As mentioned in a previous post, Facebook is the current king of traffic on the internet. The sheer numbers of visitors they receive every day is staggering, and is the reason why all businesses should add a Facebook fan page.

The easiest way to describe a Fan page is that it’s a website or blog for your business within Facebook. One of the most important aspects of a Fan page is that it separates your personal account from your professional persona. For example, your clients won’t see all the pictures of your children that you upload in the news stream. Instead they can see links to new blog posts on your primary website as the links are posted in your Fan pages’ stream.

Unfortunately when you start your business’s Fan page, it comes with a long address that’s impossible to remember. The address for BaileyHill Media’s fan page is: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/BaileyHill-Media/133309610030953. Thanks Facebook, could you have made it any harder to share my fan page? Why not add a few more digits to the number at the end, 15 is kind of short don’t you think?

Luckily Facebook added “Vanity Usernames” in mid 2009. This process will let you change your FB page address to something easy to remember and share. Your page must have 25 fans before you can register the vanity name, so ask all your friends & acquaintances in the direction of your fan page. Even better, ask your clients to “Like” your page. I asked my networking group to “Like” BaileyHill Media’s page, and sent them a link via email.

Once you’ve got 25 fans, go to http://www.facebook.com/usernames and follow the link to set a username for your page beneath the main form. On the next page you’ll be able to submit your desired name, Facebook will tell you if it’s available or not.

Facebook makes choosing a username a serious activity since it can’t be changed once it’s set. Make sure that you’re happy with your choice and that it represents your business or organization well.  They even remind you one last time before you pull the trigger.

And.. that’s it. It’s a fairly painless process but like much of Facebook, it’s not easy to find the right page to process the request.

If you like this post, why not become a fan of ours on Facebook? http://facebook.com/baileyhillmedia.web.design - If you send me a link, I’ll happily return the favor.

Image credit: Facebook by Franco Bouly

The true secret sauce behind Facebook advertising is the “Like” ecosystem that Facebook has developed.

It gives the user a perception of personal endorsement which is the most powerful form of advertising in any medium. Think about it, if a friend of yours told you how much they enjoyed a new restaurant wouldn’t you be more open to dining there? The examples are endless.

Facebook has started to carry this over into their advertising model in a subtle but effective manner. If a user’s Facebook friends “Like” a fan page, then their approval of the advertiser will show up at the bottom of the ad. The image below was a screen shot that was taken yesterday. It’s a political ad for a candidate who’s running for Governor of Texas. At the bottom of the ad it shows how two Facebook friends of the user like the candidate. There’s the secret sauce, the personal recommendation.

The amount of traffic alone is a good reason to consider advertising on Facebook. Put your ads where the eyeballs are. A national or global campaign can easily amass a ridiculous number of impressions in a very short period of time. This isn’t the secret sauce, but definitely a reason to explore advertising on the site.

Another feature of the Facebook advertising platform is the demographic targeting. Facebook users enter a lot of information about themselves that can lend a hand when trying to spend valuable advertising dollars wisely. Similar to Google AdWords, an advertiser can target specific keywords. Often these are keywords based on what the user has entered in their profile (i.e. their interests) or what they’ve posted within their status updates. Advertisers can filter for a large number of data points such as sex, age, location, relationship status, political views, religious views, all in addition to keywords. While the filtering capabilities alone are pretty powerful, this is not Facebook’s secret sauce.

Facebook’s secret sauce is the perception of personal endorsement that your Facebook Fans give by “Liking” your ad or FB Fan Page. In addition to personal endorsement, the sheer amount of traffic and the demographic targeting make Facebook a powerful advertising platform.

News travels faster than it used to in his day!

Links that point back to your website are one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine what your site is about, and subsequently what to list it for when people search. This article will demonstrate how we were able to successfully leverage the addition of new content to improve the site’s performance within Google.

In May our client, American Water, requested a few new pages of content for their site. One of the pages was a brief piece on a recent installation of one of their commercial water softener products for the city of Temple, TX. Since it was content about a municipal government, we used it as an opportunity to create a press release (PR) for search engine optimization purposes. Press releases are a good vehicle to build links coming into your site because once submitted to various “news” agencies, they will be picked up by sites from all over the internet.

There are a few rules to follow when writing a PR for search engine optimization purposes, luckily it’s nothing difficult and they are commonly accepted search engine optimization practices.

1. Put the most important keyword phrase in the headline of the PR.
2. Use the same keyword phrase in the first sentence of the PR.
3. Use at least one link back to your website content that has the keyword phrase in the text that being linked (aka: anchor text).

We followed these rules, and wrote a straightforward press release. You can read the original release here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfnwf83h_76gsspdphs.

In addition to the optimization rules for the PR, we followed similar rules on the content page itself.

1. The page title contains the keyword phrase
2. The first headline (and only) on the page contains the keyword phrase.
3. The first sentence on the page contains the keyword phrase.

There are additional best practices we followed for onsite optimization of the new content, but these demonstrate the similarity between search engine optimization for press releases and for your site itself. The content page is located at http://kineticotx.com/austin-water-filter-installations/city-of-temple-kinetico-hs-242-commercial-water-softener/.

Can you guess what keyword phrase we were targeting with this? Answer: Kinetico HS 242, the model of the commercial water softener that was installed.

We submitted the site to the following free press release distributors (we upgraded to the $12 package at one of the sites): onlineprnews.com, dbusinessnews.com, seenation.com, pr-usa.net, openpr.com, and free-press-release-center.info. After only a few hours, the release had been picked up by a number of websites across the internet and indexed by Google.  The content indexing with the links that point back to your site is what makes this a powerful strategy to build links.

How useful a strategy is this? At the time of writing this article, my client’s page is #1 for the “kinetico hs 242” search, and the next 18 results are for the press release. Not bad.

Here’s a screen shot of Google’s results at the time of writing this article.

I recently sat down with a friend from my business networking group to discuss his efforts on the web. He’s got a decent website, that doesn’t need a major design overhaul but could stand for a few tweaks here and there.

He explained that he expected the majority of his website traffic to come from word of mouth referrals, or as a result of various speaking engagements. I suggested we take a look at his  analytics to see if his assumption could be validated. He had never reviewed the data that Google Analytics provides, and was a little surprised when we started digging into it.

On the very first page, the dashboard, we made a surprising discovery. The second most popular page on his site was one that he didn’t expect, nor was it one of his primary business offerings but a service that he had stopped focusing on. Next we took a look at the traffic sources, and specifically the keywords that visitors have used to find the site. Four of the top ten keyword phrases were directly tied to the page in question. The rest of the top 10 keyword phrases validated his assumption of how visitors found his site, many were navigational searches looking for his name or that of his business.

The conversation carried on about his website and I made specific recommendations for improvements. His biggest opportunity was on the page that was getting all the attention from searchers. There was no call to action on the page, or any way for visitors to easily be converted to clients.

The moral of the story is that analytics shouldn’t be ignored. While they can’t tell the whole story, they are great tools to answer business questions. Who knows, you might even find a new way to make a little more rain.