Here’s the 9 Tech Tips:

1) Understand Edge Rank, the formula that controls visibility of your newsfeed. Facebook admits that only 16% of fans actually sees your posted content and recommends you “sponsor” your posts (pay them money)

Here are the factors that control how many actual see your posts (without paying for ads)

1) Affinity – relationship with – those who have engaged, liked and commented, will more likely see your posts
2) weight – posts with more comments, likes and photos, are shown more often
3) recency – how recently post was made

Can get high engagement with just 1-2 posts a day

edgerankchecker.com

Encourage commenting on all your posts, ask short question to get more comments

2) Include photos, also get more weight – post with 90% of posts.
example, see marismith, image with the link best. Videos and questions also good to increase weight

limit updates to about 160 characters.

3) Don’t post via 3rd party apps – Hootsuite great for twitter, not FB. share button does not show up. BUT if include a photo will include share. Can still get visibility in feed. So include photos and post manually 1-2 a day.

4) Change cover photo regularly every few days, include call to action and link in the description when click on it

5) Redirect Tab: use woobox.com add app that allows you to redirect to site directly – use one of valuable TAB spots for redirect to opt-in page for product.

6) Monitor insights stats – just enough to measure what is doing well and what is NOT. Can look at posts users asked to be hidden too.

7) Respond to comments, as fast as possible. When brands reach out 28% will make a purchase – overcomplicated marketing – reach out, use first names. Can use someone else to moderate on  your behalf, use real names.

Use 2 Browsers – log in as personal on one browser and as Page on another

hyperalerts.no – can keep an eye on anyones FB page (even competitors)

9) make use of interest list – use facebook experts and resources like Mari does

Offers are free to set up – can be claimed by mobile devices

Saying is “when marketers move in, members move out”. Be a member, not a marketer, be in the trenches.

Average engagement rate 2%, Lennar got it up to 9% – very good!
(engagement is talking about / likes)

Check out Tabsite app for contests etc. for your Facebook Page

Find own sweet spot posting frequency -Mari’s is 2 x per day

Has the recent “Penguin” Google update affected your search rankings? Some major and legitimate sites have been hit hard by this recent algorithm update and SEO pros and webmasters are generally NOT happy about it.

The good news is that Google is trying to improve relevancy for seekers and remove questionable link farms and other sites that just serve to “Spam” the search results. The bad news is that honest and high quality sites with all original content have also been penalized with sudden drops in rankings and traffic which can make or break some businesses.

The common practice of anchor text linking has been hit and sites with 65% or more of their incoming links with keywords in the anchor text have lost rankings. This site is currently #2 for internet marketing santa barbara, but if I had posted on a bunch of sites a link TO my site with the anchor text as internet marketing santa barbara, I might have been penalized by this latest update. (Fortunately for me and my clients, almost all of my rankings have not suffered. Not so for many others.)

The New SEO

This is what Google loves to see now:

Content, Content – Google loves content and best NOT on some article directory linking TO your site, but on your site directly. Post those articles on your own blog directly.

Regular Updates – yes freshness counts like at the grocery store and frequent updates help

Social Signals – Stumble, Tweet, Facebook Like and Comment and Share (shares best)

Video – Google loves natural and real content video (not auto generated garbage)

Authority Links – real folks on real sites linking to you. NOT the link farms of bogus links or other PAID links

Bottom line: Post only high quality, original content on your sites and be as natural as possible with all efforts known as “SEO” – avoid keyword “stuffing” on your pages and also in the incoming link campaigns. If getting incoming links, have a natural variety of types of links coming in from real websites:  website name, website URL, keyword phrase 1, phase 2 etc. Avoid aggressive link building that sends a bunch of links using a single keyword string, a red flag now to Google. If you find what Google considers to be “bad neighborhood” links, ask the linking site to remove them.

For more, see this excellent article by SEO pro Danny Goodwin: searchenginewatch.com

AND, contact me for a free SEO evaluation of your site.

Related articles

• Google Penguin Update: How to Create Natural Looking Backlink Profiles(quickonlinetips.com)

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• Google Penguin Update: Seriously, Avoid Doorway Pages(webpronews.com)

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Like most of our sites, this one is based on the popular, robust WordPress platform which is both user friendly and search engine friendly. Cat and her team of blog authors (including me) can log on directly using their own accounts and enter blog posts to be included in this online magazine.

