• Choose the right title for the page
  

Go back to the time when you created a profile for yourself in Facebook. Was there any doubt while adding your name there? Most probably you gave your real name with surname and maybe even a tagline that best described you as a person. So doesn’t the same rule apply to your business profile too? Definitely. Providing the actual name of your company as the Facebook page title is important for 2 reasons: first, it obviously is your identity, and second, just a random or common name that sounds fishy can make people hide your updates. Also, Facebook has started disabling the updates of pages with common names recently.

To create a brand and maintain it, it is crucial to have an impressive title for your Facebook page as well as to retain it. Changing your name once you establish your account in Facebook and have received followers is a bad idea. It can not only create confusions among your followers and those who ‘liked’ your page but also lose the credibility that you created with a lot of hard work.

• Make your Facebook URL reflect your business

One of the innovations that Facebook added recently was the ability to choose a vanity URL for your page in it. Looking at the growing popularity of Facebook, there is no doubt that your URL for Facebook is as important as the URL for your own website. Hence, it is important that you select one that is connected to your business and not something that gives no clue to the visitor as to who you are and what you do. Hence, if you are selling wedding gowns, make sure that wedding gowns appear somewhere in your URL.

At the same time, you need to ensure that the URL is not generic term, for Facebook has published a black list of generic usernames that the pages cannot register with. And once you create it you cannot change the name, hence it is important that you choose a name that you really want and one that you would like your fans to remember you by.

• Add keyword-rich text to the About text box
  

Facebook page consists an “About” box which gives you the opportunity to add information about yourself for your visitors while adding keyword-rich text that can invite search engines as well. It is important that you place this text as close to the top of the page as possible. “About” page is ideal to add as much information about your business for that, as the “Wall” restrains the users from adding large amount of text.

To add information in the “About” box, you need to click the “Write something about [your page]” that is given under the space for profile picture. Here also you have a limit of 250 characters, hence pick out the best words that can describe your business and company.

• Add more keywords in the “Info” tab

Besides the “About” page, Facebook gives you an “info” tab where you need to fill the metadata about the page. This gives you yet another place to add your major keywords and links that belong to your website. Each business category would have its own fields where you need to enter the corresponding details such as address, city and state, company overview and mission, all of which provide you scope to add valuable advertising for your business.

Keywords can be added to your updates as well. However, this has to be done carefully for you cannot add keywords at random without any meaning. Just as in your web pages, make your content informative and interesting and add keywords in a logical way.

• Add photos, videos, events and discussion forums

You’d know this if you already have an account in Facebook. Pictures do say a lot more than words as the saying goes, and hence adding photos of your office, products or services and events can create credibility in the minds of your visitors. Also, you could add keyword-rich descriptions for these photos and videos. And a discussion forum would of course let you invite direct interest from your customers and give you feedback as well regarding your services. And since Facebook makes all these content you add indexable by search engines, these would definitely give you advantage in the search engines.

• Post links to the Facebook page from your website

With the intention of promoting businesses, Facebook has created a new widget, the Fan Box widget for Facebook pages, which includes the link to your Facebook page. By adding this to your web pages, you could actually invite your website visitors to become a “Fan” or “Like” your page directly from your website, without making them leave the site. The same advantage goes for the “Find us on Facebook” badge that you could add anywhere on your website home page and get a link directly to your Facebook page.

• Increase the links to your Facebook page through intra-bound links

When the numbers of fans increase for your Facebook page, it adds to the intra-bound links as the profile pages of these fans would have the link of your page in them. Once your business is more established and you get around 1000 fans in Facebook, the internal links to your page in Facebook would also increase. Similarly, by getting your fans to comment and like your updates, you could add to the reciprocal linking within Facebook. Since the links in your fans’ pages are also indexed it leads to the overall popularity of your page in search engines and among the users.

With more and more changes appearing in the online marketing of businesses, your success depends on catching up with the latest trends and changing your marketing trends accordingly, before your competitors do the same. With social networking as one of these latest trends, to have your own account in Facebook and optimising it to make it friendly for search engines and visitors becomes a priority, especially now that Facebook itself has taken the initiative to promote businesses through its Pages.

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Till now, Google Maps guided us to find the way outdoors with the usual blue dot that indicates where you are right now. But now Google has partnered with “some of the largest retailers, airports and transit stations in United States and Japan” and helps you find where you are and what you are looking for in these places with its new Google Maps 6.0. Google Maps for Android now “enables you to figure out where you are and see where you might want to go when you’re indoors”. In other words, it helps you determine which floor you are on and where the place you are looking for is. Android users can also use other available features such as finding out restaurants and stores in the vicinity of a few metres.

