Facebook Open Graph Search is changing the way businesses and marketers approach SEO ranking. Savvy businesspeople will adapt and add to their online marketing strategies to maximize marketing opportunities and improve their brands’ visibility in this hyper-connected, digitally-social world. If you are not optimizing your online presence for Facebook Graph Search, you are missing out on an essential means of spreading your brand message.
Facebook Graph Search is a convergence of search and social media. It culls its results only from content that has been added by Facebook users (User Generated Content), Liked, and/or Shared between Friends. Queries are “natural language,” such as “Movies my friends like,” or “Popular restaurants in Myrtle Beach, SC,” and search results are personalized -- directly related to content that friends have ‘Liked’ and ‘Shared’.
Messages are spread differently on social networks than on general search engines, so optimization practices you use to promote your brand message through social platforms needs to be different as well. Here are some of the most important GSO (Graph Search Optimization) steps you can take to increase your online traffic with this new search tool
Your Business Facebook Page
To show up in Graph Search results, you must set up a Facebook Page for your business, and update it often. When setting up (or improving) your business Facebook Page, keep in mind the following tips:
- Be easy to find: Choose a direct, easily remembered, natural Page name and custom Facebook URL that is relevant to your brand and business.
- Optimize your description and About page: Write a positive description, and complete your About page using pertinent Key Words and Key Phrases.
- Invite Fans: The more Fans your page has, the more engagement you will achieve. Invite customers and Facebook friends to your page in as many ways as possible – on business cards or fliers, on signage, on your personal Facebook profile. Most importantly, create links from each of your Web pages to your Facebook Page to ensure visitors can connect with you on Facebook.
- Make sure customers can “Check In”: Provide your business’ full address. This ensures that customers can “check in” on their mobile devices, sharing on their own pages that they have visited your place of business. Then, ask fans to post photos and videos of themselves at your business on their own pages. You can use contests or quizzes to nudge customers into sharing.
- Share images and other graphic content: 50% of all Facebook content is now visual, so Facebook Graph Search puts high importance on image content. Most of your posts should include high-resolution photos, videos, and infographics related to your business – with its own descriptive name and location tag. The more interesting and sharable your content, the more interaction you will get from your Fans.
- Engage, Engage, Engage: Pages whose content has the most user interaction – likes, shares, comments, check-ins, and offers redeemed – will show up more often on Fans’ News Feeds, and thus on Graph Search. Encourage interaction with your content: Place Calls to Action right on your cover (“Like us Here!” button, or “Like this post if you took a vacation this year,” for example). Or, post pictures of groups of customers (with permission), and ask people to tag others they recognize.
- Do your research: Find information about local events and attractions, and connect your content with your community.
On Your Website
You can optimize your website as well as your Facebook Page to ensure that your business is showing up in Facebook Graph Search.
- Optimize your Web pages with microdata: Include precise location and contact information, specific products/services offered, and special offers. Not only does such structured data improve Facebook Graph Search rankings, but it is now accessible to machine-reading search engines, many mobile apps, in-car navigation systems, Google, Apple and Yelp maps, and SIRI.
- Request customer comments and reviews on online platforms: Facebook Graph Search pulls five-star ratings from online platforms such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Angie’s List to help it describe relevant businesses. Encouraging customers to rate your business or service on these platforms may benefit your Graph Search ranking.
- Customize your Open Graph settings on your Web pages: Remember, every blog post and web page you create can be socially shared. Every time someone Shares or Likes something on Facebook, the link from the page URL that they clicked is shown. Without customized settings, Facebook’s Open Graph API will always show your URL’s Meta Tags or default title and description – along with the first image it sees on your Web page. Determine which of your posts and pages will draw the most positive viewer responses, and implement customized Open Graph tags for that specific content. To optimize for Open Graph, you can choose a customized title, description and targeted image, and select a specific type and category for each page.
Facebook Graph Search makes it possible for users to search a social database of over one billion people, 240 billion images, and over a trillion different social connections. With the steps above, you can fully maximize your online marketing efforts to take advantage of this huge amount of collected data and some of the strongest social signals on the Web.
New to the Facebook Open Graph?
Start with the free web based Facebook Open Graph Meta Generator
First question - What is social media optimization? And the second question - How do I achieve this? The benefits will be almost self explanatory after you find the answers to the first two questions.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is whatever methods are used for generating public interest in your content. It does not matter what type of business you have, if there is no public interest in it, the business will fall flat.
