In just a short span of time, Facebook has already become a force to be reckoned with. It currently has about 250 million users in more than 140 countries worldwide. According to cnn.com, Facebook is now the number 1 site online. With such a huge number of registered users, it is no wonder why online marketers all over the globe have started using Facebook to promote their products and services. Facebook marketing is all the rage these days. The thing is many neophytes are doing it all wrong. Yes. There is a proper way to market using Facebook. Here are four easy ways to market in Facebook.

· Create a Facebook fan page. Making your own fan page is a practical way to market on Facebook. There are business owners who create a personal account for their brands. Don’t make this mistake. With a personal account, people would have to go through the trouble of adding you up or approving your friend request. Plus there is a 5000 friend limit for personal accounts. Pages, on the other hand, don’t have a limit to the number of likes it can have. Plus people won’t have to “add” or “approve” you. All they have to do is click “like”

· Make them “like” you. Once you have a fan page, the next step should be to market your fan page. Make some noise on Facebook. Get people to “like” your page. Now there are many ways to do this. You can do it the hard way. You can campaign individually to your friends and request them to like your page. You can chat with them, send a PM or post on their walls. This can work. However, it’s a very time consuming process. And remember that time = money. Or you can hold a contest or a promotion. Give them an incentive for liking your page.

· Put large photos on your page. Check out the fan pages of Chanel, Kitkat and McDonalds. They all have one thing in common. They have tall profile pictures. If you want people to notice you, don’t put miniscule pictures on your page. Make them big, bold and eye-catching.

· Put a welcome tab. Check out the pages of Ben and Jerry’s and Coca-Cola. They have a huge welcome tab that just grabs your attention. A welcome tab is important because it tells people in a nutshell what your page is all about. You can put a video of your latest product or a picture of your current promos.

These are just four of the most basic ways to market using Facebook. They are easy to do and you won’t have to spend a cent! So what are you waiting for? Give these tips a try today.

“Amy C. is an interior decoration aficionado and online marketer.  She also likes testing and trying new home and office decorating themes.  In addition to being an interior decoration hobbyist, she enjoys designing calming solar fountains and glass art.  Amy invites you to browse her delightful collection of glass vases “

Four Easy Ways to Market in Facebook is a post from: Page One Business

Do you ever take a look at how your competitors are building links? When you’re competing with other sites, it makes good sense to look more closely at how they are approaching SEO.

If nothing else, such activity gives you a good benchmark. You can take a look at the top site in Google for a particular search term and see how they’ve achieved that ranking. By doing so, you’ll get an idea as to how easy it will be for you to claim the positioning that you really want.

But you’ll also get a clear idea of the way in which links are being built. How are those leading websites getting the best rankings? Have they been established for many years, allowing them to build up a reputation for having great expertise? It may be the case that they naturally attract many inbound links as a result.

Alternatively, you may find that they have aggressively been buying links, or submitting blog comments. As you can tell, this is a revealing exercise!

Holding up the mirror

But what do others see when they look at your link profile? What do the search engines see?

You may not have spent quite so much time looking at the overall picture that’s been created of your own site. It’s worth remembering, however, that your link-building efforts are also sending out a wide variety of signals. Competitors will be looking at your approach and the search engines may be taking automated decisions about your strategy.

When I’m thinking about link-building, I like to adopt an approach that will be difficult for others to follow. I work hard to get the very best links, knowing that this will make it that bit harder for rivals to copy my approach. Unless they’re going to work seriously hard, they’re not going to gain as many great links.

If you’re approach has involved building thousands of automated links, then you might want to consider how difficult it will be for competitors to replicate your approach. I would suggest that they won’t find it too hard. As a result, your link profile may reveal a serious weakness in your strategy.

High quality links

This brings us on to what the search engines will think of your link profile. Been buying up lots of links? Been busy spamming forums and blogs? If so, that’s going to be pretty transparent to the search engines. You may not have been penalized yet, but are you really willing to take the risk?

A good link profile should look pretty natural. To my mind, that means that you should be able to see a certain degree of diversity. It also means that you’d expect to see links from authority sites within your particular industry or niche.

Is that how your link-building efforts would be viewed? If not, it may be time to think about a new strategy!

You’ll want to ensure that you have a good balance. Don’t be afraid to spend more time gaining each link, as long as you really are building up a picture that involves a lot of quality. The most difficult links to gain often end up being the most useful.

