Submit2Please Your Reliable Link Building Partner

Your business Facebook page is becoming increasingly important. As SEO strategies change to reflect the organic nature of real world recommendations and one way links, the ability to use your business Facebook page as a home page has developed into an invaluable tool. Here are the top 10 techniques you can use for getting your Facebook page noticed – and so increasing traffic through your business’ home pages:

1: Choose a good name for your Facebook homepage. Once you’ve selected a name that accurately reflects your business (and contains either key words or phrases that you are optimising for), stick with it. Use the same naming convention as you do with all the files on your business site.

2: Use your Username. Facebook allows you to add a “vanity” username to the end of your URL – as in facebook.com/MySite. While the page names on Facebook are subject to stringent SEO blacklisting, the usernames aren’t.

3: About “About”: the “About” box on your business Facebook page is number one in your CSS. Keyword rich prose should go here.

4: Fill up your Info Tab. Postcodes and area codes will give you an advantage in local SEO. Company Overview fields can be used to promote targeted products.

5: Create content boxes. Facebook runs a function called “Static FBML”, which allows you to insert blocks of static text and tabs onto your Facebook business page. This is another way to get around Facebook’s static text restrictions – though you should remember that Google will view each FBML box as a separate web page.

6: Link using your status. What’s on your mind? Getting better page rankings. How do you do it? By putting URLs into your status, or by using the Facebook “Attach Link” feature. Attach Link gives you better keyword density and looks nice and professional. Self pasting URLs is less attractive on the eye but open links without a Facebook logo.

7: Never leave a blank field. Search engines abhor blanks, so make sure all your image descriptions and event fields are filled. You can also encourage an ongoing discussion forum on your Facebook page, which is a guaranteed way of generating constant fresh content around your optimised ideas.

8: Find Us on Facebook. It isn’t the number one social bookmarking site in the world for nothing. Use the Find us on Facebook button on all of your other sites and you’ll generate traffic with quality links.

9: Court your Fans. Facebook Fans are your number one source of high quality links on your business Facebook page.

10: Use comments and “like” instances to strengthen the quality of links to your on page content.

Here’s a simple illustration of the importance of niche link building: imagine a high street full of shoe shops. You can’t see inside them and they all have a similar looking sign over the door, that just says “shoe shop”. How are you going to choose which one to use?

Niche link building aims to create a presence for your website in the market that you sell into – and more importantly, into specific areas of that market. Remember: when you started your business you didn’t just open a shoe shop and start trading. You looked to see what was out there already and found a niche that hadn’t been so well exploited – sports shoes, maybe, or formal dress shoes. Building niche links on the web is the same thing – defining your market so you have a better chance of creating a higher profile:

1: Find a social media site or community that does what you do. To keep our shoe shop metaphor going: if you sell shoes, find a social media forum for people that love shoes. Job done.

2: Get talking. Niche linking is about more than just fishing for compliments. Get involved in niche forums, that talk about the kinds of things you do or sell, and your opinions will start to generate some feedback.
3: Directory submission isn’t dead. Niche directories still have a useful part to play in getting more inbound links for your site. Do your research and submit with care.

4: Keep it real. Get involved in a blogging community with genuine interests in your subject area. Take your time, look around, read other people’s blogs and engage in real conversations with them. The links will follow. Hint: look for a DoFollow blogging community for your niche.

5: Offer your services to the blogosphere and guest post on a few relevant blogs. Your exposure will skyrocket as the readers of those blogs follow through to your own.

6: Get technical. If you don’t have the time or programming expertise yourself, you can always hire someone who does. When you start using the technical side of the web to enhance your chances of breaking into a niche market, you’ll end up with all sorts of extra arrows in your quiver. Having a WordPress or other hot blogging forum theme developed for your niche is an ideal way to start – fellow bloggers in your niche will use the theme and your name starts to get around as an authority.

Submitting your blogs through a blog directory increases your chances of having the two most-desired aspects of SEO kick in: increased unique visitors and a higher standing on the SERP listings. The blog directories increase the numbers of life long one way links to your sites, which give them a better SEO weighing in the eyes of the search engines.

Blog directory submission works like this: search engine web spiders crawl the directories to see whether there are blogs in there that correspond to search terms they are returning SERPs for. The spiders index the blogs according to categories that have been given them in each directory.

Never use an automated blog directory submissions service. You run a very high risk of having your blogs, press releases and articles categorised incorrectly – which means, of course, that they won’t get returned in the search engine queries for the key words, phrases and categories that you are optimising for.

