Now Facebook is getting into the mix with Facebook Deals, a new service that provides the ability for businesses to offer incentives to their customers for “checking in” or visiting their location.  Facebook has basically followed the same check-in process from the existing location-based services, but they have also put their own spin on the service.

How it Works [Intro Video]:

Step 1:  Claim Your Facebook Places Listing

Something I found very tricky when I first was trying out Facebook Deals, were how there are local listings (similar to Google Places), called Facebook Places that you will have to link to your existing Fan Page. Luckily Facebook makes it very easy to link your Facebook Place with your Fan Page.

To do this:

Do a search inside Facebook for your Places page.  If you don’t see it, you can create your local places page; if you do see if click it and go to the bottom of the left sidebar and click “Is this your business?”. Once you do this, Facebook will call your phone number and give you a 4 digit pin number that you must put in to verify your listing.

Step 2:  Merge With Your Fan Page

Once you have verified your listing, go to your Fan Page and look at the bottom of the left sidebar and click “Merge with existing Page”.  This will bring up a list of the Fan Pages you manage, then click on the page you wish to merge the Facebook Place with.  This will allow you to create a deal that will be integrated nicely into your Fan Page.

Step 3:  Setup Your Deal

Facebook has a number of different reward options they allow for users who Check-in at your location.   Choose the deal and special offer that you would like to use to incentivize your customers.

1. Individual Deal: Reward customers when they check-in to your business.
2. Friend Deal: Reward groups of customers when they check-in together.
3. Loyalty Deal: Reward customers with checking in a certain amount of times.
4. Charity Deal: Pledge to donate to a charity each time someone checks in.

Step 4:  Start Marketing Your Deal

Once you have created your deal and it has been approved, you can begin using the Facebook Ad platform to start promoting your Deal.  To do this you will need to setup an advertising account and determine which Facebook users you want to target.

If you would like to download the complete guide on Facebook Deals, you can download it here.

The post Facebook Deals: How to Setup Your First Facebook Deal first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Google Profiles let you enter a lot of information about yourself, from your current job position, location, schools, interests, etc. The beauty is you can also have links – lots of them – with keyword anchor text. And if you have had your account for awhile (I’m not sure when the “cutoff” date way) your links may all be dofollow.

So why do you need to have a great Google Profile? If you are trying to get a Google Buzz following by following others, think about which person will make a better impression in someone’s list of new followers.

Of course, the person who will most likely be followed back will be the one whose profile shows common interests, as well as interesting activity.

As you can see from the above shot of my own Google Profile, there are some key areas you will want to fill out in your profile that will be the “first impressions” people see when visiting.

1. Photo

One of the biggest selling points of your profile will be your picture, especially if you upload an image that you use across all of your other online and social profiles.

2. First and Last Name

An added bonus is when people search you by your name, your Google profile may come up in the first page of search results.

This may come in handy if you have a very common name that is hard to rank for.

3. What I Do

Right under your name will be your main description, which can be your job title, specialties, etc. These are supposed to add good SEO value to your profile.

4. Current Company

This comes up right after your headline “at Your Company”, and is also displayed with your name in search results (as seen in the John Smith example above). If you don’t have a company but a blog, putting your blog name here would be a good idea as well.

5. Where I Live Now

Also added underneath your headline and in search results is your current location, which may help people identify you from others (for a common name) or as a local expert.

6. Your Photos

Do you have a Flickr or Picasa account? You can connect your photo sharing site account to your Google Profile, and (with Flickr at least) even choose which set to share.

So, let’s say you only want to share pics of yourself and others at events like Blog World Expo. Just share that album to show what a networking superstar you are.

7. Links

The links in the right sidebar are composed from the links you add, which are available at the bottom of your edit profile page.

Google will try to find some of your public profiles based on your email address, but you can always add your own with keyword anchor text using the “Add custom links to my profile” section. You can add as many links as you like!

8. Something I Can’t Find Using Google

This one seems like a silly question, but does show up, so make it count!

9. My Superpower

Your superpowers should be the things you do best!

