Facebook Timeline for Pages - Love or Hate it, it's here to stay

If you have not yet converted your Facebook fan page over to the new Timeline design, your page will automatically convert on March 30th, 2012 which is coming up fast. This post covers the majority of basic settings and features you need to know. Even if you’ve upgraded, you’ll find some tips here!

1. Preview

You have a chance to preview your page(s) first, made all the edits you wish, get it just the way you want it, then publish. Look for the preview option at the top of your page in the old design. Or, see a list of your pages here and turn on page preview mode. Before you publish, at minimum just have an attractive cover image loaded.

2. March 30

Your page will automatically convert on March 30. My advise is don’t wait. There really is no strategic advantage to waiting … okay, maybe if you have a really hot custom landing tab with a like-gating campaign that’s going extremely well. Otherwise, go for the upgrade now and lead the way by educating your fans on all the new features.

3. Cover Image

Dimensions for the large cover image is 851 x 315 pixels.  If you upload an image that’s smaller than these dimensions, it will get stretched to this larger size. The image you upload must be at least 399 pixels wide. Facebook encourages you to change your cover image as often as you wish. Newsflash: each time you change your cover image, this posts on to your wall and goes out into the news feed of your fans. You may find the activity itself doesn’t get great Edgerank (visibility score in the news feed). So, what you can do is hide the activity on your wall, then share the new cover image with a call to action in the textual area, e.g. We’re celebrating 10,000 fans today and just changed our cover image in honor of all of You! Click like if you like! -To be clear, that message does *not* go ON your cover image itself. You’re posting your cover image on your wall with the message as a description.)

4. Image rules

Do not put contact info, calls to action, or arrows pointing to the Like or Share button on your cover image. See the Page Guidelines here. Contact info should go in your about section. The no calls to action rule is likely because Facebook has been very generous with this large piece of real estate … however, the company does not want us to run hogwild with all manner of promotions and campaigns… for free! Those come at a price and are called Facebook ads! And the new Premium Ads and Reach Generator. And, the one I’m most excited about: Offers (that one is actually free to set up, though currently only available to large brands).

5. Profile picture

Your profile picture is always a square and is displayed at 125 x 125 pixels or 150 x 150 pixels, depending on the size of someone’s screen. The photo you upload must be at least 180 x 180 pixels. Facebook discourage page owners from changing their profile picture that often. This is the primary, instantly-recognizable image that tracks you throughout Facebook wherever your posts go and wherever you comment as your Page.

6. Landing tab

You can no longer set a default landing tab. Make good use of the cover image, instead (see #3 above) and the three main apps (see #8 below). Plus, drive traffic to whichever tab you wish (see #7 below).

7. App URLs

Custom apps all still function, including the fan-gating feature. Each tab/app still has a unique URL so you can drive traffic from inside or outside Facebook to any ‘landing page’ you wish.

8. Showcase apps

Just below your cover image, your ‘tabs’ are now displayed as apps or views. You can have a max of 12, though only four are always on display. The first one is always Photos and cannot be moved. ‘Views’ are Facebook’s default apps or features such as Photos, Events, Likes, Notes, Map. Apps are all third party apps.

9. Custom thumbnail

You can add a custom thumbnail image to all your apps. The dimensions are 111 x 74 pixels. These are great areas to get creative and add seamless branding, calls to action, and specials. To add/change a custom thumbnail, first expand all apps by clicking the small down arrow to the right of the four app display. Then hover over any app > click the edit pencil > click Edit Settings > click Change next to Custom Tab Image (opens in a new window) > click Change > upload an image. Voila. The image loads and saves right away. (I have noticed bugs with this feature and have often seen other pages’ thumbnails appear… you may need to upload a couple times to get your image to stick!).

