Do you have a social media or wordpress issue that you would like some advice on?
Get help from WebWooky with your internet marketing, social media, seo, or wordpress questions!
Your questions will be answered below, via a blog post, or answered privately depending on the nature of your question and the length required for the answer.
Your name, email and any identifying information (urls, etc.) will NOT be published publically - but you can still use them in the form to help webwooky answer your question (especially troubleshooting your wordpress or facebook problems).
Public Questions answered by WebWooky:
What vanity url name should I choose for my Facebook Page?
This short url is permanent and can't be changed later, so it's a decision you want to really think about before you click on "confirm", and if you are picking your vanity url for the first time now, remember that you are coming years 'late for the party', and the name you want is probably already taken.
Obviously the benefits of the facebook vanity url is enormous... especially for advertising... you're at a network event or on the phone and someone asks for your facebook address, you can easily give them the "easy to remember" one straight off the top of your head but you'd have to be a genius to remember your old long url (or if you are a genius - will they really bother typing all that in?).
When I recommend a vanity url, I tell people to think of a radio ad, telephone call, or a networking event.
Imagine you are being interviewed on the radio, you have a promotion on Facebook and the interviewer asks you for your facebook address...
So I recommend staying away from hyphens and hard-to-spell "cool names" if the average user can't spell it 'by sound'.
In a nutshell, you want to pick a vanity url that is:
- easy to remember,
- easy to spell,
- as short as possible (so that you can fit it in your tweets, sms's, in classified ads and business cards), and,
- not a "common word" (see below)
Stay away from common names because a common name (i.e. I love burgers) can be taken away at anytime from Facebook and converted into a "community page".
If your business name is a common name - you might want to think about this point because they don't care and are pretty unreachable for debate if they decide to take it away.
If they turn your page into a "community page" - you will lose admin rights to the page and anyone can add content to it, without moderation, and you lose all the other benefits such as the welcome page, insights, etc.
Get your facebook vanity url from http://facebook.com/username
Do people really use Facebook for business?
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust ads - Facebook should definitely be a part of YOUR social media efforts.
A common misconception is that only young people are using Facebook but the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is 34 to 65 year-old women.
Your presence in social media, establishes your business as a social authority. It engages your prospects and customers on their “turf,” instead of having to drive them to your Website to establish a relationship.
Facebook has many different ways for you to communicate and network with other people.
Click for larger imageHow active you get on Facebook, depends on how much 'time' you have to dedicate, and also on the type of business as to which parts of facebook will be the most effective return for your time.
Facebook is a great place for branding and for leveraging your marketing, but the best results will come from actually networking and getting personally 'involved' as there is so much networking opportunity there that the most effective way to get results, is to reach-out to others and become an active participant.
You can communicate with your connections and fans regularly and offer deals and specials as part of an ongoing conversation, instead of an occasional intrusion. It also personalizes your business, gives it a 'human voice' and makes it more likeable - and accountable, which builds 'trust'.
SEO & Google
What is Google Caffeine?
Google Caffeine officially went live on the 8th June, 2010.¹
To first understand the changes, you should understand how Google Search works:
Caffeine is a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure. It is not a change to Google’s ranking algorithms. ²
In the past, Google’s crawling and indexing systems worked as batch processes - the GoogleBot would crawl your website every few weeks, process the information, and then add it to their index. Now, Google's index updates at the same time the page is crawled. In other words, when GoogleBot visits your page, it pushes it 'live' immediately.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is what you do "outside of your website" that affects SEO.
If I listed all the numerous types of "off-page" seo, this answer could take weeks to reply to, and we have courses that will go through the most effective 'leverage marketing' methods, but here are a few ideas to get you in the right mindset to understanding what it is:
- Anchor-text backlinks from other sites
Adobe has had the #1 listing in Google for years for the term 'click here' because many billions of websites around the world have a link to the free adobe reader, using the term "click here" as the link. You can't argue with the power of off-site anchor-text linking with that :) - Social Bookmarking Sites
(Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, etc.)
Having people bookmark/save/share your content on these sites) - Article & Blog Directories
(EzineArticles, Articlesbase, Technorati, GoArticles, etc)
Your author-bio and any links throughout the content. - Web 2.0 Content Sites
(Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger, etc.)
Posting good content on these sites can get traffic back to your website. - Video Marketing
(YouTube, MetaCafe, GoogleVideo, DailyMotion, etc.)
Your video doesn't need to go 'viral' to get awesome search engine results - Google and other search engines love video content and often you will be placed right ahead of your competitors on the first page if you have optimized your video correctly.
What is On-Page SEO?
When one refers to "on-page" SEO, they are generally referring to the following:
1. Title
This is the most important SEO thing to do. Ensuring your most important keyword is towards the beginning.
2. Description
This helps search engines identify what your page is about, and is also usually used in the search engine description (depending on search engine).
3. H1 header tags
The main title of your page should be a H1 HTML tag. This lets the search engines know what your page is about. It serves the same concept as reading a newspaper headline. The H1 heading should match your page title to increase its relevancy.