10. Interests

Use this area to add some personality to your profile – help others get to know the real you behind your profession.

11. My Places

The My Places map incorporates the location of where you live now and places where you grew up or lived.

12. About Me

Although the About Me section is not the default view of your profile, it is a great place to write a longer, more thorough description about what you are all about.

You can also use this spot to include even more keyword anchor text links, but don’t feel bad duplicating them, as some people may only see the ones in the right sidebar while viewing your Buzz activity stream.

13. Contact Info

I chose to add a lot of my contact information in the About Me section, as you can only enter phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and instant messenger information in that section. But you can, again, duplicate the info so people can find it in any spot on your profile that they look.

Muting Connected Networks

While perusing other Google Profiles, I found one other interesting setting that helps clear up the clutter in your Buzz stream. If you click on someone’s name in Buzz, you will see their Buzz activity and a section on their connected sites.

If you enjoy following someone on multiple networks, and you want to, say, stop seeing certain people’s Twitter or other social network feeds from sites they have connected to their Buzz, simply go to their profile and “Mute” the network from which you no longer want to see updates.

Your Google Profile

Have you filled out your Google Profile yet? What other important information do you include in yours?

The post Setting Up Your Google Profile for Google Buzz Users first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Given below are 8 important tips to help you plan an inner structure which conforms to both usability guidelines and  SEO.

1. Link Categorization
This site feature is technically termed as ‘navigability’. While developing a website for success, you should pay careful attention to the categories and subcategories that you create. All the internal linking on your site should be ‘relevant’. The link structure should be appropriately optimized, both for people and search engines. Keep the ‘task flow’ alive throughout the site.

2. Anchor Text
The next important thing that you need to consider is the anchor text linking of your website. Today’s users are smarter. Anchor text links like ‘Click Here’ are almost dead. Webmasters should try to use anchor text that entice users to click links. You should use call-to-action anchor text like ‘creating an ad campaign’, ‘improve direct mail response’, ‘designs that really work’ etc.

3. Redundancy
Here, redundancy refers to repetition of links. You should not link the same page double or three times from the same place. For example, placing a ‘Read More’ link under a post title which already links to the corresponding page is redundancy. You should either link the post title (that appears on a list) or provide a ‘Read More’ or ‘Continue Reading’ link at the end of the two- or three-liners. Choose any one of the two options.

4. No-follow Attributes
While setting up the internal structure of a website, you will come across multiple links which are not so important. There may be some page links to which you do not want to pass on page rank. How do you solve this? For the very purpose, you have the no-follow tags available to you. Use these no-follow tags to your benefit and keep the search engines well informed.

5. Sitemap
An important part of a site’s internal link structure is the creation of a well-defined sitemap. A sitemap keeps informed both search engines and people. It is a good idea to create both – a static sitemap (for users) and an XML sitemap (for search engines). Since well-explained sitemaps keep the search engines informed, it also helps obtain higher rankings.

6. Accessibility
Do not bury important web pages in deep links. Both in terms of usability guidelines and SEO, all the important pages on your site should not be more than two clicks away from the homepage. Search engines love to visit pages that are easily accessible from the website’s homepage.

7. Dangling Links
Do not have web pages that prove to be a dead-end for users. Would you like the search engine spider to crawl a page which has ‘nowhere to go’? These links can be termed as dangling links. If you have such pages on your site, you need to optimize them appropriately to improve the inner link structure.

8. Broken Links
Keep a close watch on all the internal links of your website to keep them error-free. Make sure your site does not have any error pages like 404 or ‘Not Found’. There are various tools that you can use to detect such pages on your website. Fix these error pages as soon as you find them.

The post 8 Tips to Improve Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure first appeared on StayOnSearch.

1) Do Your Homework

The first step is to figure out how you can improve your product descriptions and that starts with knowing your starting baseline. If the current descriptions are non-existent or if they were perhaps copied directly from the manufacturer’s database then right off the bat, you know there is a good amount of work ahead of you. However, if a human being from your company has touched them, then chances are it is a decent start. Another important factor is to consider how important product descriptions are to your buyer from a conversions standpoint. Chances are they are important.  After reading the first two articles, you should realize that the product descriptions are extremely important to a search engine and from a visibility standpoint.