Key elements for ANY effective site:

Video on front page – video sets the tone and allows you to “meet” Cat to get a sense who she is. Small embedded YouTube video upper right used in this case.

Email opt-in with free report offer on home page and blog pages – used Mail Chimp to manage email collection and automatic delivery of a free PDF report. Allows an email list to be built that becomes an asset to ANY business.

Integrated Blog – The Word Press platform allows a dynamic, article driven, search friendly site that does NOT have to look like a standard blog – this was a custom Word Press theme design with an integrated blog for Cat to add articles and posts.

Facebook integration – Facebook increasingly important for both personal and business use. We included the Like Box on the home page and blog and also Facebook comments on every blog post, which allows for easy commenting for all Facebook users. Also helped her customize, prep and promote her own Facebook business fan page as well, which serves as a mini-website: http://www.facebook.com/passionateliving

Contact me with any questions, or if you need a GREAT site or site enhancements to your current website. Any of the above can and should be added to your current site if missing any of these components.

Wayne

Instead of searching for a contact form or email or phone number, how would it be if folks could reach you directly via Skype, whenever you were online? Directly from a button on your website?

Just found this handy post by Ann Premazon that shows you exactly how to do it. (and you can always hire us to do it for you) I plan on adding this button to my Kaizen site soon.

Do you have a website or blog where you offer and sell products or a service? If you do, keep reading. If you don’t… keep reading anyway, this might come in handy. Imagine how connected your visitors would feel if they had the opportunity to speak to you directly in an instant. Instead of leaving a written comment, they could press the button and speak with you. You can answer their questions right away, hold chat parties and ultimately sell more of your product!

Continue reading…

Key elements for ANY effective site:

Video on front page – video sets the tone and allows you to “meet” Tamra to get a sense of her work

Email opt-in with free report on home page and blog pages – used Mail Chimp to manage email collection and automatic delivery of a free PDF report. Allows an email list to be built that becomes an asset to ANY business.

Integrated Blog – The Word Press platform allows a dynamic, article driven, search friendly site that does NOT have to look like a standard blog – this was a custom Word Press theme design with an integrated blog for Tamra to add articles and posts. (Tamra also loves Word Press as it allows her to make all content updates directly and she learned it quickly!)

Facebook integration – Facebook increasingly important for both personal and business use. We included the Like Box on the home page and blog and also Facebook comments on every blog post, which allows for easy commenting for all Facebook users. Also helped her customize, prep and promote her own Facebook business fan page as well, which serves as a mini-website: http://www.facebook.com/InnerLifeExplorations

Effective Copy – Thanks to collaborator and expert copywriter Erica Schreiber, WriterErica for finding and expressing so well the “voice” of Tamra.

Great Design – Thanks to Tricia Evenson at Evenson Design Group for a perfect logo design that set the graphical tone of the site. We worked with that top banner as a foundation for the rest of the site design. Also, thanks to Meganne Forbes for use of her beautiful watercolor artwork -  Meganne Forbes Gallery

A great team! This was a team effort and could NOT have done this without my fellow teammates. Thanks all!

Contact me with any questions, or if you need a GREAT site or site enhancements to your current website. Any of the above can and should be added to your current site if missing any of these components.

Wayne

Google bomb dropped last week: The most radical shake up in search in the history of Google? For SEO pros, this throws a serious monkey wrench into the works, as we generally like to get our clients keywords into the top 10 search results. But now what if there are NO universal top 10 search results. Every searcher gets DIFFERENT search results. Whoa! Basic principles of sound SEO will still apply but once again, Google has changed the game!

From their blog:

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features…

Continue Reading >>

A recent reaction forwarded to me by the author John Schuster: “Who are the media folks who put your movie together?  It is so well-done!  WOW!” I tend to agree

Music by the late great Pat Milliken, watch in full screen by hitting button lower right and then click on video to jump to original movie with a “Free Gift” button below – click this to get a free chapter of John’s excellent book and a special discount link to buy the book at 30% off. It’s a good one!

