If you haven’t started a Facebook account, there is no time like the present to get moving. You won’t want to be the last one aboard, and I think we are down to the final ten. If you are one of them, click here to get started with Facebook.

Why do you need a Facebook account? Facebook is a great way to stay connected. You’ll connect with friends and family, reconnect with old buddies, and meet new acquaintances. Most importantly, Facebook is a great way to remain in touch with a larger group than you otherwise could manage. Sharing your blog content with your greater audience of friends is a great way to spread the word, get good feedback, and even test the waters among people who will give you some encouragement.

How to share on your Facebook account? It’s easy, and it’s free. All you need to do is get an account; just visit http://facebook.com and complete a quick form. Look for a few friendly names and you can be up and running in just a couple of minutes. Now all you have to do is ’share’ your content. Sharing is fairly easy, and can be as difficult as copying the URL for your post and copying it to your Facebook account (not really THAT hard), or installing a plugin to provide a simple button that will automatically publish your post to your Facebook account.

A couple of Wordpress plugins that I really like for sharing include Social Bookmarking Reloaded and Add To Any. I like Social Bookmarking Reloaded because it is easy, and allows you to select the specific icons you want to show on your posts. Add to Any is my current favorite because it reads your reader’s browser history and automatically displays the icons they use the most. It also includes an email forwarding option, which is a great idea.

When should you share your posts with your Facebook friends? Every time you have new content on your blog. Plain and simple. Social media marketing is easy to do, but requires diligence in order to be effective. Get in the habit of sharing your posts as often as you create them. Your Facebook friends will become regular followers in no time.

Using FireFox? Use Facebook toolbar to make it even easier to post your blogs to Facebook. I use this toolbar every day and have grown to depend on it because it is so convenient; I can post to Facebook, stay in touch, or make some comments without the hassle. It saves me time and keeps me in the loop.

I talked about Facebook in this week’s tech call with Paul Jensen at Trivani. Here’s an excerpt:

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Every time we post new content, our customers receive an email notification announcing the availability of the new content, including a complete review of the article, graphics, and links to the user’s blog.

I am pleased to announce that we have added the new social marketing tips with every notification as a reminder to perform four basic steps with the arrival of your new content. For those of you not participating in ListPipe, you can easily perform these steps with your own blog content.

So, when you have new content, take a minute to get the word out in four easy steps…

1. Visit your new post and share it to your Facebook page; Just click the Facebook Share button at the bottom of the article.
2. Tweet your post to your followers on Twitter; copy the URL to the new article and paste it into your Twitter post field with a comment.
3. Post your new article to Stumbleupon; Click the StumbleUpon Share button at the bottom of the article and complete the StumbleUpon profile.
4. Email the new article to four friends; Simply copy the URL for the article and paste it into an email with a short, personal invitation to read it.

Do this every time you receive or post a new article in order to grow your opportunities in social media marketing!

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1. Research
2. Creative writing
3. Linking

Before we get into those, let’s talk about ‘why’.

Keywords are basically the anchor text of your article that help readers, and search engines, determine your relevance. In terms of ‘relevance’, there are no wrong answers; you are not trying to be relevant to a common standard. Rather, you are trying to be relevant to your own chosen topic.

For instance; If you are writing about ‘humanitarianism’, you will want your keywords to be relevant to the subject of ‘humanitarianism’. Relevant terms could be ‘philanthropy’ or ‘charity’. Conversely, you will want to avoid a concentration of key words that are not relevant such as ‘Brittany Spears’ or ‘horseback riding’. Unless, of course, your humanitarianism involves giving a horse to Brittany, but you get the picture.

It all has to do with ‘relevance’. Relevance is how closely related your keywords are to the subject you most want to be indexed for in the search engines. As the search engines scour your post for relevant keywords, they will choose the predominant topics and use those to index your article. In this way, a reader can find you when they search for ‘humanitarianism’ in a search engine. The key for you is in making the relevant keywords within your article easy to identify. The easier it is for a search engine to determine the keywords in your article, the more prominent you will be in the search results for your given topic.

Research

One of the most daunting tasks in effective blogging is in finding the most appropriate keywords. It’s not that hard, but does take a little ‘know-how’.

The first steps in your research are to determine the subject of your article, to outline topics, and to write down your assumed keywords. Assuming keywords is easy; just imagine what your audience might type into a search engine in hopes of finding your specific article.

Next, you’ll want to conduct some scientific research to confirm your choices, or to find viable alternatives.