Put yourselves in the buyer’s shoes. Do your product descriptions act as a bridge helping to complete the transaction with confidence or as a fork-in-the-road that only leads to confusion?  If you feel that you are too biased, then seek the opinions of outsiders. The importance of product descriptions (for customers) changes from one industry to another, but it is always important to have unique, fresh content from the search engine perspective. Talk to potential customers (use social media channels like Twitter and Facebook to reach out) or current customers (give them something of value for completing a survey), friends and family could also help or if the budget permits it, use an independent user group (usertesting.com is inexpensive when used in moderation).

Compare your product descriptions to the competition. As the optimizing your product descriptions post pointed out, you’ll need to consider two competitors, search engine competitors (those who continually rank in the top three positions on Google for the product(s) you are selling) and traditional competitors (those who you feel are your competitors when it comes to pricing, advertising or other considerations). Look for consistency between the competitors and figure out if your descriptions are lacking anything obvious. Take note of the format, keyword usage, and the overall voice in which the product descriptions were written. Then make a “product description wish list” that includes what you currently have, what you certainly need, and what would be nice to have.

2) Establish the Plan

Regardless if you concluded that your product descriptions need only minor improvements or a major overhaul, you will need to sit down with your team and put together a plan to address the issues. The standard project management rules and requirements apply, as your team will need to determine; timeframe, milestones, resources, budget, etc. Obviously, your project will largely be dependent upon the budget and resources (you currently have or would have a future need for). Identify the goal of your project, is it primarily to differentiate your product descriptions from competitors to generate greater visibility and traffic from search engines, or are you more interested in providing unique, helpful content that could make an immediate impact on conversion rates. Whether your site sells 100 products or 70,000 products, an important component of any optimization plan is segmenting the products into priority levels. The goal will be to identify the products that are mission important and then move down the ladder from the top.

When classifying products by priority it will be important to sit down with both the individual(s) that monitor your website’s analytics as well as the business leaders making the decisions. Every company has it’s “bread and butter” products that have strategic importance. However, much to the dismay of your business leaders, those products are not necessarily the products with the most visibility or even orders from the search engines perspective. Therefore, it is critical to have both parties identify their top products based on whatever metrics make sense to that particular company.

After you have segmented your products into their respected classifications, the last is to establish the metrics you will use to gauge the success of any optimization efforts. As always, consider both your customers and the search engines. The metrics will also be dependent upon the project’s goal. However a few pre-optimization metrics to analyze and subsequently track through the life of the project are: search engine rankings (for your product’s targeted keywords), search engine visibility (how many long tail keywords are generating traffic to your product page), unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course conversion rate.

3) Set the Plan in Motion

Now that you have compiled your resources, set your timeframe and prioritized your products, it is time to start optimizing. This step could arguably be the easiest. Make sure to follow the plan and push the team to hit their guidelines. Complete the highest priority products before moving into the second set of products and so forth. It is also important to track the optimization itself. This can be as detailed or as basic as you see fit. However, at the very least I’d recommend backing up or saving the old descriptions as well as tracking what changes were made, who was in charge of the optimization, and the date in which they were implemented on the site.

If the main purpose of optimizing product descriptions is to improve e-commerce metrics (reduce bounce rates or improve conversion rates) then you may want to use a small PPC campaign (Google AdWords) as a controlled testing environment. This will allow you to test multiple formats and or styles in order to determine which is the most effective (and of course, Stay On Search has a good article about how to set-up an A/B test).

4) Analyze the Results

Unless you are a supreme marketer who knows without a doubt, that the optimization you implement will surely provide improvements, you will need to analyze the performance of the website, pre and post optimization. It is important to track the results of your optimization from both the search engine and customer perspective. When to conduct the Pre and Post optimization analysis is dependent upon a number of variables such as how authoritative your site is (contributes to how often your site is crawled and re-indexed) and how much web traffic your site receives (you need a significant sample size to draw accurate conclusions). The individual who manages the website’s analytics and reporting should be able to make recommendations for how long to allow the test to run prior to optimization. It will more than likely be a few months out before you will be able to grasp the full effects of your work.

