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

Even the most sunniest rays of sunshine among us have felt the twinge of sadness or felt a bit depressed from time to time. To help alleviate this feeling, we’ve turned to our friends, family, professionals, music, writing – whatever helped us connect with the outside world and bring our emotions out at the same time. Whenever I’ve experienced a bit of sadness or stress in my life, surrounding myself with people I trust and being social helped me navigate to chipper waters. Recently, I’ve noticed that I’ve felt so much less stressed after logging into Facebook, seeing friends’ comments on my posts, reading and commenting on their own posts, and sharing my thoughts. I was instantly connected to these people whom I count as great friends in the physical world, but now I also had their warmth in the digital world.

Which brings me to the question – do you think social media has any effect on easing depression? One of the symptoms of depression is the tendency to alienate yourself. Same with the stages of grief – alienation can be very tempting when dealing with a loss. Social media allows us to become instantly connected with so many people. Of course, those relationships should extend into real life, but isn’t it so comforting to log into your Facebook or Twitter account  and see the world is still going on, others are also experiencing sadness or stress, and yet time moves on, just as you will? Just a thought I’d love to hear what you think!

If you’ve met me in real life, you’ve probably seen me whip out a tube of berry Yes To Carrots lip balm (several hundred times) or heard me talk about their sister brand, Yes To Tomatoes, and how much I love it. I’ve been to the Yes To Carrots website, Twitter, and Facebook, many many times, and like any SEO worth her salt, there’s some things we notice a bit differently about a website. Yes To Carrots has an exceptional social marketing campaign and overall brand personality, and they’re definitely a brand to keep an eye on! (Fellow SEO girls – you must check out their body butter, so wonderful.)

Homepage Image: The first thing you’ll notice about the site is the very attractive homepage. The second thing: it’s all an image, oh no! A search engine is basically glossing over this page as they can’t read images. Ideally, the page should be balanced with an adequate amount of SEO-friendly text and images. Plus, visitors utilizing screen-readers to access the page will be able to identify what’s actually on the Yes To Carrots page.

The homepage does include image alt tags, which is great, but be sure they’re in a consistent format. Some read “Body Butter”, while others read “hand_and_elbow_cream”. A very small point, but great for consistency and having a clean website.

Page Title: Check out my previous post, “Ask The SEO Girl: Should My Page Title Include My Website’s Name?”, about adding your brand name to each page title on your website, along with a keyword phrase you’d like to rank for. Their homepage page title includes the Yes To Carrots brand name, but their interior pages lack it. Go for consistency and branding and add that brand name in!

Twitter.com/YesToCarrots: This is an example of a company Twitter page done so right. They’ve identified a brand personality of embracing a refreshing, healthy lifestyle, with an optimistic outlook. From their own tweets to the posts they decide to retweet, their Twitter posts reflect this personality. They don’t just tweet to tweet – they do it with a purpose, and they do it well.

Facebook.com/YesToCarrots: They convey that same vibrant personality on Facebook. We’d like to see them have different posts on Twitter and Facebook, but we applaud them for keeping their page updated, posting new status messages, adding photos, and posting new discussion topics. Their loyal fan base has responded back by embracing how active they are on social platforms and interacting with them.

Yes To Carrots is an exciting brand with products that meet and way exceed what’s said in their marketing messages. They can benefit from some SEO improvements, but their social media campaign sets the bar, and sets it high, for what a successful social campaign should be. Now time to re-apply my berry lip balm and get started on more SEO copy!

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.

Okay, let’s admit – Facebook’s design is a bit blase. Very clean, which is why I love Facebook and denounce the ever-declining Myspace, but still a bit boring. Facebook Business Pages are an excellent way for businesses to represent their brand on Facebook, but it can be difficult to really set your business’s page apart. Or so you may think, Watson.

Facebook Business Pages now allow the use of Facebook’s Markup Language, or FBML, on their business pages. Simply log in to your page, set up a personal profile, and search Facebook for the application “Static FBML”. Add it to your business page, click “edit my page”, and you’ll see it listed among your other applications, such as “Notes” and “Discussions”. It uses simple html, takes a bit of playing around and will display in the “Boxes” tab on the page.

Images are a must in FBML. Create different boxes of varying shapes and sizes with attractive images and your business’s contact information. You want this page to be able to best represent your business’s image and even resemble your website a bit. Once you’re finished, change your settings so visitors land on the “Boxes” tab by default. This ensures everyone sees your very beautiful FBML work rather than your “Wall” or plain “Info” tab.

Becoming a “fan” of a Facebook Business Page typically happens on impulse, so creating an attention-grabbing Boxes tab and having visitors land by default on it can better propel regular visitors into fans, and hopefully into customers. Check out Frigidaire’s Facebook Business Page for an example of a page that uses FBML well. Mmm, now off to open my fridge for some fresh-picked raspberries…

I must say I feel for Twitter direct messages (DM’s – you can privately message other Twitter users following you). My Twitter inbox at Twitter.com/The_SEO_Girl has become so filled with automated direct messages that it would be nearly impossible to go through the DM’s and see if any of them are legit. I never read the automated messages – they’re always a clever sales pitch, or in most cases, a ridiculous sounding one. Here is my plea, my cry for help – stop the automatic DM’s!

If you want me to go to your site or read your blog, reply to one of my posts – this shows me that you’re actually spending time on Twitter and am a real person talking to me, not just an automated message. I like real people, and chances are if you genuinly talk to me, I’ll want to find out what you’re about and actually will visit your site or blog.

Please, I beg you, cease the automated Twitter DM. Keep it pure.

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!

I like long walks on the beach, watching the sunset, and – oh, sorry, wrong website! All jokes aside, The SEO Girl is a place where I can share my views and insight into the wonderful world of Search Engine Optimization with all of you. I encourage you to contribute your thoughts and opinions on each post I write, I welcome intelligent discussions, witty comments, and anything else you can throw at me (no tomatoes, please!).

I live and breathe Search Engine Optimization every day. SEO is changing every minute, and it’s our job to keep up with it.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at theseogirl @ gmail.com (remove the spaces around the “@” symbol when sending).

- your favorite seo girl