Sure, much of these 2 Billion views are “viral” dancing cats and such things, but increasingly, small businesses of all kinds are using YouTube in their marketing to directly increase sales. A fun example is the now semi-famous Will It Blend campaign from Blendtec, which increased product sales 700%, 5 X the companies old record.

The campaign educates while entertaining, using clever lab coat humor to ask a funny question: what can’t you put in this powerful blender? The Blendtec YouTube channel now boasts 170M video views and 40K channel subscribers. If you have not seen one of these, here is the Will It Blend iphone video. Note: do not try this at home (the black smoke from a pulverized iphone is most certainly toxic.)

Introducing vSEO – Video Search Engine Optimization

One of my online marketing mentors is YouTube “Queen” Julie Perry, who introduced me recently to a whole new subset of SEO, called vSEO, a study of what it takes to get your video to the top of the search engines. See Julie Perrys recent article at Fastcompany.com blog site: How to Make YouTube Part of Your Social Media Marketing.

YouTube Video Optimization = Content + SEO + Community

Julie also introduced me to a great vSEO resource: reelseo.com (clever name eh?) According to ReelSEO founder Mark Robertson, it’s not just about tags and text anymore. The basic methods may still work for very long-tail keyword queries, but for more competitive keyword phrases, you now need to:

1) create quality, compelling video content

2) publish using SEO best practices, and

3) engage with the community, both within as well as outside of YouTube.

How to Optimize and Market YouTube Videos – Presentation

In Mark’s presentation slides below, you will see in detail:

• Making the case for online video and for YouTube in particular
• How to publish and optimize YouTube videos (the gist of which starts on slide 8. )
• YouTube ranking factors and things to consider
• Promoting and marketing YouTube videos
• Driving conversions with YouTube videos
• Customizing YouTube embed

Now, as of March 18, 2011, all that will change, and for the better. Now iFrames work on all Facebook pages, which basically means you can point to and load a web page from any standard server, with all JavaScript and PHP coding operational. Cool! Recently YouTube also switched over to the iFrames method to embed video in sites and it works great.

Great iFrames tutorials here

However, there are some new hoops to jump through as well. To get this to work, you have to sign up as a “developer” and get a unique program ID for each “application” (facebook page) you are custom building. Not a big deal, but will be too technical and time consuming for most small business owners.

Let us take this job off your plate and help you to create a dynamic and fully functional Facebook fan page. Need to add your email list building form or video to the page? No problem. Need a custom welcome page for folks not yet fans? No problem. Want to offer a discount or special code for those who become fans, as an incentive? No problem. We use and recommend the latest marketing techniques to attract new fans and convert them into customers fast.

See: Fantastic Facebook Fan Pages for more info (just ignore the reference to FBML – we now do everything using the state of the art iFrames)

My teacher Mari Smith is pretty much the Queen of Facebook and covers this in much more detail here:

Essential Guide To Facebook Page Changes

So, say goodbye to FBML and Hello to Facebook iFrames!

The inspiration for the name of this business, Kaizen is a concept introduced to the Japanese by American Edward Deming, perhaps responsible for their long run of automotive success. Why? Because they focused on small incremental changes over time. Literally, Kaizen is two characters: 1) Change and 2) For the better.

Making a series of small changes, consistently over time, is the one, sure-fire, guaranteed way to insure your business success.

A new idea, a small change to your website, a minor tweak to your ad campaign, or a larger shift in strategy. With accurate testing and tracking, you know exactly what works and, between 2 options, what works BETTER.

Always try to beat your own control for the best ad, the best web page option, the best subject line in an email. Forget about what you LIKE or THINK is better. Tracking tells you what actually IS better, in terms of results.

Kaizen – The Art and Science of Continuous Improvement.

Unlike traditional guesswork advertising, modern internet advertising is both an art and a science, hence our Kaizen tagline – The Art and Science of Continuous Improvement.

Check out this new short video video from my teacher and the smartest business strategist I know, Paul Lemberg. All about making “kaizen” tweaks to your business.

Small Changes = Big Profits >>

Check this on the concept of Kaizen – from Wikipedia

Kaizen (Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better”) refers to a philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, supporting business processes, and management. It has been applied in healthcare, government, banking, and many other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain.^[1] By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste (see lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses after the Second World War, influenced in part by American business and quality management teachers who visited the country.