5) Repeat Steps 2 – 4

After you feel comfortable that you have significantly improved your product descriptions from both a customer and search engine perspective then pat yourself on the back for a job well done. However, do not fall into the trap of thinking this plan is complete. Give it some time and re-visit ways to improve your new product descriptions after a few months because after all, nothing is perfect, and as we all know, search engines love fresh content!  Think about moving onto the second, third or even third set of product priorities.

The post How To Improve Your Product Descriptions first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Ahh yes, we have all received e-mails from SEO companies promising the world for $199/month!  Unfortunately there are more unethical SEO companies out there than ones you can trust.  So if you are a business or organization looking for a reputable firm to hire, how do you know what to look for? or more importantly what NOT to look for?

Here are 25 red flags you should be aware of if a SEO company says:

1. We Promise First Page Rankings
2. We Promise #1 Keyword Placement
3. We Promise a Certain Number of Keywords to Rank on Page 1
4. We Guarantee x Percentage in Organic Traffic
5. SEO Can Be a Short-term Marketing Strategy
6. Pay Us to Get on Google
7. We Have a Special Arrangement with Google
8. You Don’t Have to Contribute to a Social Media Strategy
9. You Don’t Need to Worry About Website Content
10. We Will Replicate Your Site and Put it on Multiple Domains
11. We Will Duplicate a Page Hundreds of Times
12. We Can Hide Text by Matching the Same Color as the Background
13. Stuffing the Keywords in the Title Will Help
14. Automated Link Building Will Help Your Rankings
15. We Know the Exact Algorithm Google Uses to Rank Sites
16. Rankings Are Everything in SEO
17. We Don’t Need to Touch Your Website Code
18. We Can Take Articles From Other Sources and Put Them on Your Site
19. You Need to Pay Monthly for your Local Business Listings to Show Up
20. Visitor Traffic is the Only Thing to Worry About
21. You Have to Submit Your Website to the Search Engines
22. Reciprocal Link Exchange Can Increase Your Rankings
23. We Can Get Your Site Unbanned for x Dollars
24. All You Have to Do is Add Keywords in the Code
25. We Build Only Manual Links – Even Though They Are Automated

The post 25 Promises and Advice Given By Unethical SEO Firms first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Key features of HootSuite for iPhone include:

• Customizable user interface with sortable tabs and columns
• Easy navigation thanks to column swiping
• Schedule tweets
• Update multiple accounts at once
• Save searches
• Track statistics
• Share photos
• Import and expand lists
• Explore trending topics

Watch the demo:

As you can see from the demo, this app will be able to do everything you are use to doing with Hootsuite, just from your mobile.  I am looking forward to downloading the app and seeing if the usability is as good or better than Tweetie.

Hootsuite iPhone App ($1.99)

• Download from the iTunes store now
• Follow Hootsuite on Twitter

The post Hootsuite Releases Their Much Anticipated iPhone App first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Google will also be holding a charity event that will allow people to give donations via Google Checkout to non-profit organizations including Climate Savers Computing, One Economy Corporation, and Engineers Without Borders USA.  Once this program is complete, Google will match donations made, up to a maximum $250,000 across the three organizations.

Participating Airports

Related Blog Posts

• The Business Insider: Free Airport Wifi From Google This Christmas
• WebProNews: Google Offering Free Wi-Fi In Airports During The Holidays
• TheNextWeb: Google’s Christmas Present? Free Wifi Across US Airports
• Marketing Pilgrim:  ‘Til The Season for Free Wifi
• LifeHacker: Google Offers Free Wi-Fi at Airports During the Holidays

The post Google Offering Free Airport Wifi For The Holidays first appeared on StayOnSearch.

