The opportunity to reach customers and prospectives doesn’t just lie in Google search, but also within social media.  Small businesses can optimize website content for Google’s standard searchers, but should also take time to do so for content they upload and publish within all social media sites, social networks, and social content sites.

Why take the time to do SEO for Facebook?  U.S. search engine rankings published in June of 2010 (a report by comScore), indicate that Facebook search is becoming a popular search tool, significantly increasing in search volume between the months of January 2010 (receiving almost 400 million searches), and June 2010, where approximately 600 million were reported.  600 million Facebook search queries amount to nearly half of the nearly 1.7 billion queries Bing receives, although both are nowhere near the volume seen by Google.

Pennsylvania businesses, it’s worth reaching out to the approximately 500 million Facebook users worldwide by means of SEO.  Facebook presents itself as an opportunity for businesses to connect searchers with their content via optimization.

But why does Facebook mean greater search visibility?

Facebook displays results when viewers search its own internal search engine, and these web results are served up by Bing, Facebook’s partner.  Both web pages, questions, and Facebook results are shown, essentially a mixed bag of results such as Facebook apps, groups, and web pages unrelated to Facebook.  Also, pages hosted by Facebook tend to rank well when searched for and then displayed in other search engines, including Yahoo and Google.  You’ll see this when you search individuals or businesses by name.

How To Optimize Your Company’s Facebook Page:  SEO for Facebook

Choose the “vanity” URL of your page wisely, and use keywords there if possible, and in the “About” box as well, when writing the page description, and all info tabs available.  It’s also a good idea to learn basic Facebook Markup Language to add custom text, links, and images that can all include your businesses relevant keywords.  FBML combined with other keyword usage are well-received by search engines and as always, are a good internet marketing practice.

No doubt you’ll also be updating your Company page’s Facebook status, adding photos, and engaging in discussions—don’t miss those opportunities to use SEO keywords when appropriate.  Creating a Fan Page presents the same SEO opportunity as a content web page.  New opportunities for SEO on Facebook are always presenting themselves.  Recently, Facebook has given visitors the opportunity to create “Questions” content, and displays those results prominently in the Facebook results.  Carefully title your Facebook Question and add interactive media (perhaps a poll), and be descriptive and interesting.

Internet Marketing and Facebook:  Facebook SEO Considerations

Consider adding the “Facebook Open Graph Protocol” to your site.  This allows you to “Like” different web pages, and can be popular if your content includes, sports teams, restaurants, movies, etc…  This is a set of meta tags you add to the source code of your website, and can influence Facebook rankings, along with the likes and dislikes your pages receive.

Consider linking your fan page from other public pages—pages from external and relevant websites.  It’s a good idea to do this in article author bios, social profiles, and other appropriate places that make sense.

If your company is on Facebook, why not take the time to reap the benefits of Facebook search?  If not, take the time to sign up, it’s easy and as Facebook promises, free.  Learn more about SEO PA and Internet Marketing for Facebook and you’ll appreciate new opportunities.

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1. Sign up for Facebook, if you haven’t already done so, or log into Facebook if you’ve got an existing account.
2. Once you’ve signed up for a personal Facebook profile, you’re then able to create other Facebook pages for organizations and groups.
3. When logged in, go to:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
4. You’ll then see a “Create New Facebook Page” box.  Choose the appropriate business category, “Brand, Product, or Organization”.  (You’ll need to check the box to certify that you’re the person authorized to create the page, as well as select the appropriate industry from the drop down menu).  Name your page as well.
5. You’re then ready to post information to this business page, including your business logo, business information, contact information, hours of operation (if you have a retail or local office), and a general description that describes your business.  (Facebook will prompt you to add details as you go along).  As you add more details about your business, you can view the changes live on the page you are creating.
6. You’ll also be able to start posting information on your “wall”, and share photo and videos, as well as upcoming events.
7. If you’d like restrictions placed on your page, go to “Edit Page” and then “Settings”.  You’ll be able to manage age and location restrictions, who’s able to post to your wall, and discussion boards, links, notes, and other applications.
8. When you’re satisfied with your page, engage would-be “fans” by clicking the “Share” or “Suggest to Friends” button on the left side of the page and sending to your Facebook friends.  Click “Like” to like your own page.
9. If at any time you’d like to access your organization’s page from your profile, click the “Account” drop down menu on the very top right and select “Manage Pages”.