A great tool for this task is found at http://google.com/keywords . The keyword research tool at Google is as good as any, and takes advantage of Googles remarkable collection of data. Once you enter your assumed keyword idea in their form, and get past the annoying-but-necessary captcha, you’ll be presented with a spreadsheet of data that now requires some study.

Listed in order of relevance, with the most relevant term at the top, you will see a list of related terms with information about how much competition there is for the term, and how many local searches and global searches have been conducted on the term in the last month.

Your job now is to find keyword alternatives that have a good balance of competition vs hits. The higher the competition value, the more the keyword is used in other blogs and the lower the chances are for you to stick out among the crowd. High competition keywords are tempting because of the high number of hits they usually receive. However you may do better by selecting a low competition term and shooting for a greater piece of a smaller pie. You don’t necessarily need to avoid high competition terms, so long as you are working in the lower competition ones, too.

Note that further down in the spreadsheet you will find a list of alternative terms that may help in your creative writing exercise.

Creative Writing

Perhaps the most difficult step in your effort to incorporate keywords, creative writing now requires that you come up with a story, and develop the ability to include terms in an appropriate density. You’ll want to include as many as 10 percent keywords to your SEO copywritng. Tricky, but over time it becomes second nature. Ten percent may be a bit too much for some articles, so shoot for a minimum of five percent.

It is also important to maintain ‘human readability’. The search engines understand language, grammar, and punctuation, so you will want to pay attention to these important aspects of writing to avoid appearing as spam and receiving an index penalty. Write your article in natural language, and use keywords as often as you can without creating lists or appearing to be blatant.

Be sure to modify your keywords with localization as well as with descriptive terms. There are two ways to modify your keywords;

1. With a descriptive modifier, so that if our primary keyword is ‘humanitarian’, we can say ‘humanitarian relief’ to make it a stronger keyword phrase.
2. With a localization such as ‘Miami Humanitarian’, which helps the search engines localize my search index for people within the Miami area searching for the term ‘humanitarian’.

Localization has become one of the most important aspects of keyword usage because of the mobile revolution, where people search from a mobile device to find local products and services. The search engines have responded with more localized search results and listings. You can take advantage of this simply by adding the name of your town in front of a keyword.

Keyword Linking

Finally, be sure to link your keywords to appropriate pages around your site, or to an appropriate page on your home site. A few rules of thumb to consider include:

Don’t link excessively. In a 300-word article it is appropriate to link 3-4 keywords. More and you will appear to be spamming, and will dilute the authority you are giving to each keyword. (Authority is a measurement of strength based on the relevance of the article.)

Don’t link a specific keyword more than once; no need to waste authority on the same keyword. Keep it simple for the search engines to follow, and don’t waste their time by leading them to the same place from the same keyword multiple times.

Use alternate tags to add information to your links. This is a great way to help the search engines understand more clearly your terms and their specific modifiers.

I talked about keywords in this week’s tech call with Paul Jensen at Trivani. Here’s an excerpt if you’re the listening type:

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When a new customer signs up for a blog using our automated system for any of our vertical categories (including dentistry and real estate), our system will automatically create an About page, and a Contact Us page. Both pages are fully editible, of course, and can be modified by the user simply by loging into the blog control panel and making any necessary adjustments.

Square Compass created a new Simple Contact plugin for Wordpress expressly for the new feature. The new plugin provides a simple way to add a contact form to your Wordpress blog. The no-frills contact form will be available in the Wordpress plugins library soon. I’ll keep you posted.

As for the new Pages feature in ListPipe, users now have the ability to capture more search engine attention with an automatically customized About page. The About page includes a short, custom paragraph about you based on your input during the registration process. Though simple, the About Us content is designed to give search engines a customized glance at who you are, and provides a more mature position for your ListPipe site.

The Contact Us page is also customized, and includes an automated form that allows your visitors to contact you by completing a simple contact form. The form is customized to deliver the feedback directly to your email address, and includes a Captcha for security, and error checking to help assure you do not get spammed. The form is optimized to ensure, also, that your visitors provide you with at least one method of contact, and warns them if they do not complete the comments field.

We are excited to announce this new feature, and thrilled that we now have a complete solution for those who use ListPipe to capture business leads through Internet marketing.

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Links tell the search engines where you want them to go, and where to apply ‘authority’, or the page’s popularity. Think of your next blog post as ‘the most popular kid in school’, and your links as that person’s ‘favorite friends list’. The ‘friends’ gain a little bit of credibility for being on the list. You get the picture.