1. Initial Keyword List: To start your keyword research you want to brainstorm a starter list of keywords, phrases, and terms that you feel people would use to find you. Since you probably have a pretty good idea about your industry, you could probably come up with 5-10 keywords that people would use to find you. That list that you just created will act as a starting point to find other keywords and phrases that you may have missed or didn’t think about.
2. Analytics Data: If possible, look through your analytics data to see which keywords people used to find you. Ideally if you have goals set up, for example, you are tracking a thank you page on your contact form, sort your keywords by contact forms submitted. This will help you find keywords that most importantly converted to leads or sales.
3. Keyword Research Tool: There are plenty of good keyword research tools that you can use to find additional terms, along with their search volume. Even some of the free keyword tools out there are almost, or as powerful, as the paid tools. Put your initial keyword list into these keyword tools and they will generate a huge list of related terms that you can add to your master keyword list.
4. Analyze Your Master Keyword List: Once you have come up with your master keyword list, find the words that are most relevant to what you do and the content on your site. Use those keyword tools to see how often each of those terms are actually being searched. Even though the tools give you estimates, you can still get a pretty good estimate.
5. Test in PPC (Optional): I made this step optional because some smaller businesses simply do not have the funding to spend on pay-per-click campaigns. However if you are able to, test out those keywords in Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. PPC advertising is great for seeing if those terms are actually getting searched. Once you have enough data that is statistically significant you can pull some hard numbers to show which keywords/phrases are being searched.
6. Implementing those Keywords: Once you have come up with your list and possibly tested them, you can then optimize your site for those keywords. Use those keywords in your title tags, meta tags, throughout your content, links, etc…

For more information on keyword research check out Back To The Basics: Getting Started with Keyword Research

Search Term: Chevy Cobalt

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

<< Part 1: Search Engine Friendly Site Structure Part 3: Website Usability >>

The post Your Website SEO Checkup: Part 2 of 8 – Keyword Research first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Facebook’s recent acquisition of Instagram is proof of the company’s promise. You might not consider Instagram a top source for your own business, but it’s time to reconsider. Your customers are online, and online readers are excited by photo-rich content. Nobody’s reading anymore, it seems, but people can’t resist a great photo.

The key word to keep in mind is “great,” because anyone can snap a photo and put it online. However, the lenses Instagram offers appeal to a younger crowd and audiences more sensitive to vintage touches. If your customer base is under 35, they’re not going to be happy with a photo that looks like it was taken at a Yuen Lui studio. Whether you’re a motorcycle attorney or snowboarding gear company, image matters and Instagram can help.

Instagram + Online Presence

You probably have a Facebook page for your business. Hopefully, it’s a solid social media presence with daily posts, updates and photo albums. It really means something when someone likes your page, because they’re gone out of their way to keep in touch. Respect this nod of approval and keep your fans entertained and informed.

How many times have you passed over another post from a page you liked? Long, boring posts that are completely unrelated to your customers can quickly get you axed from a newsfeed. However, your fans will linger for a while on a photo. They’ll really take an interest in an Instagram photo that appeals to their style, likes and age.

Use Instagram as an Engagement Tool

Hosting a competition is one of the best ways to engage your current customers and drum up a larger customer base. Use Instagram to make it even easier, asking for Instagram photo submissions related to your business. If you’re a shoe company, ask for Instagram photos of customers in their favorite shoes. Running companies can ask for snapshots from their customers’ most recent runs.

A good competition has a prize that contestants really want. This can be free merchandise or services. Make sure that the prize is truly worthwhile and, ideally, worth a substantial amount of money. You might not be able to get a good competition with a $10 gift card, but you can with a year’s supply of cupcakes.

Let it Work for You

Technology is meant to make your life easier, so take advantage. Instagram lets you instantly and easily change and improve photo images. Forget Photoshop or other expensive, difficult programs. Start getting acquainted with the tool that’s designed for quick use.

Remember that Instagram is a lot more than a fun way to share photos of your last family reunion. It’s a true marketing tool in its own right, and it’s completely free. You need to speak to your customers on their level, and for many younger customers that means Instagram and Facebook. So snap (and filter) away. Need inspiration? See how some other brands are using Instagram.