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• If possible, make sure to do a 301 redirect from the “www” version of your website to non “www” version or vise-versa.
• Use a tool like Google analytics to track visitors to your Corporate Blog.
• It is very important that the posts you write target industry related news with industry keywords. Also every post must have unique and quality content. Search engine bots are very sensitive to duplicate content and if you copy something, you will face difficulty in indexing.
• It is important to do as many posts as you can. Please make at least 4 posts each month.
• Please use keywords in the title of each Blog post.
• Please try to make keyword-rich posts on your Blog. Ideal keyword density is 2-7%.
• Ensure that each post has industry related tags.
• Please categorize your post according to service or product category name. It will be great if you can use keywords in Category name.
• Please add “industry news” & “industry trends” and regularly post unique industry news.
• Add “recent posts” and “top posts” on your Blog Navigation. It will help your visitors to find other post on your Blog and increase index rate of search engines.
• Arrange the older entries into monthly archives for easy access.
• Please add a “Tag cloud” on the blog navigation.
• Provide RSS feed subscription option for visitors.
• Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog through eMail.
• Comments are a good option to interaction with Blog visitors with your company. It’s also help to build relationship with other Blogger and proposed clients.
• Write a press release announcing corporate blog and post over free press release directories.
• Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.
• Add the main website service page link on your Blog. This way your blog visitors can get to your main website and learn about your services.
• Please add Social Bookmarking links on the bottom of each Post, so that visitors can bookmark your post on there personal profiles.
• Please add a link to each post on your social media profile including FaceBook, Twitter & LinkedIn.
• Highlight your Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn profile with an image on the Blog so that visitors can follow you on these social profiles.
• Make sure there is an HTML sitemap on your Blog.
• Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.
• Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your corporate blog – Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.

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We recommend choosing a few social media outlets and fully taking advantage of them.  Popular media marketing options include:  Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Youtube, etc… You don’t have to establish your presence on every social networking site available.  It’s more effective to channel your efforts into a few, preferably those you feel most comfortable working with.  Don’t go with Youtube if you’re unfamiliar and uncomfortable in front of a video camera—it’ll come across to your viewers.  If you don’t understand Twitter, don’t use it.  You don’t want to appear as if you’re struggling with new online media.  If you choose a few media marketing campaigns and then utilize, monitor, and establish a solid presence there, you’ll have a better chance of success.

In addition to Social Media, you may wish to participate in Social Bookmarking communities to share news, websites, articles, and other information you find interesting. www.stumbleupon.com, www.delicious.com, www.google.com/bookmarks, and www.digg.com are all great resources.  When you set up a profile on a social bookmarking site, place a link in your profile leading people to your website.  If people then bookmark, link to you, or mention you, your website will receive improved page rank and increased traffic.  It’s important to remember not to “spam” or constantly promote your business, but rather make genuine contributions.

Lawyer Directories. Submitting your website link to a directory is great for rankings.  Directories are not the same as search engines, but rather lists of sites that are sorted by category and subcategory.  Both www.dmoz.com and dir.yahoo.com are important directories, and although it may take a while to get listed on these websites, their authority makes it worth the wait.  Submitting your website to lawyer directories directs traffic to your website and also adds credibility to your law firm.  We recommend submitting to the many free lawyer directories available online.

Lawyer directory: www.avvo.com Avvo allows visitors to search for the best lawyer in the “worlds largest legal directory” by region.  Have your clients rate you!

Another excellent legal directory: www.superlawyers.com “Super Lawyers magazine names attorneys in each state who received the highest point totals, as chosen by their peers and through the independent research. Rising Stars names the state’s top up-and-coming attorneys.”

Is your website SEO friendly?  Here’s our Checklist for Making Lawyer Websites Popular With Search Engines.

Read the next blog post on Lawyer SEO/Internet Marketing Strategies…

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• No set up is required, what you need is a Gmail Account
• Google Buzz is faster than any other social media applications
• Google Buzz auto generate your social network

• Google Buzz puts replies & updates in your Gmail Account. Unlike to other static messages Buzz message are live conversations you can reply from here directly. Here comment appears in real time.
• Sharing experience is pretty interesting with integration of images and videos
• You can share with your network in the way you want, publicly or privately. You can control whom you want to send update in the network.

When we are talking about sharing, network etc Google Buzz seems pretty interesting but here is one point which make me think. Today we are living in marketing age where people trying to increase there network for business purpose what role will buzz play in that case. For them update in email inbox may be more annoying. Let’s say a person having 1000 friends in the network. Just imagine if from them 100 people share something what will be the situation of email inbox then? You are going to get hundred of messages which may not useful for your business.  I think Google Buzz have following disadvantage:

• Biggest disadvantage of Google buzz is Google profile. In Google profile worst part is we can not change its URL it will automatically taken as http://www.google.com/profiles/username Or one suggestion http://www.google.com/profiles/123456789 (some random number). This is not user friendly URL.
• Can provide hacker a clue to hack your account
• People may not ready to mix social and business contacts

Finally, Its a new social Media platform which  will allow us to manage social connection and emails under one roof with improved features. However, the question is “Are people still want to join another new Social Media platform where they already have good success on there existing Social media platform?”.