For more tips and advise - contact Scream Media / H2l today 021 5590800 - Social Media Marketing courses also on offer

Local Search Engine Optimization

1. Local Search Engine Optimization 

 

The first type is local SEO, which means getting listed in Google Places. We recommend small business owners start with local SEO, because it's the easiest and fastest to setup and start seeing results.
Recently, Google has made local business results much more prominent by displaying local business results at the top for millions of searches. For many searches, the local results are even more prominent than the regular "Top 10? results.
If you've been stuck on the sidelines and haven't been investing in SEO because you thought it was too complex or too expensive, you no longer have that excuse. It's much faster and easier to break onto the 1st page of Google with local SEO.
Here are the 3 main ingredients for a successful local SEO campaign are:
i. Demand
What keywords are your potential customers searching to find your type of business?
You don't need to guess. Google has a free keyword research tool, available here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
ii. Relevance
You need to edit and optimize your Google Places page to make it relevant to these keywords, so Google knows to display your business listing when people are searching for your type of services.
C. Authority
You need to prove to Google that you're a credible, trusted business. And the 2 main authority ingredients are citations and reviews.

We created a step-by-step training program  that shows you exactly how to do all of this, so you rank at the top of Google's local results. Learn more about it here: SEO Courses

2. Traditional Search Engine Optimization ('Top 10? SEO)

The other type of SEO is the type you're probably already familiar with. We call it traditional SEO (or Top 10 SEO) because these are the techniques to get you listed in the regular (non-local) Top 10 results.
Traditional SEO is a little bit more complex than local SEO, but has the same 3 main ingredients:
i. Demand
You need to do keyword research to find what words your potential customers are using to search for your services. Same as with local SEO, use Google's keyword tool as the starting point.
ii. Relevance
You need to make your website relevant to your keywords. And specifically, you want to focus on 1 keyword per page. So, if you offer a bunch of different services, then you should have a page for each of those services.
iii. Authority
The main factor Google looks at when judging the trustworthiness of your site for the Top 10 results is your incoming links (or hyperlinks). Links are like positive votes in favor of your business.
If you include these 3 ingredients in your traditional SEO campaign (keyword research, content, and links) you will begin to rise in Google's Top 10 results and start getting more visitors to your website.

A Note About Building Links...

Most of the small business owners I've been speaking to have only been focused on getting reciprocal links by setting up link exchanges with other websites.
Reciprocal links can be OK, but in some instances they can actually be counter productive. Overall, link exchanges really aren't the best way to build links, so I don't recommend spending too much energy there.
You want to get a lot of different types of links to your website. And instead of focusing on link exchanges, you should focus more of your time on building one-way links to your website (where other website link to you, without you linking back to them). One-way links are much more helpful for building up your website's authority.
Why would another website link to you? Maybe it's because you are providing a helpful resource on your website. Or perhaps you write an online column for a local newspaper's website, and they let you place a byline link back to your website. There are many ways to build links, and that's outside of the scope of this post.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?
It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

If you’re using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that’s called Meta Description, or possibly just “Description.”

There are 3 important ways that Meta descriptions are being used today that make them an important part of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:
1. They can be used as the description (or part of the description) of your page if it shows up in the search results.
2. They are often used as part of the descriptive information for your pages when Google shows “extended sitelinks” for your site.
3. They are often used as the default description in social media marketing links such as Facebook and Google+.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Meta Descriptions in the Search Results
People often think that whatever they put in their Meta description tag will be the default description that the search engines use under the clickable link to their site in the search results. While this is sometimes true, it’s not always the case.
Currently, if you’re searching for a site by its URL (for example www.h2lonlinemarketing.co.za) Google tends to use the first 20 to 25 words of your Meta description as the default description in the search engine result pages (SERP). However, if you have a listing at DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) and are not using the “noodp” tag, they may default to that description instead. (Do a search at Google for www.amazon.com to see an example.)
Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, don’t always default to the Meta description tag for URL searches. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. A search for www.h2lonlinemarketing.co.za   at Bing or Yahoo! shows content from my home page as the description rather than the contents of our Meta description tag.
Of course, real people aren’t typically searching for a site by URL, so what the search engines show for those types of search queries is not as important as a true keyword search. So don’t get hung up on what you see when you search for your site by its URL or if you’re doing a “site:command” search to see how they’re indexing your pages.
Instead, go to your favorite web analytics program and find the keyword phrases that are currently bringing you the most traffic. Then see what your description looks like at Google when you type in those keywords.
And surprise! What you’ll find is that your search results description will be different for every search query! You may see any combination of the following used:
* Your entire Meta description tag text as the complete description (typically if it’s highly relevant and contains no more than 25 words).
* A full sentence pulled from your Meta description tag, but not the entire Meta description (if it contains more than one sentence).
* Text from one part of your Meta description mashed together with text from another part of it (if it’s more than 25 words long).
* Some text from your Meta description mashed together with some text from the page.
* Some text from your page mashed together from some other text from your page (nothing from the Meta description).