The post How to Use Instagram to Build Your Business first appeared on StayOnSearch.

Probably the most notable website to be hit was Cult of Mac, which is an Apple tech blog. Cult of Mac is linked to by a range of external sites as an expert resource on all things Apple and is frequently cited by sites such as Techmeme. After the farmer algorithm change came into effect, traffic experienced a massive drop despite 100% original content and provoking the ire of Cult editor, Leander Kahney, who claimed the site was a ‘civilian casualty’.

PRNewswire was also hit by the farmer change, though behind the initial numbers there is the reality that websites will be pulling down these releases to pass off as their own content. In this instance, the fact that someone else is scraping your content means you are getting hit, though whether this is as a result of the farmer change or the scraper algorithm change is unclear.

Blogging darling, Technorati was also hit with a sharp drop in traffic and loss in rankings. Whilst Technorati provides real value for bloggers, the fact it is aggregating content and information from the blogosphere is enough to downgrade it to spam site in Google’s eyes. Less well-known websites got hit too: Healthhype.com (lost 50% of its traffic with 100% original content at the high end of the quality spectrum); Theteacherscorner.net (13 years old, masses of original educational content and a 50% drop in traffic leading to 40% drop in ad revenue); and I4UNews.com (a tech blog which saw a 30% traffic drop).

Meanwhile, some of the established content farms which are the ostensible targets of the algorithm change have experienced mixed results. Hubpages reports no material changes, but thinks it is still too early to say anything. Demand Media has reported some drops in rankings for some of its sister sites, but eHow rankings have improved in certain instances. EzineArticles experienced a significant drop in traffic (-35% on one day alone) which some may feel is harsh, but then again isn’t EzineArticles simply a content farm for third-party companies to plug into anyway?

The only thing clear at the moment is that there is massive upheaval in traffic patterns for a large number of websites, many of which cannot be termed ‘content farms’. An issue with zeroing in on the reason for the rankings drop is the proximity of the two major algorithm changes. That and no-one is in a position to accurately say why rankings have changed in specific terms, at least not yet.

Since the Change – Quality Content

Since the change, Cult of Mac’s traffic and ranking has recovered, and I expect (note: I expect, but cannot be certain) that quality websites will also see their rankings recover too as Google tweaks the algorithm. Therein lies the crux of the issue – content quality.

Websites which have eschewed the “more is good” strategy, and focused on quality, appear to be less likely to suffer in the current rankings fallout. Google really seems to be dealing with the problem of content for search engines-v-human users issue, but then again isn’t this a good thing?

I’m not going to reiterate the content quality debate here – I subscribe to it wholeheartedly – because there is a more fundamental issue at play. Effectively, Google is the market in search engine land. Google makes the rules and we all have to follow them, or suffer massive traffic and revenue consequences. For a website such as Theteacherscorner.net, losing 40% of ad revenue will have a major impact on the viability of that business. The correct business decision is to already be sure to have diversified risk away from sole reliance on one income stream, but if Google is the dominant revenue stream, there is only so much diversification which can take place.

The 800 Pound Guerrilla

Whatever Google does impacts the entire commercial Internet structure. We have experienced the downside of this situation very recently with the Big Banks almost collapsing and causing a global meltdown of the world’s financial system. The argument there was that the big banks were considered “too big to fail”, which is how they managed to capture so much taxpayer money to bail them out. I’m not suggesting Google will ever go cap in hand to Congress for a bail out, but there is a serious systemic issue when one company wields so much power over the market.

You’re going to see something of what I mean when the Google algorithm changes are rolled out worldwide. Despite all of the upheaval caused in recent days, the changes only impact the United States at the moment.

The fundamental takeaway from the algorithm changes and their impact on traffic patterns and rankings is simple – we need more search engine competition for Google so that systemic shocks to eCommerce are minimized. Google cannot be allowed to become too big to fail.

The post Google Algorithm Change Claims Victims but Is Google Too Big To Fail? first appeared on StayOnSearch.