Get fans to comment and like content in your stream to strengthen intra-Facebook linking.
Facebook links a fan’s name back to their Facebook profile page when they comment or like content in your Facebook page’s stream. When these comments and likes are indexed, Google will see more links between your page and your page’s fans and will view this as a stronger bond.
Facebook can play a central role in improving the emergence of your firm and your website because it allows your page to be visible to Facebook’s immense user base. Sure, it will take a little time. You’ll be forced to do a little creative planning and you’ll need to actually build and update it, but when all is said and done your online visibility will increase.
About The Author
Brian O’Connell is the President and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading edge website design companies dedicated exclusively to accounting website design. His company at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, bookkeeping, and tax preparation firms.
Leaving Comments on Blogs for Website Promotion
Sunday, July 10th, 2011In beginner-guides on Internet marketing or blog promotion, you’ll often see the suggestion to find other blogs in your niche and leave comments there. How can this strategy, usually called blog-commenting, help your own website? Is it a good way to increase traffic? Read on to find out.
How Blog-Commenting Can Help You
Commenting on blogs can be beneficial to your site in two ways. First of all, each comment you leave will contain a link to your website (you get to specify the URL when you enter the comment). This means that each comment you leave equals one backlinkto your website. That’s great for search engine optimization. Another advantage is that you’ll be getting those backlinks from many different places, online (different IP adresses, different geographical locations, different domains etc.). This diversity is one of the things that search engines pay attention to.
The other benefit of blog commenting has nothing to do with SEO: People might click on the link to go check out your site. People might simply be intrigued by your comment and want to see what other stuff you’ve written.. You could almost say that you’ll be “stealing” a bit of traffic from the blogs where you’ve left your comments. Obviously, this only comes into play if you leave interesting comments that get people curious about your site.
If a blog uses ComLuv (aka CommentLuv), you’ll even get a link to your latest post, including the post title, displayed with your comment. Especially if you’ve chosen a spectacular or provocative title, this will increase the amount of people clicking through to check out an article.
In summary, leaving comments on blogs can help your Internet marketing campaign by creating backlinks and creating a small traffic stream from click-throughs.
Where Blog-Commenting is Limited
Regrettably, blog commenting also has some drawbacks as a link-building method. As you may know, almost all comments on blogs are tagged “nofollow”, meaning that Google doesn’t properly credit or “follow” those links. This means that having links from blog’s comments sections won’t increase your website’s rank in Google. Although there is much debate about whether Google really discounts nofollow-links or not, it’s safe to say that you’ll get substantially less or even no benefit from nofollow-links. In fact, even a blog’s comments are dofollow, the links you’ll be getting will still be relatively, low-value. Google “sees” that the links are coming from a comments section and that means that they were created by the site owners themselves. This is obviously less valuable than a link created by a third party. Secondly, your comment will usually be one among many, so any pagerank that gets passed will be split up and distributed to perhaps dozens of sites.
And that’s also a problem concerning the human visitors: Comments on blogs that get many visitors are usually “in good company”, meaning there will be dozens or hundreds of other comments. This decreases the chances of people paying attention to your comment and wanting to click through to your own site. On the other hand, less popular blogs won’t have many comments, but neither will they have many visitors. So, once again, you won’t get a lot of click-throughs.
Also take into account that your comment must be intriguing and relevant. If all you write is “Awesome post!” or “I agree. Nice blog!” or something like that, your comment will probably be filtered out as spam. And even if it’s not, no human visitor will become interested in what else you have to say and click on your link. In other words: Good blog commenting takes a lot of time. For it to work, you have to read the blog articles and then write something original about them in the comments. Of course, if you’re visiting blogs because you’re interested in them, this isn’t a problem at all, but if you’re trying to use blog-commenting purely as a website marketing strategy, you’ll soon find that building a few backlinks this way can swallow up several hours of your time.
In summary, the links you get through leaving comments tend to be of low value both in terms of search engines and human visitors..
Blog Commenting Mistakes
As already indicated, you should certainly avoid leaving short, worthless comments. Even if comments like this pass the spam filter (which they usually don’t), they are still a waste of your time and effort. They are also a bit of a slap in the face of the blog author, who tries to create great content and get readers interested.
There are many Internet marketing products that automate blog commenting or even do high-volume blog comment spamming. Of course, you should absolutely steer clear of any software like that, for all the reasons stated above.
Whatever you do, never rely on blog comments alone as your SEO method. While it can be a useful thing to do as part of a larger link-building strategy, it doesn’t have enough oomph to stand up on it’s own.
So, does blog commenting make sense as an online marketing strategy? In my opinion: No. Ultimately, there are many ways to build backlinks that get you better results in less time. Leave genuine comments on blogs if you truly want to interact with the blog owner and the community. That’s the original and still the best purpose of comments sections.
Tags: blog commenting, internet marketing strategy, website promotion
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