The SEO Girl

Have you seen those annoying little ads promising “500 free Facebook fans” or “200 Twitter followers overnight”? Sure, those numbers sound nice, but will any of those additional fans or followers actually be a brand advocate for your website? Probably not. The most successful Facebook and Twitter campaigns have not just a large number of followers, but a large number of followers who actually love their brand and want to spread the word about it!

So how do you increase your Facebook Fans, while also ensuring they’re fans who actually can help promote your brand?

1. Make it your page’s mission to triple the number of fans in one week. If you reach that number, you’ll run a special promotion just for your Facebook fans, and donate a portion of the sales to a non-profit organization that relates to your business.

2. Start the promoting! Post about your promotion on your Facebook page twice daily, post about it on Twitter, and write post about it on your blog.

3. You want people to feel they’ll be helping a larger cause by spreading the word, so be sure to focus on the end result: you’re donating a portion of sales to a non-profit organization, and they’re directly helping you do this. Ask them to help ensure you’re reaching your goal by suggesting your Fan page to their friends.

4. Reached your magic number? Congrats, and make sure you follow through with the promotion and donation. Close, but not quite there? You’ll reach it next time, but be sure to reward the efforts of your fans by still running the promotion and donating to the organization you chose.

5. Keep up the Facebook posting – you don’t want to lose any ground with your newfound fan base. Focus on posting relevant articles and blog posts, sprinkled with a marketing message here and there.

Now, how does this benefit your SEO? By running this type of promotion, you’re working to help a great cause, and people love to write about and link to businesses that are working to help others and increasing their social awareness. Reach out to your local media about the promotion you’re running, and highlight your promotion as you’re contacting sites and bloggers in your link building efforts. They’ll see you’re much more than just another pretty website

Before adding the Akismet spam filter to my blog, which is lovely, I was receiving tons of spammy comments with random links in them. Since the comments contained little relevant text, it appears they left the link solely for SEO value. A tactic which, of course, has little value. I stress the value of personally contacting site owners for link building and giving them a reason to add your link, rather than trying to “game” search engines in this way. Plus, you’re basically wasting your time and your money – links in blog and forum comments aren’t going to boost your rankings.

Thoughtful blog and forum comments can boost your industry cred, though. Take for example the recent post of mine, “I Think I Can, I Think I Can: SEO, The Little Engine That Could”, where I highlighted a person who commented on one of my prior posts and his insightful comments. Spend five minutes giving your opinion on a blog post in your area of expertise, and those thoughtful comments could be worth much more in the long run. You’ll be able to make contacts in your industry and network, show you know what you’re talking about, and perhaps even get the word out about your own website and encourage other blogs/sites to link to you, all without engaging in obtrusive comment spam!

Remember: Keep SEO pure. Show the value of your knowledge and your website, and real people and search engines will notice in time.

I was talking with a new SEO client yesterday who told me her previous SEO company built her a Facebook Business Page so she get value from the link on Facebook to her site. As you can probably tell, I cringed. Let’s all say it together: links on Facebook do not pass on search engine value to your site (unless they’re coded in Facebook’s markup language, but we’ll talk about that in another post). They carry the “nofollow” tag, making them clickable, but a search engine spider will not pass on value to your site for that link.

That doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t useful for link building. Here’s some ways to capitalize on Facebook as a link building tool, and get people talking about your site!

Links, In Moderation. Imagine taking a leisurely drive and taking what seems to be a nice turn in the road. Suddenly, you’re bombarded with billboard after billboard, all screaming for your attention. Not so fun, right? Same goes for Facebook Business Pages – link to your site where appropriate, such as linking to a fun product every once in awhile, a new blog post, and of course in the “Website” field on the page.

The less obtrusive your page is, the more likely visitors will stay on the page, click through to your site, post on their own Facebook about your site, and grab the attention of their Facebook friends, who just may link to your site on their own blog or website!

People Like Free Stuff. It’s pretty much a rule of thumb that we like free things. Start a contest on your Facebook page where the first 25 or 50 fans receive a coupon code for your online store, with a value large enough to make a potential fan gush “Awesome!” and blog about it, thus resulting in more links to your main site, and of course more Facebook Fans!

I’ll be posting in about a week about Facebook contest ideas, so check back often!

Keep up the posting. I see a lot of really excited site owners posting often on Facebook for the first month or so, and then their interaction fizzles out. Keep up the posting – try to post daily, whether it’s about something interesting from your day or about a cool product on your site every once in awhile. A conversation involves two or more people, so be sure to comment on other people’s posts to spark conversation and get people noticing your page. Don’t be shy!