4. File naming conventions
When naming files DO NOT use spaces but hyphens instead as these are seen as spaces.
For example, yourdomain.com/my-keyword-phrase.html. Also, keep your filename in the root directory or as high up the hierarchy as possible and in an ideal world, your domain name should also be keyword rich or at least contain your keyword in some way, shape or form.
The url "Slug" is the url of your page, ie: yourdomain.com/nameofpage - the 'slug' is also important for SEO.
5. Image Optimisation
Place your keywords inside the 'alt' text and then place this code towards where the keyword is mentioned in your site content.
So our code will look something like this; < img src ="blue-type-widget.jpg" alt="Blue Type Widget" >. You may rank high in Google images or other search engines.
6. Interlinking
Internal page linking can be a good way to tell Google about the theme of your pages. By using targeted relevant anchor text, you can help increase your rankings and also help to distribute any PageRank your site may have.
7. Content
They say that 'content is king' and this has always been the case ever since the inception of the world wide web. Bold and Italics should be used to emphasise points in your content without overdoing it. The more related content you have to what people are searching for, the higher relevance your content will be, and the search engines will 'reward' you for that. Focus on unique, relevant and good content.
8. Meta Description & Keywords
Meta keywords aren't detected by Google anymore but are still seen by other search engines so shouldn't be left out. The Meta Description informs the search engines with a short summary of what the content of the page is about and is also displayed in some of the search engine listings.
9. Blog Tags
If you use WordPress or any content management system that enables you to 'tag' posts with keywords that relate to the content, the blog tags become important for on-page SEO.
What is an Alt Tag?
Search engines also use Alt Tags to correctly index and rank the image and the web page where it resides.
When you hover over an image, if it has an Alt Tag set, you will be able to see what it is. Try it now on the image above (hover your mouse over the image).
Because search engines can read alt-tags, not images, if you don't set your alt tags, and your competitors 'are' using alt-tags, it could be the difference between them being higher in the rankings than you.
So in the above example, in my "code" I have the following:
<img title="Ask WebWooky Alt Tag Example" src="ask-webwooky-alt-tag.png" alt="Ask WebWooky Alt Tag Example" width="168" height="100" />
Do I need a high Google PageRank?
- A site like Google.com has a ranking of 10.
- Facebook.com has PageRank 10
- Twitter.com PageRank 9
- YouTube.com PR 9
- eBay.com PR 8
Every site starts at PageRank 0 and Yep - you guessed it! The higher your PageRank, the more popular your site is and the more frequently and higher Google will show your pages in relevant search results.
A ranking of 4 or above is considered an authority site.
It's a lot of hard work to get a high pagerank and it's not to be treated as your ultimate goal - it's a "nice to have", not a "need to have".
You can still get page one results for your target keywords without a high pagerank (unless you are competing with the big guys above!) by having relevant, on-topic content and by utilizing On-Page and Off-Page SEO.
Social Media
What is LinkedIn? Should I even bother?
If you want to establish yourself as an industry expert, market to other businesses, network with business leaders and executives, a presence on LinkedIn is a must.
One of LinkedIn's features that makes it substantially different than other social media sites is that your profile is much more like an online resume than it is with other social media platforms.
As a result, with LinkedIn you really want to put your professional best into your profile.
You might also want to consider doing our LinkedIn for Lead Generation course to get tips on how to modify your profile to be at the top of the search results and how to change all your past employment positions into a 'benefit' to what you want to do now, how to establish yourself as an expert in their "Answers" section, how to connect with the right market using LinkedIn groups and much more.
What is Twitter? How can I use it for marketing?
Twitter can help you find more customers.
Not only can you search Twitter for people who are interested in what your company has to offer, potential customers can find you.
For example, if you are a hypnotherapist who works with people struggling with quitting smoking, you can find people online who are talking about their struggle. Likewise, people can search twitter and find your services.
You can also track and respond to what your customers are saying about you and can keep track of your competitors too.
Leverage your Marketing
In addition and most importantly, it's also a fantastic place to leverage your marketing. Twitter is established across many different online websites, tools, and social networking sites, so one tweet can 'automatically' reach hundreds of different places, including search engines (so even if people aren't reading your tweets on the twitter platform, they could see your message in any of the many different other places that you integrate & syndicate Twitter to publish to).
What is Digg? Should I use it?
The more votes it receives, the more popular it becomes and the more traffic and visibility your business and website receives.
Posting your best content to Digg is a very effective way to establish yourself as an expert and to drive potential visitors to your website.
There is even a saying called making your site "Digg-Proof", which is another way of saying that a Digg post that goes viral... can actually bring down your server from the amount of traffic that it brings you.
Digg used to be far more powerful than it is now, but you can still get thousands of visitors to your site in a single day if your post becomes popular on Digg.
If that happens, you will want to make your site "digg-proof" (making sure your server can handle the traffic) - usually by installing a cache option, upgrading your hosting account, getting a dedicated server, or even hosting "on the cloud".