Keith Barrett is a search engine expert and is a consultant with Search South, the UK digital marketing agency.

Take A Look At Your Link Profile is a post from: Page One Business

SEO link building is the corner stone of any and all successful websites. When sites from around the Web link to your website the search engines regard this as "votes" confirming the relevancy and quality of your website content. Building effective links is a major challenge and there are some unscrupulous service providers that use "Black Hat" techniques to the detriment of their customers.

When the rules and guidelines as laid down by the search engines are adhered to, it is called "White Hat" link building. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and more) have the ability to pick-up on dodgy link building practises. Google provides articles and resources that can be used to research acceptable and unacceptable techniques. Wikipedia is also a good source of information on 'Black Hat" and "White Hat" techniques.

Your website can be blacklisted by the search engines when links from websites are obtained using unethical techniques. It is always safer and more effective to make use of acceptable techniques. Examples of "Black Hat" links would be links from link farms, adult sites, gaming sites, 1000s of links in one day and links from banned sites to name a few.

5 SEO Link Building Tips:

1. Relevancy and placing of links in the page content.
The value of a link is greatly improved if it is on a page containing content that is relevant to your website, product or service. When placing a link on a site always try to place it inside the content of a page. Footer links have lost a lot of value and is not effective anymore.

2. Domain Trust.
In order to become a trusted site in the eyes of the search engines you need links from existing trusted sites. Prevent links from "bad neighbourhoods" at all cost. Who you link to and who links to you plays a very important part of domain trust.

3. Anchor Text.
Always strive to make your anchor text look natural. If you use the same anchor text containing your keywords all the time the search engines will penalize your links. Look at including phrases like "my hot site" or " visit my site here" in some of your anchor text. Do not over optimize!

4. No-follow and Do-follow links.
To ensure maximum value and a natural link building process, build "do-follow" and "no-follow" links. The average person on street does not care about "do-follow" or "no-follow" links and will build links to and from the sites they like. You want your SEO link building to look natural to the search engines.

5. Pages that pass on Page Rank.
Web pages that ranks high for a phrase or keyword that is important to you will pass on some of this value when you place a link on them. Research high ranking pages and target them for your link building.

If you incorporate the above 5 tips into your optimization strategy you will see positive results. Shortcuts and unethical techniques are not worth the time and effort. Links build using the correct techniques will have more value allocated to them and you will need less links in order to improve your keyword rankings.

H.E.Muller is a small business owner providing SEO solutions to website owners. Feel free to visit his website for more information on SEO link building, seo article writing, video marketing and social media marketing.

Author: Heinrich Muller
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

5 White Hat SEO Link Building Tips is a post from: Page One Business

The person actually taking the time to search and then finding you is more valuable because that person is a more targeted individual who has expressed an interesting in finding you.

“As a blogger, you probably do not have the luxury of having a staff of people to work for you. As such, your time is very valuable and you need to spend it where it will do the most good. We have reached a point in late 2010 where the work required to generate traffic for a normal blog via search engines is much greater than that required to generate an equal amount of traffic via social media.

My thesis is simple: for the majority of bloggers, the time and effort invested on social media is better spent than time spent on SEO.”

via Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO.

My experience, thus far, is social media traffic does not convrt as well as search traffic. I do both and I think anyone serious about the success of their site should continue to do both search SEO and social media marketing.

Most people are best served by considering what will it take to convert people to what you want them to do first and challenging themselves to provide the best possible user experience they possibly can.

Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO is a post from: Page One Business

Click The Pic for Guest Blogging for Profit

Getting more of the people who come to your site to buy , or join your list, or download something is called conversions. It doesn’t mean you have to join a new religion but it is something we can all learn to do better.

You want your visitors to get a few messages clearly and right away; Above the fold so they don’t have to scroll down to see all this:

• Who you are, your company name or blog name and logo.
• Why you are cool; why they should listen to you; why they should choose you: like, Over 3 Billion Served, or 10 years serving happy customers, or Our Many Reviews
• Why We Are Better: Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). A benefit only you can provide.
• The 1st Step: What do they do to start falling into your sales funnel? Download a free report? Answer a Poll? Spell it out.
• Show them how they can buy right now. This is especially important for the returning visitors who have come back to buy, they do not want to be run around or have to search to find what they want.