With Google Maps 6.0, when you enter these selected places and open the Google Maps, their detailed floor plans would appear. As you move around, the interface would automatically get updated to show the location where you are right now. Google has added a few airports and stores for the time being; however, in course of time it would be adding more locations around the United States and Japan. Currently, this facility is for Android devices including mobile phones and tablets. IPhone users might have to wait for some more time.

The help centre for Google Maps for Android has the complete list of indoor locations in the United States and Japan where you could avail this facility for now. In fact, if you have a business of your own and wish to add the floor plan of your store in the Maps, you could do that as well through the help centre. Very soon, your customers could find you through Google Maps and thus reach you faster and easier.

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For past few years, search has meant Google for quite a lot of people, with Bing and Yahoo just closely following. The latest news anyway is that the alliance that Bing and Yahoo have formed has increased their market share, which might turn out to be a bad news for Google. Whether you are optimising for Google, Bing or Yahoo, the truth remains that you need to put some efforts in bringing your website to gain better positions in their search results. Here are, therefore, some of the common principles that search engines follow in ranking websites:

Improved Click through Rate (CTR) and reduced bounce rate

Your website’s CTR, in other words, the number of times it is clicked in the search divided the number of times it is displayed, depends on where exactly the site is placed in the search engines. This indicates that it is not enough to just bring the website to the front pages but you need to make the visitors click on it. The number of times visitors click and the number of times they return to your site make a difference here. In fact, even the time frame that visitors take to return to the site is taken into account, which means that you cannot get away with just a better position in the search engine, but you need to make the visitors come to you and convince them to return to you some way or the other.

Logically following the CTR is the bounce rate, which represents the number of visitors who reach your website and bounce away to other sites almost immediately as they couldn’t find what they required. Today, search engines, especially Bing, has started measuring the bounce rate, if the visitor returns to the result pages within less than minute, it doesn’t really look good for your site as it would mean the site couldn’t provide what the visitor wanted. On the other hand, if the visitor could stay in the site for a longer duration the search engine would consider the site compelling.

Schema.org

A protocol supported by Google, Bing and Yahoo, Schema.org helps you to mark your content according to their type so that the search engines can recognise them as they are such as images, product descriptions, locations, reviews, etc. Schema also helps you in defining the semantic relationships between the different components. Schema is still not known to boost your rankings; however, being promoted by search engines to reduce their own costs and efforts, we can safely assume that they are definitely going to add extra weight to those websites that use the protocol.

Original and quality content

This is perhaps the most common and oft-repeated requisite in any SEO related article or blog post, that a website requires quality content to boost its ranking. And there is no surprise in that. If you want visitors to come to your site and spend their time there, you definitely have to offer them what they need. A good website needs information relevant to its users that would help them do transactions with you. And original and quality content does not mean some random words, keywords, obviously, but well thought out ideas logically and sensibly put together in sentences that have no errors.

User friendliness

A user friendly website is not one that has a lot of images and interaction; in fact, it is far away from that. User friendliness is a combination of different factors, the content mentioned above being one of them. The right images in the right resolution, informative videos, faster loading time, easier navigation are all part of the combined effort of making a website user friendly. It is easy to put one or two of these factors in the site, but users tend to stay back in a website when all these elements are put together to make the site attractive and relevant and helpful. Besides, you need to know the right balance in which you need to include these items. For example, if you add too many videos, the site would load slower. At the same time, you cannot completely avoid the graphics to make the website totally empty of colours and graphics. In other words, it is balance that you need here.

Social media

Of course, there is no website now without a link to its social networking profile. In fact, adding the necessary buttons for social media like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is not just necessary but not adding it can take away points from you in the eyes of search engines. In fact, Bing has admitted that it uses the data from Twitter and Facebook in its algorithms to check the website’s popularity among the users. You can make use of this fact is by adding these buttons at the strategic locations of your web pages.

Relevant URL, keywords and meta descriptions

The links and URLs you choose for your website play a pivotal role in making users click them. Choosing a random link that doesn’t seem to have any relation to the business you do or the keywords you are focussing can make the users ignore your site even if it is in the front pages of the result pages. Therefore, keyword-rich links could divert visitors to you who might end up converting once you convince them to buy from you. The same rule applies for the keywords and meta descriptions you choose for the site.

It is important that you realise how important the keywords you choose are. For this you might have to do a detailed research on the keywords you have chosen as well as keywords of your competitors. If your website is not optimised for the keywords related to your business, no matter how much you try to make the website attractive, visitors might not come to you and convert. To ensure that your website is optimised adequately for the keywords, make sure you do a thorough analysis and optimise the website for those keywords. This also means that you should not stuff the website with the keywords and thus give an impression of spamming.

The descriptions that you provide for the website to accompany the URL in the search pages is as important as the positions they occupy there. Most visitors would be reading your titles and descriptions before they choose a website to click. Providing relevant details that are short and at the same time to the point can make a favourable impression on the users and they would click your website.