What are the Available Methods?
There are several methods available to achieve the SMO that you need. Blogging is one. RSS feeds are another. The incorporation of useful tools such as images and videos are another way to achieve SMO. Online communities and their websites will be still another way of achieving the social media optimization you need.
This is why you need to hire a professional who knows the ins and outs of doing this for your business. The content you put up might be the best content around but without the public interest that can be generated by a professional, the public will never know this. SMO is the most important part of managing your online reputation and the strategies you will use if you want the best online presence available.
There are basically five rules for SMO that if adhered to will ensure you the best ways of getting the interest in your business that you need.
1. Increasing the ability to link to your business.
2. Create a way to make bookmarking and tagging your content simple.
3. Find other websites that will benefit from using your links.
4. Help your content get to the maximum number of people possible.
5. Using the 'mashup' approach is an exceptional way of getting your content noticed.
What are mashups, you may ask? This simplest way to explain this is when a professional company develops your website; they may take the data from two sources and join it to become a unified tool. The benefits of this are a business or website that will attract attention because it is so unique.
How Can I Do This?
Hire the best. Check out their reputation before you hire them so you know you are getting the best. Are people satisfied they are doing a good job? Do they have clients that you can check with for an unbiased review of their abilities to do what they advertise they can do?
It cannot be overemphasized enough when it comes to hiring a professional that they must know what they are doing. Because they will get you the most traffic and recognition that is available for your business. This is their ultimate responsibility and your online reputation as well as business depends upon it.
What Will a Professional Do for My Business?
Getting inbound links will be one of the first things a professional will do for your business. This happens somewhat on its own as word gets out about your business but it can be helped along rapidly by concentrating on a few simple things when it comes to content. It is not enough for your content to be good; it has to be extraordinarily good.
This is what makes the difference between the number one ranking on the search engines and page 10, 20 or 30. And you know what happens if you are not on the first page. People very rarely see your content. Maybe one in a million people will happen to click on your site.
If your content is a good and this means really good (not a repetition of everything else that is available) the professional can get your business social media optimization that will knock your socks off. This will save you thousands of dollars in advertising to no avail.
The professional social media optimization team knows how to do this. That is why they are the professionals. Results in the shortest amount of time possible are what you need. Instead of wasting months waiting for your website to get the interest it needs to survive, find the perfect SMO professional. Do not let your business die before it even has a chance. Hiring the right professional for the job will be the key to the business that survives, prospers and in turn makes money for you.
Try Search Engine Marketing – SEM - Instead
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization as a standalone methodology, is dead as a doornail. Trying to accomplish high search engine ranking using SEO alone is a losing proposition at best and web site suicide in most instances. You need to incorporate an entire SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign which includes:
- Link Building
- Article Writing & Distribution
- Press Release Writing & Distribution
- Pay Per Click Advertising
- Social Networking
- Blogging
So, what’s a webmaster to do? The term “webmaster” means staying on top of what drives successful, targeted traffic to your web site. It means staying up later than the average guy, reading, discovering, and learning the cutting edge of what it takes to make your site successful.
In the beginning, you could throw up any kind of page and get people to visit. Quality web pages were few and far between, and it was just astounding that you could get type on a page that others could view. Then came the keyword, the meta tag, the phrase, the optimization, software considered downright primitive in today’s world that would tell you your page was a cut above the pack. These days are long gone.
In order to get around the dead horse of SEO standalone, you need to be ready to add links, backlinks, and quality backlinks. You need to be able to do more than string three words together. Today’s readers are savvy. They want real information; don’t deliver junky, slapped together, non-researched splats of content and expect to maintain traffic and credibility. Today it is all about quality content, unique and different — that delivers a message that is both interesting and informative.
For basic optimization, you need to add things like blogging, dynamic updating, and social networking. Use the checklist below to smarten up your pages and make them more than SEO optimized. Knowing what makes them hum, what spiders love, will make your pages more than just web-ready. They will become traffic magnets.
Let’s Talk Keywords
If you remember nothing else, remember to put your keyword or keyword phrase in the PUT YOUR KEYWORD HERE. Many folks overlook this and just like that the spider glides on by—uninformed. If you are adding things like social bookmarking and blogging to your site and you forget this, you might as well be holding up a sign in a sandstorm.
