Business Guide to Facebook Launches

Facebook has launched Facebook for Business, a new resource hub dedicated to helping businesses get started and optimize their brand on Facebook. The new resource center presents preexisting features in a way that will make businesses understand what Facebook features and properties are available and relevant to utilize.

Launched Tuesday, Facebook for Business attempts to lay out a clear, concise, and easy-to-follow guide for businesses, making the problem of over-optimizing a thing of the past. The resource center brings value to business owners, employees tasked to handle social media, and marketers looking for science and statistics to sell and educate regarding Facebook services.

Facebook for Business goes offers a simplistic but useful guide to its various resources, including:

• Fan Pages, along with a conversation calendar resource, Facebook Pages Optimization Guide, and Facebook Insights Guide.
• Claiming Your Place, something every business should do.
• Making Your Website Social – open graph, plugins, and widgets.
• Engagement, including resources for learning how to #win on Facebook
• Advertising, with many resources to ad optimization, targeting, and insights.
• Sponsored Stories, also offering a sponsored story guide.
• Best Practices Guide
• Success Stories
• Personalized Mobile Experience
• Facebook Credits

Resource by: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2097810/Business-Guide-to-Facebook-Launches

SEO Tips to Increase Ranking in SERP

General Rules in Search Engine Optimization:

Make blogs or websites for people, not search engines.
Make websites that convert to your end goal...not just rank for keywords.
Build a brand around a community. One that loves you and will fight for you because they love your services. Don't shut them off.
Make your brand so big that search engines need you.
Don't focus on just one keyword. Do a proper keyword research to find out what people seeking your products and services are actually using.
Don't forget to read Google's SEO Starter Guide

Make sure your title tag includes your keyword
A compelling call-to-action might help you get a better click-through rate in Google search engine results pages.
Make title tag unique on each page. [Use Google Webmaster Tools to detect problems with title tags]
Avoid keyword stuffing in your page title.

SEO Tips on the Use of Headings (H1, H2 and H3):
Headings (h1) and sub-headings (h2, h3) are texts that are written between those heading tags.

Avoid keyword stuffing in any of heading tags because it will do more harm than good.
Using your Keyword in H1 or H2 can give some minor positive effects on SEO.
H1 is the most important heading - Use it only once or twice per document and include your keyword there if it fits naturally.

SEO Tips Regarding the Body Text: Body text is the text from your web page without all the HTML tags and code.

Make sure that the keyword you are targeting with this page really is in your body text.
Avoid keyword stuffing in body text. Take note - each page should be targeted to different keywords.
Put main keyword closer to the top of the document.
Don't hide text through color by blending text color with background color.
Avoid too high keyword density (>10%) as it may lead to penalty (use synonyms, related words and LSI words)

SEO Tips on Using URL:
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URL is the address of your web page.
Suggestions for Domain Name

If possible, put your main keyword in the domain name.
For SEO it seems that there is no difference between delimiting words in domain name or writing them together. From marketing standpoint it's better not to delimit words in domain name with dashes because of word of mouth marketing.

Suggestions for URL

Make user-friendly URL ; put your keywords there and leave out stop words like "I", "a", and "an" etc. Also avoid special characters like "&", "?", "=", "$", "%". "^" in the URL
Avoid keyword stuffing in URLs and try to keep them in reasonable length.
Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.


SEO Tips on the Use of Sitemap
Sitemap is a file (or multiple files) that list URLs for a site.

It is important to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
It is important to include a link to sitemap file in your robots.txt file
If you want to put sitemap on different domain you must put a link to it in your robots.txt file
All information about sitemaps - http://www.sitemaps.org/
You can also submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
If you don't have a sitemap, try sitemap generators

SEO Suggestions about Links:
Internal linking and links in general are very important from SEO standpoint. Search engine algorithms use anchor texts extensively.