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Google Buzz is actually a social networking tool provided by Google with a Gmail account. It gives users the power to share recent updates, photos, videos with other Gmail users. Google launched Buzz in two phases together:

• Gmail Account (Official Announcement at Gmail Blog)
• Google Mobile Application (official Announcement at Google Mobile Blog )

First Google launched BUZZ with Gmail accounts.  It automatically follows the contact present in your chat list or more specifically it could be said this application automatically follows  the friends whom you are in frequent contact with from your friends list. Google said it is integrating with existing social networks, and you can share directly to twitter from BUZZ now. You can make your post both public and private. Google also provides access separately from gmail, and anyone can login to Google Buzz from http://www.google.com/buzz.

For those who want to remove Google Buzz from their Gmail Account, Google provide a separate option for it from the Gmail account setting tab.
No doubt it is a very smart and timely approach from Google, Twitter etc. to provide both your professional contacts and social contacts together!

Gmail is one of most popular email services these days, and has a large number of users. Google already owns a popular social networking platform Orkut. The main advantage of using Google Buzz, is that people do not need to visit ant other website and log in there. They now can do public chat or micro bloging directly from there Gmail account.

Now the question of month is: Can Google compete with other social networking sites like facebook? Is this a real Twitter killer or a threat to Facebook? What I personally think is that it is an attempt by Google to keep its users from bothering to try another social network like Facebook or Twitter, because now they can get everything together under one account. Google may be successful, but one question arises: Are you ready to handle your professional and social network together? For me it is a little bit difficult – let’s see what you people think!

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Click the link to watch:  SEO Internet Strategies for 2010

Sue and I discuss 5 hot Internet Marketing trends you can expect to see in 2010:  Universal Search, Google Caffeine, Social Media, Video Phones, and the new FTC changes.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the webinar, email us at sue.mccrossin@boomtownig.com or erica.ronchetti@boomtownig.com.

Our next webinar will discuss Google Analytics!

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Many types of businesses are beginning to see real benefits from social marketing.  Social sites are growing.  Take a look at these impressive statistics from http://www.quantcast.com/ which show the top five social sites.

You will notice that there are millions of people actively using these networks. If all these people, who incidentally are probably your target demographic, are active members of a social network, it makes good sense for your business to monitor what is being discussed, and create corresponding marketing platforms and services which target your lead generation goals.

This article attempts to simplify a strategy that will work for a generic company to make use of the data and connections available on social networks.

I’ve chosen four of the five social networks mentioned above, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn for my generic social marketing plan. The company blog or website will be the target of this social media plan.

Any successful social media campaign must begin with an exercise in listening to the issues people are discussing about your specific topic. After listening or monitoring various social networks using Google Alerts and other monitoring tools, you will have a good overview of the issues being discussed, the most influential sources of information, and where the opportunities for engagement exist. You should be able to make a list of blogs and social networks to monitor for opportunistic discussion participation.

The next step in a social media campaign is to prepare everyone who will be working on the campaign. You will need to prioritize the topics you will blog or write about, create your corporate social media policy and train the people who will be using social media tools on best practices. This will allow your marketing staff to recognize where, when and why to participate in social media conversations.

Next, you will need to plan your campaign around social media and make a campaign schedule. Your blog or website needs to be setup specifically to engage visitors for your campaign.

You will need to create or participate in social community (here we will use Facebook), and therefore, you will need a page on one of these networks describing your campaign and its objectives, events, and other features. You will need to set up a Twitter account to discuss subjects relevant to your marketing campaign. You will need to create a series of videos, which can be used on Youtube to virally influence visitors, and for this you may need to create a widget to make it easy to share this content. You will also want to create accounts on several social bookmarking sites like digg.com and de.licio.us to bookmark any interesting articles about your campaign.

Once your accounts are set up, your people are trained, and your plan is constructed, you are ready for engagement.

The next step in the social marketing plan is engagement. Remember, the idea behind social marketing is to start a dialog with your potential clients, not to hit them with a hard sale.

As an example, let’s pretend your generic business sells widget services and or makes widgets, and you have written an ebook. Let’s say it is called “How Widgets Help Get Us Through Tough Economic Times”, and it just happens to promote your services and products. Now you want to create a social media campaign to launch this ebook which will lead people back to your website and blog.

First you will need to decide on a specific keyword phrase you will use to “optimize” your website. Let’s pretend the keyword phrase is “widgets that help in tough economic times”. Then you will identify your target audience as small to medium sized businesses having trouble in tough economic times. You will start monitoring blogs and social networks using tools like Google Alerts to see what types of problems they are having, make a list of issues, and a list of networks and blogs they visit.