Some of the circumstances that cause Google to not use text from your Meta description may include:
* The information in the Meta description tag was not specific to the page it was on.
* The search query used some words that were not in the Meta description, but those words (or some of them) were used in the page content.

My recommendation is to always use keywords on any pages where you get search engine visitors (or hope to get them). Make them very specific to the page they’re on by describing what someone will find when they click through to the page from the search results, while also using variations of your targeted keywords.
Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters.

For instance, if you’re optimizing a page for 3 different keyword phrases, you could write a 3-sentence Meta description tag, with each sentence focusing on a different phrase. You could probably even insert more than 3 phrases in those sentences if you’re a good wordsmith. The idea, however, is not to stuff this tag full of keywords, but to write each sentence to be a compelling marketing statement – a statement that naturally uses the keywords people might be typing into Google to find your site.

Overall, the Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site. The more compelling it is, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it’s certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to create interesting, keyword-rich tags that sum up what users will find when they arrive!

Using Facebook for business

1. Invite by welcoming

The Welcome-tab is an essential tool. Yes, big brands like Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Fretzie Bercede etc. use it. No, you are not imitating them; just making use of what is available to all. You can make your page look different and exciting. This would organically invite people to your page. The welcome page is the influencing page which can present a clear ‘call-to-action’ to your page visitors; if it’s good then your page would be liked by many automatically!

2. Coupons, offers available
You can dole out “special discounts and offers” to your fans (only!). Also, the people who are not your fans can be enticed by showcasing your offers but not providing them. This would be a compelling tactic that would make them ‘like’ your page. Giving discounts and offers is an old marketing technique of course, but in social media it performs as a ‘likeable’ tool!

3. Learn more of their expectations

Your company is in the process of building up and formation. So it’s always better to learn what your consumers demand from you. You can create quizzes or polls for a particular query and know what your customers are looking for! The level of participation would also let you the number of people interested in your business.  Use the polls app on Facebook to know your customers best!               

4. Updating is crucial

Your page needs to be updated regularly. Make activity on your page, keep it going! Update about the customer-friendly stuff your company just created, the deals happening etc. Share as much as possible! Let them know your company works just like the large busy industry. Make an impression.

 

5. Yes, you’re answerable!

You owe responses to all the comments by your fans. If you are responding well, your customers would certainly feel they have a space in your business. Respond them positively and be transparent. Further, accept criticism since they’re the experiencers of your products. They know the faults best. Accept it and correct it abidingly. Respect the complaints by your ROIs.

Mobile Website Design

Did you know that in the world today there are more than 2.4 billion mobile phone users, and a thousand more are added every minute!
About 30% of these mobile phone owners (more than 700 million and growing) have browsed the Internet through their mobile phones. This is the reason why mobile Web browsing is predicted to become the next predominant Internet platform.

The Basic Principles of Mobile Website Design

First, you have to know that the Web site design and construction generally used for computer browsers is not compatible with that of mobile phones. For your site to work well on a mobile handset, it must follow the accessibility design guidelines for building mobile Websites which are set by the W3C.
In mobile phones, the technology called the WAP is used for browsing. Because of the limitations of WAP browsers in terms of screen size and allowable download, you will need to strip down your current design.
The easiest way to build your mobile Website is to modify your existing Internet site to make it compatible for mobile handsets. If you decide to do so, expect that there will be big changes in terms of layout, design and construction.

