Allan Todd's Internet Marketing & SEO Blog

Facebook is a key part of online marketing now a days (Feb 2010) so you need to understand the difference between a Facebook "Profile" and a Facebook "Fan Page."  A "profile" is meant to represent a single individual, and a "fan page" (aka "pages") is meant for organizations.  Important: It is a violation of a Facebook policy for an organization to create a profle. So don't create a profile page for your business, you will probably have it terminated.  

You have to create a fan page for your business.  A fan page can be associated with a profile, but it does not have to be. You can create a fan page without having a profile.  If you do associate your fan page with your profile, current Facebook features will not let you dissaccociate your profile from your fan page.  For a business this could be bad news when it comes time to sell your business and you want to sell your Facebook fan page as an asset with the sale.  Here is what I do.

Are you promoting a local business, i.e. in a city or region.  Then you need to submit your site to the local oriented web directories that focus on linking to local businesses and organization. The local directories usually have you fill out a profile form, be ready for this by having a professional sounding profile and a  photo (if appropriate) ready to go. 

Below are some of my favorite local directories, the link should take you directly to the submission page.

This post is a real world story of how we did a makeover and search engine optimization (SEO) to a website and traffic went down, but the client loved us anyway.  In the story I illustrate the importance of a web visitor statistic called the bounce rate and explain why it is important for web business owners to understand and monitor the bounce rate.

In Sep 2009 we completed a makeover to a business website, converting it to Joomla and upgrading the websites' copy and organization to improve persuasion, content and hopefully results.   The website also included my most aggressive search engine optimization (SEO) consulting program with emphasis on very specific keywords.

It's the first week of December, the day after Cyber Monday, and my wife is annoyed about all the email offers filling her inbox.  She is getting 20-30 emails a day from retailers and is tired of deleting them, so she says she is taking the time to unsubscribe from each email list.  How did something she once requested become an unwanted intrusion?

Could it be that email newsletter marketing is dying? Or evolving into something else?

It is extremely important that your blog be hosted on your own web domain.  Do not host your web blog on an external domain.  For example, you do not want your website address to be: yourblog.blogger.com, yourblog.worpress.com, or yourblog.blogspot.com.  You want your blog address to be something like blog.yourdomain.com or www.youdomain.com/blog which are both hosted on your web site's domain.  Here's why...

Do you hesitate to send people to your website because you are embarrassed by your own web presence?  Here is an easy and inexpensive idea for improving your website so that you can be proud to refer people to it.

Are you using RSS yet, either as a publisher or consumer of content?  If not, you should be!  RSS is a great to increase traffic to your site and improve return visits. Confused about what RSS is? Read on.

Google local search tip - If your business is "local oriented" then it is extremely important that your website is well represented in the Google Local Business system.  One part of Google local search system is Google Maps.  Google has published quality guidelines that you must comply with to receive the best listing and maximium qualified traffic from Google. Make sure you or your SEO team is following these guidelines.

Here is a link to the Google Local Business Listing Guidelines (opens in new window)

Article Marketing is a way to drive traffic to your website.  The traffic comes from other external websites that link to your site.  The link on the external site is in an article that you wrote and provided to the external site as content for their site.  The actual link is usually in the "author resource box" at the bottom of the article. So article marketing is the process of creating great articles, providing the articles to related websites that use the article as content, and then hopefully receiving relevant traffic from the link.  Read more for a detailed look at article marketing.

Are you a brick-n-mortar business looking for ways to expand your marketing and increaase your sales?  Well, your local customers are searching for you right now on the search engines, Google maps and their iPhones, Blackberries and other hand held computers.  What steps do you take to drive local search engine traffic to your website?  The local search engine optimization (SEO) process is different from "national level" SEO.  I am going to explore each step of the local search process in the next sequence of blog postings.