Good crawlability and structure

To ensure that your website is crawled and indexed by the search engine robots you need to make the site easily crawlable. Adding an HTML sitemap could help you in this as you can include all the necessary web pages that you wish to be indexed. Similarly, each time you add a new page, make sure that you add the page in sitemap. Remember that unless you add the pages in the sitemap they will not be indexed by the search engines.

Good internal navigation is also important for the search engines to go through all the important and optimised pages in the website. Also, this is important for the visitors also that they can move from one page to another and find the page they want quite easily. Hence, if you have added external links in your web page, do make sure that the search engines do not leave your site through them. Add proper alt tags for images so that search engines could read them.

To make your website a favourite for your targeted audience the list above is not entirely sufficient. However, you could concentrate on them as the first step in optimising the website so that you start improving your position in the result pages. After all, these preliminary steps would help you in establishing your position in search engines first before you starting moving up to reach the front pages.

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When you come to think of it, there is hardly anything surprising about this ranking. Google has succeeded in keeping its top-most position for years now. While the other search engines vie for the second position, appearing in the top pages of Google undoubtedly is most beneficial for online businesses.

Yet another finding from Experian® Hitwise® was regarding the length of the search words. While single keywords still top the charts with 26.26 percent, there has been an increase of 3 percent in the use of key phrases with an average of five to eight words when compared to that of July 2011. An interesting point to note is that key phrases that come up to four words have found a slight decline in use of 1 percent during the said duration.

For websites aiming for a local market this is good news, at least in the United States. And for those websites with single keywords, this is bad news as it just means they have to strengthen up their marketing strategies to fight with thousands of other websites with the same keyword. However, when it comes to visitors with real intention to make a purchase, the trend is moving to longer key phrases that bring them faster results.

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Google Panda Algorithm

It has been some time since Google Panda made its appearance and scared almost 90% of the website owners with its new ranking. Bringing down some of the giants in the online community Panda had spread the terror around making all webmasters apprehensive and nervous. Now when the storm seemed to settle down comes the next one that brings the news that Google is bringing even more new changes to its algorithms in 2011 and number is said to be 550. High time we get prepared and how?

As professionals of search engine optimisation maybe we should revise on some of the facts related to Google Panda that had leashed the storm. This way, at least we would be ready to face yet another attack and maybe even come out of it in flying colours. So here are a few factors that Panda considered and that helped some websites escape without harm:

Links from authority websites

Panda, in case you remember, was released to make quite a few websites, which ran crazily behind back links just to convince Google of their immense “popularity”, realize that adding their links to several link farms and stuffing their content with keywords will not bring their ranks up in Google neither will it bring them to the front positions in the search engines. Hence, we can safely surmise that link farms and spam links could make your ranking considerably low. Finding your URL in some of the quality and authority websites, on the other hand, can make people trust you and come to you with an open and positive mind.

And if you think that adding your link to a 100 websites is more important than adding to 10 websites of quality you are wrong. When it comes to linking, quality definitely takes priority over quantity. And these include avoiding some of the sub standard article directories as well that accepts content of any type and quality.

Relevant and useful content

When it comes to SEO, content has always been ‘king’, and there was a time when websites were filled with content that was often irrelevant and filled with keywords meaninglessly. Google panda is all about taking out all those websites that clung to such low quality content. Today what matters is relevance and that includes not only the relevance of what you are talking about but also the relevance of your keywords to the overall purpose and content of the website.

In other words, there is no point in just stuffing the website with any content. What you add should be valuable and useful for the readers to take their next action for which they visited your website in the first place. Content for the sake of content is an absolute no, no. No relevance, no ranking either. And this means your site has to be free from such space fillers including too many advertisements and banners, decorative pictures, etc.

Social media and networking

The very fact that Google itself launched its own social networking tool Google+ indicates the extent of importance it gives to connecting with people through social media. Besides the obvious benefits of connecting to your customers and letting them in the loop about your business, social networking brings you the much wanted love of Google as well. Perhaps now, more than ever. FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and right now Google+ – all makes you the favourite of all major search engines, Google definitely.

Video optimisation

That’s right. Get a video camera, go ahead and record what you sell, products or services. For the very fact the video centric websites like YouTube and MetaCafe escaped from the slap of the Panda shows the significance Google places on videos. Also, you would be killing two birds with one stone by adding video in such websites for you get a bonus advantage of convincing your customers of the quality of your service by letting them watch what you do.

That sums up some of the basic requirements for an online business in today’s SEO scenario. While you would find even more changes coming up in the next few months, you only gain by preparing your site for the existing needs of the search engines like Google. Remember, as the American baseball player Brooks Robinson said, “If you’re not practicing, somebody else is, somewhere, and he’ll be ready to take your job.”

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