Questions to ask your website:

• Is it confusing to follow and find places?
• Are there a lot of distractions?
• Are there too many ads going to other websites?
• Do the colors and layout create tension?
• If you have a shopping cart, is it easy to use and work in all browsers?
• If they want to contact key company people or customer service is that clearly visible and easy to find or do people have to search around?
• If you have forms, are they asking too many questions or difficult to fill out?
• Are user instructions available and connected to tasks?

One very important part of SEO that will lead directly to sales is taking a second look at your Title Tags and your Descriptions Tags. This is the information shown in the search engines. First of all I hope you are using well researched keywords in your Title and Description, but, do the “Sell The Click”? Is what people see in the search results result pages (SERPS) grabbing their interest and enticing them to click the golden link that takes them to your wonderful website? Do the words speak to the needs and wants and desires reflected in that search phrase you showed up for?

Of course it is crucial that page is relevant to what that person is looking for not only for the visitor but for SEO because they are analyzing for relevancy as must as possible.

Making your site easier to read and making the navigation easier to follow can give you a quick boost in conversions.

Getting More Sales From Your Website is a post from: Page One Business

I think the most important keywords are the ones the search engines are showing me for. At a minimum I want to track the rankings. I usually still have some keyword I am developing ranking for, some choice ones I feel will convert well, however the terms sending traffic and getting shown are really the most important.

I take the keywords shown in Google Webmaster and in Google Analytics then run them in a Rank Checker. To me these are the real world keywords because they are bringing traffic or seen and shown by Google.

Getting the list of words from Webmaster is just a matter of exporting the list. To get the words from Analytics I have to copy the whole data set shown in my Google page then paste that into Excel as “Paste Special” text; then I can copy just the list of words.

I like the Traffic Travis Rank Checker because it is fast and when I paste in an updated list of words it automatically adds the new ones without duplicating any. You can get a free copy of Traffic Travis - click here . SEOBook has a good free Rank Checked Tool here.

Easy Analytics for your best Keywords is a post from: Page One Business

Link Spam means a building a bunch of links thrown around to all kinds of places that are not relevant to what Google sees when it looks at your website. This can be blog farms, some forum posts, profile links, and pligg site link spamming.

That is all you get from many SEO services out there. You know, the ones cold calling you and they won’t get off the phone. They often want an iron clad contract too. Of course its cheap, it takes less work to flip the switch on some automated software than to think through what a business and web site really need.

I find the most relevant words the buyers type then get you placed for those terms with quality content that lasts, individualized to your site and your business and your goals.

Google is getting better and better at knowing what link spam is.
Mostly they just ignore the links which means you pay for no results. Sometimes they have been known to take sites with lots of link spam right out of all search results.

SEO Blueprint Plans

Are You An Inadvertent Link Spammer? is a post from: Page One Business

Here I am going to simply  refer to read this excellent post by Ann Smarty. She is such a smarty!

10 Hacks to Mine Your Google Analytics Data Deeper

Getting More Data And SEO Leverage from Google Analytics is a post from: Page One Business

I like this site. It offers a chance for a company to post many different types of documents and make them highly visible online. The way pages can be flipped and the use of the term Library for where you put your stuff makes it all easy to navigate and use. That is very important. Issuu.com

I can add stuff on Issuu to my Library or upload stuff. I see full product catalogs and magazines. There are some interesting publications I would probably never have found anywhere else.

One think I do like a lot as well is I can add a link which is dofollow to every publication I add and it will show in the view window. I have been getting good results for myself and my clients at DocStoc and Scribd, which means views there by people and I have links in there too. So I will be adding more to Issuu as well.

I always like to build links at places which can send traffic also.

Issuu Com Site

Links and Visibility- Issuu.com – Good Resource is a post from: Page One Business

Selling the click means getting someone from the search engine results pages (SERPS) to click on your site instead of any of the others.

You can quickly test this for yourself. Go search nearly any term and read the titles and descriptions showing in the results. Some yell click me and some make you wonder Huh? Try a couple of them to get ides on what might work better for your site.

In most, but not all, cases the Meta  description you have on your site is what will be shown in the SERPS. It is the 2 lines right below the Title, which is the same as your page title at your site.

The maximum number of characters shown is 160 and if you use any more than that you will see your description cut short and ended with …

You want to be descriptive and encourage the searcher to come to your site.  Sell the click to him.

Selling The Click is a post from: Page One Business