Thursday, June 30, 2011

Effective Way of Getting More Likes on your Facebook Fan Page

What most of the topmost brands have one thing in common? Well, they all have a Facebook fan page which they use for more online visibility. It is something that not just the most famous brand names use but indeed every next online business uses and also gets benefitted in brand recognition, popularity, and better sales and improved SEO.

A well-designed and well-presented Facebook fan page can really do wonders. It works as a special place where you can ask your customers to talk about your products, services, special offers, promotions and lot more. One can even sell from Facebook directly. It works like a small local site where you can find all your customers easily at once.

It plays a really important role in your SEO as Facebook is one of the highest ranking PR sites of the world which has billions of users from across the world and Google even ranks the Facebook pages and sometimes they even rank the highest. When you think that your targeted audiences are searching the internet they are actually busy hanging out at the Facebook pages and watching YouTube videos, so you can surely depend on your Facebook fan page for SEO purpose.

And most online businesses are already there with their commercial Facebook page. But to use these pages effectively, you need lot many people to like your page and once you have lot many likes, your success appears almost confirmed.

Here are some trustworthy ways to increase the number of likes

- Ask people to Like by Inviting them

The best way to get lot many people like your page is to invite them to do that.  So place your invitation right on your site or blog and suggest your visitors right out there to like your page. Tell them that liking your page will prove very beneficial for them. They will be getting various wonderful tips and tricks and technical know-how from your Facebook page just by liking it.

- Place a Widget in the Sidebar
It is one of the most important things to do. At times you may have a page or two dealing with similar topic as that of your blog. When you have such pages don’t try hiding them, place a widget in your sidebar. This way your loyal readers, who love reading your stuffs can be converted into your loyal fans on your Facebook fan page. This will also make it easy for you to communicate with your fans and inform them about all the new products and services.

- Maintain Uniqueness
Always remember that your Facebook Fan Page is not meant for spamming so don’t ever try doing anything that will be considered SPAM. Try to share informative stuff from the page. Avail your fans with useful tips and advice; updates related to latest technologies or new topics, and other attractive things, this will bring in greater number of likes to your page. You can even try offering free stuffs like some e-books, other downloadable stuffs like software, music, video, etc.

- Use your own friends base
Well, this is a thing which anyone can do, i.e. using your personal friends’ base. Your page always has a “Suggest to Friends” option using which you can invite all your friends who are linked to you through your personal profile. Most people forget about this wonderful option. It is indeed a sure-shot way of getting fans, now your friends won’t be letting you down!

- Ask your friends to join in their friends
So you have asked your friends and they have already joined you up now ask them to bring in all their friends to join you up. Your friends have their own networks and most of them might love to join you if they find your niche suitable to their choices, this way you will get a huge network of people liking your fan page!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

5 Tried and Tested Ways to Select Your Keywords

You have a website or your own or you are the owner of a nice little blog and want the site or the blog to be optimized; however, you have not yet spent much of your time in undergoing search engine optimization and whatever time you have spent in doing a little bit of SEO hasn’t got any result yet. Any idea why is it so? What should you do? What should you start up with?

Well, if taken as whole, SEO appears an impossible job, something unachievable without putting in a lot of efforts but if you break it up into smaller chunks and deal with small amount of it at a time, you’ll surely be able to get it done successfully.

Choosing right keywords is the best thing to start up with. Have you tried choosing your keywords ever? How often have you done that? What works like a catch 22 in your keyword choosing is that you expect people to search the products using a certain set of words whereas they use some other set of words to do the search and you fail to understand why your business isn’t doing well.

So instead of trying out your own hit and trial method of selecting the search terms and wasting a lot of money, time, and energy in optimizing for those words and terms, it is better to do the selection using some of the tried and trusted ways.

Here are five simple but effective ways to select your keywords:-

1. Make  sure that you own all your Brand Terms
The very first thing you need to check out is the ranking of your brand name. So simply search out your brand name and see where you rank.

Sometimes some other people rank higher than you even when you are searching your brand name, if this is happening with you, the very first thing you need to do is own all your brand terms and rank higher than your competitors and others.

The latest search engine algorithms enable you to own the entire first result page for your brand name. So along with you brand name try owning all the other terms that are associated with the brand name, such as product names pertaining to the specific brand, etc.

2. Get proper suggestions for the search terms
Getting suggestions for the search terms will help you get hold of the most appropriate search terms and phrases. The best way to get the suggestion is by using special tools meant for this. These tools allow you to simply add your URL, possible keywords along with the URLs of your competitors, on the basis of which they then get you the most relevant suggestions.

But while you are adding the possible keywords related to your brand or business, don’t forget to include all possible head terms, mid terms, and of course the long tail keywords.

3. Include search terms to defeat your competitors
Have you searched what keywords your competitors are using? Check them out on your keyword suggestion tool. Then check out your list of keywords against your competitors. If you are missing out some of the most searched after search terms that your competitors are using, don’t forget to include them.