And When All Else Fails, Beg! Okay, just to be clear, I have confidence your page isn’t “failing” by any means. It never hurts to outright ask for a link. Once you’ve built up at least 25 Facebook Fans, click the “Send Update to Fans” link and ask if they’ll link to you on their site or blog. After all, if they like you, they’ll be helping out their site visitors by providing them with a trusted resource. Include a coupon code in your update. If only 2 out of 50 fans have a site and link to you, your 5 minutes of time still resulted in success.

Think about it this way: What would make you link to a site? Would it be a fun promotion, helpful daily tidbits, or a collection of really unique product images? Think about your audience and what really piques their interest.

Eric Ward posted an article on Search Engine Land today on how to write link request emails. Link building is the bane of many an SEO Specialists’s existence. I’m here to offer you some suggestions for your link request emails so you can breathe a little easier and maximize the value of your link building campaign.

1. Subject of the email – Stay away from the “Link Request” subject line, it probably won’t do you any good. Choose a more descriptive line that reflects something you like about their site.

2. State your case – Don’t beat around the bush. Tell them who you are and what you’d like from them. Flatter them and their site – tell them specific things or articles you like on their site. Remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. They’re doing you a favor, so put on that smile.

3. Give them an incentive – Why do they need to add your link? If your site has a PageRank, include it in the email. If it doesn’t, talk about the design of your site or the great resources you have on your site. Give them reasons why visitors from their site would ever want to go to yours. A great incentive is offering a free article or blog post for their site.

4. Link Text - What do you want your link to say? Give them the html code and exact text for your link so all they have to do is copy and paste it from the email into their site. People like ease.

5. Reader-friendly – No one wants to read a huge block of text. Break it up into bullet points or numbers. It’ll be easier to read, and they’ll love you for it.

6. No attachments, please - Include an attachment, and your email is going straight to the junk folder!

Link building can be frustrating and difficult, but the payoffs are enormous. Once the replies roll in, you’ll be able to develop a relationship with site owners that can have huge rewards. Treat them well and they will do the same to your link.

- Happy linking!

If you want to talk the talk, you need to first know the buzzwords that will turn you into an SEO expert (or at least sound like one). Here’s the lowdown on Search Engine Optimization lingo:

• Organic/Natural – Organic, or natural, refers to the 1-10 search results in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. They are the unpaid, not sponsored, results that you will be targeting in your SEO campaign.
• Paid Listings – Paid listings, or sponsored results, are ads that people buy to market their products online. They usually appear alongside the organic results.
• SERP – SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, or the list of organic results that comes up in a search engine like Google.
• SMO – SMO is Social Media Optimization, the latest SEO technique. SMO involves getting your site and fresh content noticed by social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
• White Hat/Black Hat – White Hat SEO refers to SEO that typically plays nice and doesn’t violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. Black Hat specialists aren’t donning devil horns, but they know how to beat the system. Yet, there’s a chance of being penalized by the search engines for black hat techniques.
• Keywords – When you type a term into that little white box on Google, the words you’re typing in are called “keywords” in SEO land. SEO specialists optimize sites for specific keywords.
• Long Tail Keywords – These are keywords that came out of the womb with an extra appendage. Joking. Long Tail Keywords are usually keywords that are more than three words long. These keywords are usually easier to rank for than short 1-2 word keywords. Many SEO specialists who promise results will optimize your site for long tail keywords because the competition isn’t as great for these words. Yet, few people may be searching for these terms, so be careful if an SEO specialist does this.
• Link Building – The part of your SEO campaign that will most likely cause you the most frustration. Think of getting your site ranked with Google as an election that you want to win. Every relevant site that links to you is a vote. The more votes you have from reputable sites, the more likely you are to “win” by getting your site ranked higher.
• One-Way Links - Google is now thought to reward “one-way links” rather than reciprocal links. One way links occur when a site links to your site without you first linking to them.
• PageRank – When looking for relevant links, looks for sites that have a high PageRank. PageRank is Google’s system for determining how much weight a site has. Great sites have a PageRank of 7 or higher. Download the Google Toolbar to see the PageRank for all the sites you visit.
• WTF?! – The cry of a frustrated SEO specialist. *Pat on the back.* It’ll be okay.

This is only a handful of SEO lingo. Leave a comment to post your own!