Links also help your visitors know where to go for next steps and more information. Your links are literally a calling card for where to go next from the page. As such, make sure your links are made from the most relevant keywords on the page, and make sure those keywords are relevant to their destination. The more relevant the link, the more ‘authority’ the link provides to its destination.

In a good sized article of about 300 words or so, you can afford to place about 2-3 links without appearing to be an abuser. Too many links on a page and the search engines will we wary of your intentions; better to err to the minimum. One or two extremely well placed links will concentrate the page’s authority on the destination pages. Too many and you risk diluting your effort.

As a general rule, only link to an outside page from the same keyword once. No need diluting your authority on multiple links to the same page. There is an exception that has the ability to help; linking to the same destination is not a problem if you are linking from several different keywords. However, make sure the keywords are highly relevant to each other, otherwise you will be diluting your authority yet again and wasting valuable linkage.

Providing alternate tags is another important element. An alternate tag is the text you see when you hover over a link for a second and a little note appears to explain the link. Search engines eat these up, providing you with a second opportunity to clarify your intentions for the link. This is a good opportunity to incorporate localization. For instance, if your keyword is ‘haircut’, a good alternate tag would be ‘Miami haircut’ if you happen to be a salon in South Florida. This alternate tagging strategy will help the search engines associate you with localized searches, which are ever more important with all these iPhones and Blackberries floating around (search engines know where you are, and deliver relevant search results based on your location).

Don’t have a blog to post all these links to? No problem; you can gain authority by creating links in your comments on other relevant blog sites. Most blogs that accept comments will also allow you to tag your comment with a link back to your page. Sort of a repayment for adding a good comment. Make sure you post genuine comments, and only comment on sites that are relevant to your own site. If you are selling haircuts on your site, you won’t get much authority from a site that sells ice cream.

Finally, remember that ‘Content is King‘, and that links are an important element of content. Links help establish your post as more than just a ‘dead end’, and the search engines hate dead ends.

I talked about linking in this week’s tech call with Paul Jensen at Trivani. Here’s an excerpt. It’s about five minutes; let me know what you think.

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When posting to a blog, frequency is often a leading factor. Post length is not as critical, but there are some guidelines.

Writing as few as 50-100 words is adequate. That’s about one or two paragraphs. An article of this length is easy enough to produce without racking your brain for something good to produce, and provides enough juice for the search engines while being short enough to keep your human audience reading.

A perfectly sized post will be about 300 words. This is a good amount of info to provide for SEO, and is just enough for a quick read by your friends. Articles that approach 600 words are too much and risk getting truncated by the search engines, or not finished by humans who loose interest at the 300-400 mark. (interest isn’t fair; usually it’s that we don’t have a lot of time to absorb your wordy story.

Here’s an audio clip of me explaining things:

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A few weeks ago, Google confirmed this in an article titled Google Becomes More Local. The article was not about Google’s plans to open local shops across the country, it was about Google’s understanding that when we search for products and services, we usually want them in the geographic area from which we are searching.

Apple, too, recently revealed that they will support geolocation services in their new iPhone 3.0 software. Geolocation services will allow you to search from your iPhone and receive results based on your current location. Imagine standing on a city corner and searching for ’sushi’ and getting step-by-step directions to the nearest location for lunch. Pretty cool, and very powerful.

To take advantage of these new technologies, and to attract local search traffic to your site, you need to be incorporating geo-tagging and geo-centric keywords. One of the easiest ways to do this is to include the name of your city or town as a modifier for keywords in your articles. For instance, instead of simply stating that you are a ’sushi restaurant’, you might mention that you are an ‘Provo sushi restaurant‘. Using the name of your city helps the search engines understand your location, and is a good way to help capture a typical keyword search.

It helps to understand what your customers may be looking for when they type in a keyword string in a search engine. knowing they may be looking for your service in your town, or even local surrounding cities, will help you attract local customers to your site.

ListPipe articles always include geo-tagging. Our articles are linked using a combination of city names and keywords to help search engines better judge the type of service our customers are providing to a geographic area.

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Here is an excerpt from the call:

Note that there were a few technical snafus, and I didn’t realize the mic was on the computer, and not in the headphones, resulting in some fan noise.

The next one will be better.

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If you are posting a typical article of about 250-300 words, you should be including at least 2-3 links, but not more than 4-5. Links can and should lead to one of three places:

1. Your Home page;
2. Another post on your site;
3. Another site altogether (but make sure it is relevant).

I have a quick video that will show you how to add a link in your Wordpress blog.

Don’t go crazy with your links; just a couple for each post, and remember that linking to an outside site is a good thing. Just make sure the new link opens in a new window, and that the target site is relevant to your content.