4. Keep your keyword list short and  sweet
Don’t clutter up your list of keywords for a single SEO campaign. For every SEO campaign you undergo, keep your list short and sweet with only 10 keywords which will include your brand name and other industry specific search terms.

Pick up only the relevant terms and not the irrelevant ones. Also check, if you are already ranking well for any of the keywords because it is always better to start up where you are already doing well.

Do some research and know how well a particular search term is doing in the monthly global search and how much competition it has. If a certain keyword has low competition and about 1,000 monthly searches, it can surely be used. But before using it finally, simply think how people would search the terms on the internet. And if they land up on your site using those words how will they react. Will you be able to convert them into your customers?

5. Work out a Plan to improve your ranking for the chosen keywords
So now you have chosen a set of competitive and most searched after keywords, this is the point where your actual task starts. Now you will have to build your SEO campaign using these words. If you’ll do this task with a planning, it will surely work well.

But one very important thing that some people under estimate has to be taken into consideration, it is keyword monitoring. You can not simply overlook the search terms and the fact how they are working. So once your campaign has got started, monitor whether the words you have chosen are actually working?  Are people really searching for those terms? Have the terms proved useful for you? And so on.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Best SEO Strategies for Mobile Web

Mobile search is becoming more popular compared to desktop search; Eric Schmidt of Google confirmed his observation recently. Since people have started using mobile phones as their primary equipment for searching the internet, it is important for the online companies to undergo SEO of the mobile version of their sites so that the search engines and their mobile consumers can easily find out the mobile sites.

According to a report, it is found that in the last six months more than 60% of consumers used their mobile devices to search the brands before purchasing them and at the same time about 49% of mobile searchers made purchases through their mobile phones. So, it is important for the businesses to include their mobile sites in the marketing strategies for driving in a significant amount of traffic resulting in the increase in the revenue.

Here are some useful SEO strategies that can be implemented for ensuring a brand’s maximum mobile visibility:

Follow an All Device Pervasive Approach
Several criteria are taken into account by the search engines while making out the page rank. These criteria include – how is the over all performance of the site, its usability, how much time it takes in downloading, and its screen rendering. This is why a properly optimized mobile site will have much higher search engine page rank compared to the one which is slightly modified for the smaller screen as the optimized website promises much better functionality without compromising the key content.

For instance, if you try transcoding a webpage using a cookie cutter template, you will also miss out a lot of key content making it incomplete which will decrease its proper usability and will also result in broken pages and navigational difficulty which will then lead to a bad user experience and lowering of the page rank. So optimize your site in such a way that it best suits all screen types and all mobile devices for better user experience.

Using the Traditional SEO Strategies for the Mobile Platform
Mobile SEO isn’t very different from web SEO, thus some of the common SEO strategies that are used for web should also be used for mobile sites. These include-

Headlines and Text must include Appropriate Keywords:
One important thing that every marketer should know is that the consumers using the mobile platform for making internet searches undergo far more focused and work related searches, whereas desktop computer users have quite a different approach. So it is really essential to be to the point to reach these searchers. Placing proper keywords in the headline and text does it all and for this you need to understand the consumer behavior and on the basis of that include key search terms into your page content helping the search engines spot you out easily.

Maintaining the Relevancy and Correctness of the Page Titles and Descriptions:
Your Page Title and Page Description are the most crucial factors in deciding where your pages will be shown in the results and it works the same for the mobile browsers. So it become essential to include the key search terms in the Page title and description, as it increases the chances of your site’s better ranking.

Outbound Links:
Though there is less space on the mobile screen compared to a computer screen, it is still advisable to include outbound links. You may think why sending your visitors away but if your outbound links are built around proper partner sites, they will work in getting you identified as a quality mobile site. So get associated with some trusted brands.

Use Standard Coding:
Since mobiles follow a really wide variety of operating systems, it becomes essential to use valid HTML coding. Browsers use the HTML code for determining the relevancy of the search. Therefore, if there are any errors in the coding or if an invalid coding is used, your page gets broken which results in lower ranking. So in order to ensure better user experience and better ranking, it is very important to work in accordance with the standards while building your site.

Include Linking & Go for Digital Newsletters
Though most of the email marketing is read from the desktop yet above 20% of it is read from the mobile phones, thus it is important for the online companies to capture these users by supporting all the incoming links that come from the digital newsletters and other such promotional stuffs. So one needs to test all such links – whether they are working or not. Email newsletters, and social media sharing lead to a faster link share but if the links are not tested and they don’t work, you’ll surely lose a lot of traffic accessing your site through the mobile devices.

As the rate at which the Smartphone usage and the technical advancement in the field of mobile is increasing, the users searching the internet through the mobile phones will also increase more in the near future, so the online company owners should not neglect the traffic from the mobile users and should undergo better SEO practices for their mobile sites.