You can manually submit a blog to any number of directories. This is time consuming but easy enough – so if you want to do your own blog submission you shouldn’t find it hard. The benefits of directory submissions tend to be reaped in long term strategies, though: which can suggest that having a third party do your submissions for you is a better idea.
Whether you choose to do your submissions yourself or through a third party, remember to make sure that each article gets filed under the correct categories within the directory. Having your submissions done by hand is the best way to ensure that this happens.

Find a site specific directory and you’re better represented. Make sure you also either put in the work yourself or go with a company that is able to guarantee a high acceptance ratio. Clearly the more times your articles are accepted by the directories they are submitted to, the higher your results will be. Our own average acceptance rate of 95% is due to two things: the manual submission practices we stand by (as noted above); and the fact that we choose every directory after careful testing.

Using a database of known friendly directories is an excellent way to streamline your directory submissions. Make sure you can track your submissions performance too. We offer real time tracking of current submissions as well as monthly reports showing the progress of completed submissions. If you can get a long view picture of the way your submission are working for you, you will be able to target future submissions to an even more effective level.

Tracking your social media strategy is an inviolable part of having a social media strategy in the first place. You need to be able to work out what effect your current tactics are having on your social media presence. Bear in mind that since Google came out and admitted that the top social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg) are being catered for in its search algorithms, your social media presence is becoming even more important than it used to be.

Time for the good practice brigade to start earning their spurs. Here are some top tips for social media strategy tracking:
1: Get the tools for your trade. If you don’t know how to code your own routines, or don’t have the time, then there are as many social media tracking tools out there as you could want to use. The trick lies in choosing the right one for your needs. Go free and you won’t ever “waste” money on your social media campaign: go for a pay per subscription and you’ll be much more likely to get the functions and reports you actually need.

2: If you want to get involved then you can start using APIs to track your data and to build meaningful reports about how your social media strategy is performing. A basic starting place is Google Docs – which can track and report on enough social media data to get even technophobic site owners started. If you want to go deeper you’ll have to be prepared to start writing your own scripts.

3: Use PostRank to get some meaningful insights into how your links are doing over long periods of time. PostRank is powerful enough to deliver a pretty detailed picture of your own sites’ performance in the social media world, but has less value when you start tracking competition URLs.

4: Systemise. It’s no good tracking your social media strategy when you think about it, or when you remember to do it. Build a workable routine for tracking your social media involvement and the data itself will start to make a lot more sense. Keep tabs on what you do on a weekly basis at least.

5: Go big and beautiful with an all singing all dancing tracking tool like Radian 6 or Attensity. Using the powerful functionality of the bigger pay per subscription tracking tools can really pay off in the long run.

Google recently admitted that social media activity now has a place in its algorithms. In other words, that the things people link to and like on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming more important in determining search results relevance.

Google has always aimed to have its search engine results pages reflect as much web relevance as they can. The web has become more and more entwined with the “here and now” activity of social media sites as the power of those sites to give a “real life” experience to digital users has grown.

Facebook and Twitter, as the primary exponents of social media, are to be expected to have the most effect on Google’s search rankings. Conventional wisdom claimed that Twitter, presumably with its reputation for absolute immediacy, held more currency with Google than Facebook. A study by SEOmoz, released in mid April, suggests otherwise. The most powerful social media tool in your ongoing fight to maintain a visible web presence is Facebook – and its best attribute is the share function, rather than the “like this” button.

That’s because the share function appears on more unique places within the Facebook universe – and so is visible to a wider audience. Likes are visible on your wall, and on the comment threads associated directly with your wall or the page being liked. Shares pop up on Facebook’s own featured pages too, which seems to mean that Google has given them more credence than likes.

The reasons for Google’s use of both Facebook and Twitter as SERP criteria are simple. Social media has been working like a personal search engine for a couple of years already – where the Facebook and Twitter communities have been recommending sites and pages to each other based on common interests. Google’s continued mission to reflect the preferences of the web community has led it to give what looks like epic credence to links posted on both sites – particularly, as noted, those Facebook shares.

Here’s the good news: the data in the SEOmoz study looks like it records existing best practices for online marketing, rather than advising a radical new direction for your own SEO practices. In other words – creating great content, sharing likes and shares and links on Facebook and Twitter, and creating a genuine community of like minded people, is what drives modern social media marketing anyway. The results confirm that the techniques you are already using are the right ones.

Here’s the theory behind social bookmarking as a traffic generator: people only bookmark stuff they really like, which means that each bookmark instance is a vote for the quality of your site’s content. Number one on any list of how to use social bookmarking to your advantage, then: make sure your content is in order. The layout of your page, the images, the headlines and subheadings and content, all need to be spot on if your bookmarks are to be useful.

You don’t need to stick to a single social bookmarking site to generate your links. Sign up with as many as possible and use them all. The Internet, after all, is a very big thing – so the more sites you have on side, the better your chances of sustaining a high visibility will be.