Follow Google's suggestions on URL structure: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&hl=en
For internal linking - put nofollow attribute on links to unimportant pages (from SEO standpoint - like "Privacy Policy", "Contact us" and other pages)
Put keywords in anchor texts
If link anchor is an image then put anchor text in image's "alt" attribute
Avoid keyword stuffing in anchor texts
Avoid using un-related phrases like "click here" or "more..." in anchor texts
Linking to similar external sites will help search engines to determine your site's theme
Use the list above to check your anchor texts and nofollow attributes

SEO Suggestions on HTML Code and Page Load Time:

100% Valid code is great but most of the time search engine spiders can process invalid code as well.
Using less table tags may result in faster page load
Having smaller HTML will result in faster page load
Avoid broken images on your site as it slows down page load (click on the "Load time" link to get list of broken images on site)
Put CSS in external files. If you can combine all CSS information into one file it will make your page load faster
Put JavaScript code in external files. If you can combine all JavaScript code information into one file it will make your page load faster
If you are using common JS libraries (like jquery, prototype, moo tools and others) use Google Ajax Libraries API (more info here)
SEO Tips in Dealing With Images
For SEO purposes it is usefull to analyze filenames and "alt" texts of images on your site.
Use "alt" texts to describe the image - for accessibility and SEO reasons
Don't overuse "alt" texts, for example, don't add them to spacer images or layout of images
Put keywords in "alt" texts if they make sense in the context
You can also use keywords in filenames (write keywords together or seperate them with dashes)
Avoid keyword stuffing in "alt" texts or filenames
SEO Tips in Using Meta Keywords:
Meta keywords are keywords related to your site. They are coded in HTML and don't appear on the web page. Search engines do NOT care about meta keywords AT ALL and there's no reason to have them. But you can get new keyword ideas by looking at your competitor's keywords!


resource by http://www.scolexportal.info/2010/12/50-seo-tips-to-increase-search-engine.html

Tips to Increase Search Engine Ranking and Website Traffic And Visitors

It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings.

Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.


resource by http://realtrafficsource.com/targeted-traffic/tips-increase-search-engine-ranking-website-traffic-visitors/

5 Steps to Strategically Managing Your SEO Provider

The truth is that trusting any part of your marketing to a third-party poses some serious challenges. While a search marketing agency can offer you a level of skill and expertise that you don’t have in-house, the wrong choice can end up costing you rankings, revenues, and profits.

But a bad SEO agency experience can often be avoided by being a smart, organized, and efficient SEO client. Specifically, there are five steps you can take to manage the relations you have with your SEO provider, while protecting your investment and your rankings.

1. Educate Your SEO Provider
Make sure your SEO agency understands your business – both your business model and your business goals.

Your business might seem obvious to you, but that's because you live, eat, and breathe it. Conversely, SEO agencies live, eat, and breathe SEO – that’s what they specialize in. Take the time to make sure your agency understands your revenue model and the particular strategy that you’ve chosen.

Similarly, make sure that you explain your business goals to your SEO provider. After all, there's a big difference between "cornering your market" and "dominating your niche." Your SEO agency needs to be aware of your particular goals so that they can devise an SEO strategy that fits best with your business.

2. Define Your SEO KPIs in Advance
Work with your SEO firm to set KPIs that fit with your business goals. After all, there are many ways to measure SEO efforts (i.e., rankings, traffic, conversions, and any blend of these). Both you and your agency should agree in advance on what combination of KPIs to work toward.

For starters, this will enable your SEO agency to develop a strategy around your expectations and business needs. But more importantly, it will put you in a position to evaluate the work they’re doing, as well as measure the SEO ROI.

3. Appoint an SEO Gatekeeper
It's important to appoint an SEO gatekeeper. Ideally, this person would have been involved in the KPI process, and will fulfill two key roles as a kind of SEO project manager:

Operation Level: The SEO gatekeeper will manage any bottlenecks – whether they’re on your side or the agency side. Essentially, by having one person monitoring all SEO projects, it will be easier to map their progress and push them through on a consistent and steady basis.
Strategic Level: The SEO gatekeeper will help facilitate cohesion between various projects. By directing all SEO inquiries through a single point of contact, both you and your agency can be sure that the proverbial left and right hands are always working in tandem. For example, your SEO agency will know about new pages, products, and site that your company is creating, and can work them into their strategy.
4. Know Your SEO Stakeholders
Your appointed SEO gatekeeper must now identify all the relevant SEO stakeholders within your organization and establish processes for dealing with them. After all, the SEO gatekeeper will be responsible for ensuring that all strategy decisions are communicated to your agency, so they need to have access to decision makers and be aware of any internal developments that can affect any SEO projects that your agency is working on.

