Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem complicated and it can be overwhelming. If you don’t have the resources to hire a technical SEO specialist, do you have any chance of your website being returned in the organic search results? Should you even try to optimize your site for SEO or should you rely on providing quality content and promoting your website through social media?
A Fan Gate is essentially a filtering tool to ensure that different content is visible to different users, depending upon whether they have Liked a Page or not. In fact, the name itself is suggestive of the function. It is a barrier, to go beyond which, a user has to fulfill some criterion; in this case, Liking the Page. Therefore, a Fan Gate enables those who have ‘Liked’ a Page to see all its content, while those who have not, see only part of it.
If you follow SEO, you know that it’s a constantly evolving discipline. One of the latest trends in SEO is social media and it is becoming a larger and larger influence on your search engine results. To properly cover how SEO is being influenced by social media, we have to break it up into two parts: Direct and indirect influences. A direct influence would be something that Google actively uses to rank your site or effects how your site is displayed in search engine rankings. An indirect influence would be something that benefits your site, but not directly through Google’s algorithms. Let’s take a look at how to use social to benefit your SEO.
I’m starting out 2013 with a recap post featuring the top six how-to articles that I wrote in 2012 that should help you incorporate SEO and social media into your WordPress blog. Many of you have told me that you have found my how-to posts to be of value. So, you’ll continue to see this type of post pop up on my blog throughout the next year. I also promise to continue sharing things that I learn along the way and I’ll often tie them into how they fit into my strategies. Bottom line, if you have any hopes of either making money by blogging or driving traffic to a website via your blog, you need to treat it as a business. Hopefully, together, we can share ideas and experiences that will help all of us find success in 2013.
Pinterest has been a hot topic lately, and with social media outlets skyrocketing, small businesses owners have begun looking into utilizing the Pinterest platform to increase profitability and drive traffic back to their sites. These same tactics can be employed by small business owners looking to sell their businesses, though there are a few things to think through before diving in completely.
This is a guest post by Steven Papas.
People will always pay more in time to be entertained. The entertainment feature of social networking sites is in those fun words and creative pictures. Playing by this rule has pushed many businesses and brands to the limelight. Why write about your environment, what you saw on a vacation or how that last weekend seminar went, when you can take a few shots with your Smartphone and share them with your social media audience? If you appreciate online images, so will your audience.
Recently I started a discussion called “The Ten Do’s of Using Twitter To Promote Your Business” on the LinkedIn group, “Business Knowledge Share — powered by American Express”. My 4th tip is to be consistent about your social media presence. I talk about creating your Gravatar and registering the same username across all social media platforms. (The rest of the post includes nine more tips on promoting your business with Twitter but I’m here today to talk about the branding aspect of choosing your username.)
Have you ever launched a website, new product or a service and not known how to start driving traffic to your website? It’s virtually impossible to establish a meaningful presence on all of the major social networking sites. The old adage, “You can’t be all things to all men” is true. It’s important to have a social media strategy that works for you. What we need to do is focus on where our target customers are and establish our presence there.
Building your brand online can help you be one of the first people/businesses that comes to mind when someone is looking for your product or service. In the small town that I live in, there’s a woman who drives a truck around selling fresh produce. She’s known as the “fruit lady”. She is a walking/driving advertisement for her family owned business. Whenever conversation turns to where to buy the freshest fruits and vegetables, someone will mention her. She is a living example of someone who has done an excellent job of building their brand and creating top-of-mind awareness.
Last week, I received a phone call from a reporter for the Harrisburg Pennsylvania newspaper, The Patriot-News. He was looking for an “expert” on using online petitions to impact change on big business and he wanted to interview me. My first thought was how did he find me and my second thought was that I had just published my blog post “What Impact does Social Media Have on Businesses?” Hmmmm…. I must have optimized that post well.