Keywords in the URL do help. Remember if you are just redirecting a keyword URL to your web site to use a 301 Redirect which is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. See the sidebar on this page regarding redirect codes.
Keywords in your anchor text from another site. Called an inbound link, this is like getting a vote from another site. Be sure and have your keyword or keyword phrase as part of that vote.
Keywords in your tags. Yes, it is your headline. It’s important. It’s rated by search engines, and if your keyword is part of it, it’s rated higher. But be sure that it’s also part of your body text or you will probably upset the spiders. Never upset the spiders or you’ll be on page 11 million for your keyword. Keywords in the tags. Alt tags are what your page displays when the pictures can’t be found or someone browses your page with pictures turned off. Spiders also read the tags, so if you have your keyword in there then viola, more credit for your page.
Article Writing and Distribution
There are a number of article directories where you can distribute your articles with your resource box promoting your web site. You will want to write relevant, short quality articles that build curiosity for your web site. You do not want to write articles longer than 500–600 words for article directories.
Articles as Bait
On your web site, you will want to have longer, informative articles on a specific subject related to your web site’s topic. Called linkbait, these articles are designed to inform and educate your readership on relative topics. This is not what articles for article directories are all about. They are curiosity builders. You write 300–400 words on a topic to demonstrate your knowledge on that topic. You include a resource or author’s box back to your web site where you can present a long, in-depth version of your material.
One important thing to remember when writing articles for directories. Each must be different and unique from each other, and each one must be different than the one on your web site. If you duplicate articles for the various article directories and they all have inbound links to the same content on your main web site, you will kill your page rank and credibility. If you can remember that article directories get you quickly indexed and offer a curiosity booster that acts as a portal to your main web site, then you’ll write accordingly.
Through these directories, you’ll receive a ton of backlinks as other web sites use your content on their web site. However, none of it will match what’s on your own web site, so it won’t be considered duplicate content, just inbound links.
Press Releases Are An Overlooked, Great Process
If you can write news copy, you can write a decent press release which will get your web site a ton of exposure. You will want to put out a press release for the following reasons:
To announce your new web site and what it’s all about
To highlight new products and services that you add to your web site
To review various themed parts of your web site
To announce expansion of your web site
Using press releases in this fashion will always guarantee a steady stream of visitors in that a well-written press release will usually be picked up by other sites and be rewritten and added to their new repository which increases the number of incoming links you’ll receive.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Using pay-per-click advertising is another way to get almost instant traffic to your web site. Utilizing pay-per-click giants like Google and Yahoo, you can pay for visitors to your web site. You list small, contextually-based advertising which is published across their network of web sites, and interested people click on your advertising and arrive at your site. This is one of the quickest ways to get traffic to arrive, but it can be costly to get started. Pay-Per-Click lets you advertise to the whole of the online community.
There are also text link advertising, classified advertising, and pay-per-post advertising where you can get other bloggers to blog for money about your product or service on your web site. It is a variation of PPC in that bloggers will write and review your site or service for a small fee and list you for a set period of time on their web site. It adds content to their site and gives you more than just a link back to your site.
Social Networking and Social News Sites
Web 2.0 and social networking are the next fastest ways to get traffic rolling into your site. To get the ball rolling and to give you some ideas on where to start, let’s look at the basics of social news networking. We want to separate this from social bookmarking which is for personal use. Social news networking is for when you want to advertising your business, home business, or professional site. It’s about providing news to the world about who and what you are, the benefits you offer, and why they should stop by.
Some of the better news sites where you can post your short articles include: Netscape, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, Digg and OnlyWire to name a few. These sites are news-hungry, just waiting for information about your web site. Whatever your site is about will be quickly and effectively disseminated by posting on these web sites.
Considered the second generation in online marketing, social networking is all about building communities of like minded individuals who are looking for certain things. You web site is taken into a group, and depending on your service or product, people arrive at your web site because of the tags and text you provide to the online community. There are as many social news and networking sites as there are interests, but the main ones to start with are listed but by no means complete. HBM
- Previously
published in the April 2008 issue of HOME BUSINESS® Magazine, an
international publication for the growing and dynamic home-based market.
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Article Link: http://www.homebusinessmag.com/ecommerce/search-engine-optimization/search-engine-optimization-%E2%80%93-seo-dead
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