Some of these stakeholders will include:

SEO Director: This is the stakeholder who will need to take the lead on aligning all internal efforts. They will need to ensure that SEO is involved early on and for the duration of all web projects, and will provide guidance/direction to your AOR and all local agencies.
Execs & Upper Management: This level of decision-makers is ultimately responsible for the results of any marketing initiative, including SEO. Consequently, these stakeholders are critical for holding people account for working properly with SEO, and shouldn't let things move forward if SEO isn't involved.
Sales, Marketing, & PR: While the sales team needs the leads generated by SEO, marketing knows that SEO will be its number one acquisition tactic. Similarly, PR is responsible for global messaging, and SEO should be a key part of that strategy.
Usability/Design: These stakeholders will be integral for creating SEO friend users experiences for all countries/brands, and optimized information architecture for all your sites. Consequently, usability/design in each office needs to be in close contact with local and/or global SEO staff.
IT/Dev: This layer of your organization is needed to develop multilingual, SEO friendly technologies and test every release of every site for SEO best practices. Having your SEO team closely involved in their development cycle, then, is critical.
Editorial/Content: One reason "content is king" is because of its importance in SEO. Your content team, then, needs to adapt content production according to search trends/volumes in each country, as well as ensure that there's a steady flow of local content across all your properties.
Legal: Your legal department will be important for developing a worldwide policy on SEO (i.e., whether you pursue certain practices). This is particularly important so that they don't become a roadblock. For example, you don't every piece of onsite or offsite content to get caught up in legal and slow your SEO momentum. So work out clear processes with them in advance.
With all the stakeholders identified, it’s important that your SEO gatekeeper has access to decision makers within your organization. Sometimes a small change in internal priorities can bottleneck an SEO projects in a big way. Your SEO gatekeeper needs to be able to communicate the opportunity costs of delaying certain SEO projects to those who can influence internal priorities.

5. Protect & Maintain SEO Momentum
As an SEO client, it’s important to understand and maintain SEO momentum. You can't put SEO on hold and then pick up where you left off a few months later.

Rankings change constantly. If your SEO initiatives get held up, your rankings will slip while your competitors’ increase.

Maintaining SEO momentum is probably where your SEO gatekeeper will play their most important role. In addition to managing internal bottlenecks (IT, legal, etc.) they should also implement procedures to address unforeseen variables.

For instance, if a key IT resource leaves your company, there should have a policy/procedure in place to assuage any potential bottleneck. Similarly, internal SEO deliverables should be planned well in advance of their deadline so that you have breathing room if a sudden internal priority arises.

Most importantly, any change in SEO service provider should be a pre-planned and measured on. After the decision to change is made, a new SEO agency should be selected before you fire your old one, and then your SEO gatekeeper should plan and manage a transition of responsibilities from one agency to the next.

Basically, you should never just fire your SEO firm without there being an alternative in place to follow current SEO projects through to the end, and having additional projects planned and scoped in advance.

Any interruption in your SEO efforts can end up setting you back months or years, and that can not only mean having to reinvest in SEO all over again, but losing the SEO equity you’ve built to date.

Managing Relationships, Rankings, and Your Bottom Line
Every business relationship is a two way street. After all, it takes two to tango. So it's important to take responsibility for your side of the relationship.

Granted, it’s tempting to think “well, I’m the client, and the customer is always right,” but that’s reckless and irresponsible – especially when future revenues are on the line.

As business goals and priorities change, make sure to keep your SEO agency (and any other marketing service provider) in the loop, because these are changes they need to know about and understand. And make sure you understand what their strategy for you is, and why they chose that route. This will help you get the most out of your investment with them, both in the short and long term.

Source By http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2082871/5-Steps-to-Strategically-Managing-Your-SEO-Provider

How Google Works

1. Googlebot, Google’s Web Crawler
Googlebot is Google’s web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It’s easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn’t traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google’s indexer.

Googlebot consists of many computers requesting and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users, Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly than it’s capable of doing.

Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web.

Unfortunately, spammers figured out how to create automated bots that bombarded the add URL form with millions of URLs pointing to commercial propaganda. Google rejects those URLs submitted through its Add URL form that it suspects are trying to deceive users by employing tactics such as including hidden text or links on a page, stuffing a page with irrelevant words, cloaking (aka bait and switch), using sneaky redirects, creating doorways, domains, or sub-domains with substantially similar content, sending automated queries to Google, and linking to bad neighbors. So now the Add URL form also has a test: it displays some squiggly letters designed to fool automated “letter-guessers”; it asks you to enter the letters you see — something like an eye-chart test to stop spambots.