Here are some principles about mobile Web design that you should take note of before proceeding to build one of your own:

• Websites which make use of tables for the main layout will not look right on mobile phones.
• Your site must use CSS for the layout to ensure maximum compatibility.
• It is easiest if your site is coded using either XML or XHTML, with your character encoding set at UTF-8.
• You have to consider that different mobile phones have different screen sizes. This can be a major headache if you want your mobile Web site design to run on all of them.
• Remember to put all the most important information that you want mobile users to see on the top of the page. It can be time consuming to browse through a mobile site, not to mention tedious to read through. Make your mobile site design convenient for your consumers.
• It is difficult to enter text in mobile Web sites. You may want to offer your user the convenience of radio buttons and lists, which they can choose from depending on what they need.
• If you wish to put images on your mobile Website, it should be in jpeg or gif format.
• A good mobile Web site design provides back buttons and links. Many phones are not equipped with back buttons, so try to provide one.
• Keep in mind that the maximum page size for a mobile page is only 20 kilobytes. Make everything fit into that number.
• Lastly, you should bear in mind that users are actually paying fees to access your mobile Website. Make sure that they are getting their money's worth!

Having a mobile friendly website is especially important for businesses who want to increase their exposure onto a fresh, up-and-coming platform ahead of their closest competitors. However, designing and optimising sites for various mobile platforms is very challenging due to the amount of smart phone platforms available .

 The fact is that people accessing the web via their phone are having to deal with smaller screen and slower connection times, meaning that a site that looks impressive on a PC may lose quality and functionality when accessed with a mobile.

There’s a lot to take into consideration when it comes to this kind of specialist website design development. Sites need to be optimised for all of the latest browsing devices, such as iPhones, iPad, Blackberry and Android platforms (amongst others), which can be a time-consuming process.

 Scream Media is proud to offer affordable solutions when it comes to mobile web development and urges any company lacking a sound mobile presence to get in touch before they lose out on exposure and revenue generated from on-the-go web browsing.

The not so humble Description Tag

Meta tags  are often very misunderstood, people often get confused with the different types of tags available. In short your meta description tag is often used as the snippet on the search results pages to describe your site. So apart from including keywords, it has to do the job of convincing people to click on it.

A nonsensical list of keywords is not going to convince people to click so you have to balance it out with an appealing sentence, preferably including a call-to-action or reason to click.

Yes, it’s important to put your keywords at the start of the tag if you can, but you have up to 160 characters in that tag indexed by search engines, so you should use the space to your advantage. Having a short, unimaginative meta description tag or simply copying your title tag is not going to make any difference to your overall rankings and is more likely to turn your potential visitors off.

Google admitted that it no longer considers the meta description tag in their ranking algorithm anyway, so, other search engines aside, the main job of the tag in Google SERPs is to convince people to click on the link and visit your site.

Put it this way: if you were in the market for an antique chair and you saw the following two listings in Google, which one would you click on?

• Site1.com – “Antique Dining Chairs.”
• Site2.com – “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home.“

I’m thinking Site2.com – am I right? And – oh look! The longer tag managed to include *dining chairs* twice and a whole bunch of other keyword phrases as well: *dining chairs Glebe*, *chairs Glebe*, *occasional chairs*, *Antique(s) Glebe*.

Got it? Why not let the experts help. Contact Scream Media today on 021 5590800

SEO and Blogs

If you don't optimize your blog—or other online content—there's a good chance you're missing out on higher search-engine rankings that could extend your reach well beyond your site's current readership. But take heart: Sometimes all you need are a few tweaks here and there.

SEO Friendly Blogs help you get found on Google

Arrange your post's content in logical order. Think back to the essay format you learned in grade school: an introductory paragraph followed by supporting evidence and a conclusion. It improves readability for human visitors, and will earn a search engine's approval.

Pay attention to word count. According to Google an article should contain at least 200 words. (For eyeballing purposes, most Get to the Po!nt newsletters are between 250 and 300 words.) We recommend writing to a target length in the 400-to-500-word range.

Be sure to use local keywords. If your company offers products or services to a specific region, incorporate terms that local customers will likely use when searching for companies in your area.

Choose an image that complements your text. This provides visual interest for the reader, and you gain SEO points with a keyword in the photo description tag.

Don't duplicate and resubmit content. As with keyword stuffing, this raises major red flags for search engines—and they'll likely treat you like a spammer. "That could be the kiss of death for your site.

Remember to deep link back to your website.  In bound links are essential for SEO, with a Blog you have control over these ln bound links. Look at the heading of this paragraph and you will see exactly what I mean!.

Tweak it one more time. If your blog delivers valuable content, you're already winning most of your SEO battles