When regular social bookmarking site users browse at random they will uncover your site – so you generate a whole wedge of new unique traffic just by existing on social bookmarking sites. In addition, of course, you start to pick up targeted traffic where your bookmarks are being passed around in a niche community of bloggers.
Do a little research and you’ll find that some social networking sites leave off the no follow attribute – in other words, they become “DoFollow” sites. A DoFollow site leaves your URL link up in search engine results pages for keyword searches that match your bookmarked content. Make use of them.

The bottom line for social bookmarking is this: when people rock up at the link you have bookmarked, they’ll either approve of your content or they won’t. If they don’t, your site will never generate the exponential link feedback it would if your content was well organised and relevant. When you have ideal content then every social bookmark you leave is likely to generate tons of unique one way links as bloggers all over the world start finding your site and sending the link onto their friends, or posting it on their blogs.

Social bookmarking is easy, too, which makes it an ideal addition to your link building arsenal. All you need to get started is an Internet connection (and that great content we keep talking about!). Get out there and find as many bookmarking sites as you can and start laying a trail of links to specific blog posts within your site.

When Google released the jointly “named” Farmer/Panda update in February (the company initially asked that the word “Farmer” not be applied to the update in the press, though it has now gained popular currency), the word on the e-street was that “content farms” were in for a hard time. The idea was that Google had been looking to crack down on “shallow, low quality” content for some time, and the Farmer/Panda update was the tweak that had finally done the trick.

Sources including SEOmoz and Search Engine Land claim that as much as 12% of search results were changed once the update had been applied – making Farmer/Panda the most sweeping algorithm change in Google’s recent history. So what has caused a loss in rankings, since the update – and for whom?

Bear in mind that Google’s algorithms are necessarily kept secret, so the factors that the industry thinks have affected subsequent search rankings are borne out by statistical evidence but not by confirmation from Google itself. In the broadest terms, the “shallow, low quality” definition seems to be key in identifying sites that got hit by the update – as does the idea of “scraping”, or copying content between sites. The post-update SERP landscape featured more high places for sites that had “better” content; or who held the original versions of content that had been scraped off and pasted into other sites.

How do you tell when your own content is poor quality? Again, the industry is using benchmarks to develop a working answer. Generally speaking, Google seems now to be favouring sites that have demonstrably modern design and functionality as well as well structured content. Tellingly, advertising is also taking a hit as sites that feature less intrusive advertising score better than sites with big bars of promotions all over them.

Search engine optimisation experts have long been telling us that content is king. They mean that unique, original, well written and excellently organised content is the best way to generate everything you want from your site – better rankings, more back links and more loyal traffic. Google’s Farmer/Panda update bears the hallmarks of an algorithm change that has made the truth of this statement come a little closer. It is, apparently, no longer enough to churn out content that provides a simple framework for key words and phrases. The onus is moving towards real quality at every level: content that has no keywords or phrases, and is genuinely intended to inform.

Social media has landed right on your Google homepage thanks to its funky new “+1” feature. The +1 button, which you append to any URL that you like, allows all users of Google to see sites that other Google users have +1’d.

The +1 button works exactly like a “like” or “share” on Facebook or Twitter. It’s nominally intended (according to Google) to show you only the +1’s of other people in your own social network – so when you do a search for a ski lodge, Google tells you, then your ski-loving aunt’s favourite ski related URL will show up top with her +1 next to it.

The real value of Google +1 is evident in the next sentence on Google’s +1 page: “even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop”. In other words – if you do a local search for a coffee shop then the quantity of +1’s area coffee houses have received may well determine their eventual SERP rankings.

Have you noticed the “shared” notices that come up under some of your Google search results yet? Google is dragging information from your social network into your searching, showing you when friends or acquaintances of yours have shared a link on Facebook. The +1 is a continuation of the same theme.

Is this the start of Google moving away from links and into a more personal SERP provision? Maybe. The more individual information that Google pulls into your search results, the harder it is going to be for SEO practices to fake out the web bots. We all know that the major search engine providers and social networking locations have an inexhaustible amount of data on us – as was proved to me the other week when a friend was contacted by 12 different no win no fee lawyers after her husband was in a car accident. They’d all “seen” her status update on Facebook.

The +1 button on Google is a visible way of introducing personal page rankings, filtered through your own social groups and interest areas. Fortunately for you, good SEO practices already encourage the kind of content creation, management and marketing that should play right into the hands of the +1 initiative. Bad SEO practice will be penalised the more Google leans towards social data correlation for its SERP listings.

Keep it natural, keep it fresh – and your content will keep getting those unique links.