When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. Googlebot tends to encounter little spam because most web authors link only to what they believe are high-quality pages. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

Although its function is simple, Googlebot must be programmed to handle several challenges. First, since Googlebot sends out simultaneous requests for thousands of pages, the queue of “visit soon” URLs must be constantly examined and compared with URLs already in Google’s index. Duplicates in the queue must be eliminated to prevent Googlebot from fetching the same page again. Googlebot must determine how often to revisit a page. On the one hand, it’s a waste of resources to re-index an unchanged page. On the other hand, Google wants to re-index changed pages to deliver up-to-date results.

To keep the index current, Google continuously recrawls popular frequently changing web pages at a rate roughly proportional to how often the pages change. Such crawls keep an index current and are known as fresh crawls. Newspaper pages are downloaded daily, pages with stock quotes are downloaded much more frequently. Of course, fresh crawls return fewer pages than the deep crawl. The combination of the two types of crawls allows Google to both make efficient use of its resources and keep its index reasonably current.

2. Google’s Indexer
Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google’s performance.

3. Google’s Query Processor
The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. A patent application discusses other factors that Google considers when ranking a page. Visit SEOmoz.org’s report for an interpretation of the concepts and the practical applications contained in Google’s patent application.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings. Google closely guards the formulas it uses to calculate relevance; they’re tweaked to improve quality and performance, and to outwit the latest devious techniques used by spammers.

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by Google’s Advanced Search Form and Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators).

Source by http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

Google Places combined with SEO can help your business

How does one create organic rankings by using mapping? The most effective ways are by being honest about the service you are offering, by encouraging real reviews, and by combining your SEO organic strategy with Google Maps.
Here are some pointers: there are many things on Google Places which can help you to appear on page one.
Firstly, use searchable keywords in your company’s name whilst including your brand’s name. Avoid over doing things and always include a listing or description.
Secondly, use the correct categories and make sure that they’ll be helpful to the searcher.
Thirdly, reviews and testimonials from your customers are absolutely priceless, especially if they have your keyword in them.
Your fourth step is to get these reviews posted on as many sites as possible, such as Qype. Lastly, always cross-link your website to your Google Places listing and vice versa.
The advantages for most businesses when it comes to using Google Places are endless. For one, your telephone number, address, description, reviews are clearly visible. This offers you a huge advantage over other organic results in Google’s listings, as the user no longer needs to navigate to your website to find contact information. Google is allowing regional businesses to gain advantage over rankings. Why? Because business done directly via regions is healthy for search marketing. Promoting actual brick-and-mortar businesses as apposed to online portal sites is essential.

Source by memeburn.com

Google's Panda Update changed the old SEO method

Forget about the old Search Optimization Engine (SEO) rules. Google had changed the method that had been applied for over ten years now. Google Panda will replace the Page Rank rules and if you want higher position in the search engine enumeration, the site has to be a high quality one.

This is how Google chose to avoid the fake traffic on the websites and with this method to be better placed into the search engine qualification. Google Panda has an additional quality upgrade.The ranking methods will be based more on the way the people are searching for one site’s content than the links from other sites that was the old method that hadn’t had best results for a while now, because the costumers found out several ways to trick the Google’s ratings.

The company’s officials announced that Google Panda is here to replace the old Page Rank method that had a lot of complaints. It will matter less the way other sites are sending traffic than the way one user uses the site.It will matter most the time that one user is spending on the site, the pages that he uses and the way he navigates through it.

Google Panda will have an automat system that counts the way users are treating the site and the interest that they have on every page of the site. This is the new quality method that will have the most powerful influence on Google rating.The new SEO method is a quality orientated one, because Google found out about the easy methods to trick the old system.

This is why Panda system will pay more attention to the site, individually and not by the way it is looked by the other sites.This is a new method to stop the low quality sites to have the first position in the Google search in the expense of the high quality sites, with interesting content that is capable to attract the users in using it at its most.

More, depending on the time that one user is spending on the site, Google registers the level of experience that the user has it on the given page and this will be one of the indicators.More, the bounce rate will be another one and it will be a very important instrument that will give Google information about how the user landed on the site and how long will take until he will close the page.

Reference by newsinabox.net