Next you could post your ebook on your website or blog – available via a download after filling out a contact form. You will title the post “Widgets That Help in Tough Economic Times” and use these words a few more times in the posting. On the download page you might add a button to “Tweet this” and a “Share” button for social bookmarking sites just so that it is easy for your potential clients to share this information with their friends in similar situations. In addition, you may allow visitors who have downloaded the book to write a review and to refer friends.

Next you may want to create a video “tease” called “Widgets that Help in Touch Economic Times” about the book with interviews from people who have successfully used it, or perhaps featuring the author discussing why he or she wrote it. Publish these videos on YouTube in your own account, tag them as “widgets that help in tough economic times” and link this account to your blog or website.

Next create a Facebook page for the book called “Widgets that Help in Tough Economic Times” and link it back to the website or blog. Use the event invitation system once you have planned the nature and specifics of your events for marketing the ebook. Call the event “Widgets that Help in Touch Economic Times Book Signing”.

Next create a twitter account called “Widgets that Help” just for the book and begin posting tweets about the upcoming book “launch”. Perhaps there will be “book signings” or webinars to describe various strategies in the book. Post these events in Facebook and Twitter about them.

Write a series of press releases and articles, using your “widgets that help” phrase and include the events and any reviews the book might have received. Bookmark each article and press release as “widgets that help in tough economic times”. Try to get reviews of the book published in trade publications and influential blogs by submitting articles or excerpts from the book to them. Identify groups in LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook which also might be interested in posting an except or review of the book.

Finally, monitor your traffic to your blog or website using Google Analytics.
Many social media marketing campaigns follow this type of plan, however only those with active and constant honest participation succeed. In any case, you will soon dominate search result pages for “widgets that help in tough economic times”.

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You do have to have a D&B number which gives you the ability to customize and feature information about your company. Plus it has that trusted D&B name for your prospective customers and vendors. You can customize your profile listing with logo, links, testimonials, etc. and list your services or products. But best of all, you can Increase the credibility of your existing website by adding the D&B badge.

This link has a flash demo of how it works:

http://dnb.powerprofiles.com/about

They say their directory gets 8,500 visitors a day.

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1. Research Tool: Twitter allows you insight into an amazing community of people from around the world to find out what they are thinking, feeling and experiencing in different ways. In a sense Twitter becomes a news service where you’ll quickly find if there is a breaking story somewhere in the world by watching it. Twitter is getting more popular because it’s very quick and easy to use. Wide variety of people use twitter because of the character limit of the messages which keeps communications brief, convenient and Productive.
2. Collaboration and Networking: This interaction is helpful for business in way or the other. Such interaction can generate new ideas or can get business partner. For the ongoing partnership it can generate confidence among them. It can generate significant collaboration that can help now or in long term.
3. Direct Traffic: Twitter is all about the direct traffic! If your twitter page is not driving direct traffic to your website then it’s useless. There are many ways to drive direct traffic to your own website from your twitter page. You need to use these key benefits.
4. Twitter as a marketing tool: For marketers who use Twitter, this is a great way to reach out to a different demographic. Those who are not able to commit to blogging, particularly due to time restraints, Twitter could be an answer into social marketing. Using Twitter would be an interesting exercise for companies to try communicating their own announcements.
5. Reinforce Your Personal Brand: You can use Twitter to expand your brand or to show a different side of you. Some people inject humor into Twittering that you don’t see on blogs. There’s also something a little more personal about many of the people on Twitter.
6. Promote Content: Twitter can potentially drive traffic and promote content. Twitter provide a tool called Twitter Feed will take the titles and URLs from blog’s feeds and publish it on a Twitter account. This is a great way to promote your content.
7. Extend Audience: Bloggers after sometime started feeling that they have been started falling towards saturation point. Such type of falling take at up to 1 year to develop and that is a real time challenge for them. Such type of situation needs some encouragement to that blogger to overcome and beat this misleading feeling. Twitter can help them much it will attract potential leaders and this definitely generate confidence in them. So Twitter can help in uplifting not only the business but also the self satisfaction.
8. Excellent for Search Engine Optimization: You can gain popularity of your profile page of your twitter with the help of some tricks. You can found many famous people’s twitter pages which are having high page rank.
   For Example: “Brent D. Payne” is one a popular user who has 7 page rank and 21,720 followers to his profile. If you can link to their profile page, your profile will get popular and ranked.
9. Easy Updates: Now you can use cell phone to update twitter page! This will help you to keep update with fresh and related content to your twitter page from any where and anytime. You can very easily post text from you cell phone as twitter allows 140 characters for one post. Updating your twitter profile page frequently will bring people back to find what you are posting.
10. Find Out What People REALLY Think: Through Twitter you can get the sense of what people think on a subject, which is very good thing. Twitter helps you to know people better. Twitter also helps you to keep your finger on the thoughts of your potential readers and their requirements.

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