Here’s how I create links in my blog:

1. Open two tabs in your browser, one for the blog editing window, and one for the ‘public’ side of your blog;
2. Write your article and get it ready to publish in the editing window. Before publishing…
3. Find a keyword in your new post that you want to link, highlight and copy it;
4. Now, Go to the public blog site (in your other tab) and perform a ‘Search’ for your keyword;
5. You should get a couple articles from your blog in the search results. Select from the list of resulting articles and click the headline;
6. Copy the URL from the browser window and move back to your editing window;
7. With your keyword still highlighted, click the ‘link’ icon at the top of your editing window and past in the URL;
8. Complete the process by identifying a ‘Target’ (open in Same if on your site, open in New if another), and add a Title. Don’t worry about ‘Class’ right now;
9. Hit ’save’, and treat yourself to a donut. Don’t forget to post your new blog article before you head out.

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We have come to rely on links to get us from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ in a relational context, and to provide a sum of information greater than the single page we are visiting. This concept is important in search engine marketing…

Search engines deliver a product to their customers, and that product is a list of search results based on keyword input. If you type into a search engine the words ‘tooth whitening’, you would expect to receive a list of web sites that are relevant to ‘tooth whitening’. Search engine companies know that you will be frustrated with their results if the list does not satisfy at least three basic requirements:

1. Relevant: The resulting sites listed have to be relevant to your keyword search request; in this case ‘tooth whitening’;
2. Current: The resulting sites listed need to present information that is current and not outdated;
3. Informative: The resulting sites listed need to be informative.

Search engine companies work very hard to satisfy these requirements. It is a hard thing to do, and it is difficult to perfect. For this reason there are a few clear leaders in the search engine market, and they are pouring millions into measuring these factors accurately so they can continue providing a good ‘product’.

One important factor in demonstrating relevance, currency, and informativeness is linking.

There are two types of linking strategies you should employ, each of which is important and should not be considered without the other. One is ‘incoming’ links, and the other is ‘outgoing’ links.

We have all heard that incoming links are important, and they are. Search engines are interested in the number of other sites that are linking to yours. This helps establish a certain degree of popularity and relevance. The thinking goes that if your site is linked to from many other sites, then your site must me important to the sites within your category.

Search engines are wary of incoming link strategies because there are so many ways to ‘cheat’. For instance, some marketers have essentially carpet-bombed the internet with links to their own site. There are tools and services that make this easy, but there is a risk: carpet-bombing your URL all over the web means that you will be receiving links from sites that are not relevant, and therefore dilute your site’s relevance factor.

To explain: Imagine your site about ‘tooth whitening’ receives links from sites that specialize in ’saddles’, ‘hunting’, and ‘political commentary’. Search engines will measure these factors and may determine that your site is not relevant to any of these items, including ‘tooth whitening’. Your site appears to be the equivalent of a ‘dictionary’ to the search engines, with no clear or specific subject (at least based on the links).

Your best rule of thumb with incoming links is to cultivate links from relevant sites, and to reject links from sites that are too disparate. Links from social bookmarking sites are the exception, and simply indicate popularity without focus on relevance.

The second linking strategy you need to consider is ‘outbound’ linking. Perhaps even more important that inbound linking, outbound linking considers the links you have created on your site, and to which sites they point to.

There has been general reluctance on the part of our clientele for linking to other sites based on a desire to contain visitors to their own site. This is an important consideration and there are, of course, appropriate and innapropriate times and places to place outbound links. For bloggers, who’s primary product is ‘information’, outbound links are critical.

When a search engine measures your site for relevance, currency, and informativeness, they look at the sites to which you are linking for a ’second opinion’ of who you are and what you have to say.

Most importantly, outbound links tell the search engines that your visitors will be introduced to additional relevant content that is beyond your site. Think about it: when a search engine delivers their ‘product’, they want to present sites that are relevant, current, and informative. How better to add value to this objective than to include additional destinations in your presentation?

Put a different way: Search engines would rather deliver a relevant starting point in a search result than a ‘dead end’. Is your site a ‘dead end’, with no exits to relevant pages? Or are you a ‘great place to get started’ with lots of relevant places to go?

Which site would you rather get in a search result? …See what I mean?

Bottom line: Cultivate lots of links from relevant external sites, and don’t be afraid to create links within your content that reveal relevant, interesting places to go. You will literally help others while you help yourself. It’s a network, after all.

Tip: Make sure your links open the destination page in a new window or tab so your visitors don’t loose you.

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