Although this is not the typical article that I write for this blog, I think it is still important to go over none the less.   Many if not all of us use Facebook for personal use as well as helping our business grow after all.  
Facebook polices on privacy keep changing all the time it seems.  Every three or so months a revision is made and the settings and options are getting more difficult, buried, and hidden.  Facebook is out to make money and if your information is public information… well they can sell it!

This has turned many off to Facebook and some even have boycotted it altogether.  Personally I still use it but I exercise some wise advise from online sage Leo Laporte; “Treat all information you put online as if it can be seen by anyone”.  You never know what potential business partner, employee, etc. could see and draw unfair assumptions.

So exercise cautions and watch the below video to restore your Facebook privacy settings to what you signed up for.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2RFwqGVlqg

Facebook Privacy Settings Link

Best Regards,

P.S. You might want to maximize the video for better viewing.  You can also select HD video quality under the video.

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite online tools.  HubSpot (who maintains a terrific blog on internet marketing) offers this tool for free use called Website Grader.  All you need to do is input your website address, list some competing website and put in your email address.  Give it a few minutes to grade your website and it gives you a lengthy report back.  I want to take some time explaining each of these areas and how to improve your “grade”.  The list is long so I will only cover the most important ones.

While waiting for my site be be graded I got this great quote from the Grader: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.” – Ben Franklin.  This really echos HubSpot’s (and OptimalWeb’s) idea on the kind of content that you should be publishing on your website.  The idea is to have exceptional content that is truly engaging, do this and the traffic will come.

First the grader looks to find a blog on your website.  This one is number one for a reason, a blog covers so many different areas of improving your ranking with the search engines.

1. First it provides a channel to provide great content to your website visitors.  There bored at looking at static 5 page “online brochures” and your site is interesting so they subscribe, bookmark it, rss it etc.
2. Second, it provides a constant flow of new content and keywords for the search engine.  Think as this as food for Google’s search spiders.  Each new articles is a new opportunity to introduce more keywords and specific on site content.
3. Below I get more into inbound links but the blog serves as a reason for somebody to generate one of these links.  For example, lets say you write a great article, “How to…”.  Somebody finds this interesting and creates a link to it on there blog or website.  You will see the importance of this more below.

The next section is on how well is your site optimized.   It is looking at stuff called metadata.  Metadata is data about data, it is for the search engines and it tells them what things are so they know (there computers after all!).  You want to make sure you have both meta description and meta keywords. Meta description is what frequently shows up under your page title in search results and meta keywords tells the search engine what keywords to match to your site.  The method for adding this or editing this changes from software to software so do a Google search (i.e. “How to add meta data DramWeaver…) to find a tutorial or if your doing your website the old fashion way here is a nice tutorial.

Inbound links section is also very important if not the most important section.  Inbound links are links from one website to your website.  The more of these inbound links you have the better.  Not only is this number important but the sites your getting these links from also is key.  For example, let say your a plumber and you got a link from one from Kohler.  Not only do they get a TON of traffic, it in your same industry, this inbound link is as good as gold.  To learn more about how to raise your inbound links check out this previous article: http://optimalweb.biz/10-ways-to-build-inbound-links

Just wanted to give a quick update on what is cooking for Optimal Web.  We are on the tail end of complete re-design for our website.  We are shooting to launch the new site by the end of the week.  We are also restructuring our SEO packages and web design packages and will have some great specials for the spring.

Needless to say this has taken up a great deal of time that I normally devote to Optimal Web Blog.  Once the changes go live we will continue with updating the blog on regular schedule once again.

Thanks,

P.S.  Thanks for being patient!

Most of the ways you capture pictures will do so at the highest resolution.  This is great and you don’t want to change a thing here.  You always want to capture it at the best quality because you can always go down but you can’t go up.  You just need to re-size the photo so it does not bog your website down or take forever to send over email.

How do you easly resize photos when everyone has diffrent programs to do the same thing?   Then add in the fact that each program has a totally unique way of doing the re-size.   You make it simple.  The below tutorial will walk you through a great tool that I use to make batch photo resizing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoD9NKcvz6U

Note: You can download the program at this address. http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize

Best Regards,

Chances are you use Facebook all the time for personal use but how do you make it work for your business?  In the past business owners would simply create a new profile for their business and in this fashion it functions identically to the normal account.  Facebook however has just changed their policy that all self promotional material needs to be on a “fan page”.  If they discover anything else they will be disabling user accounts.

In this article I want to go through how you set up this fan page and a quick and easy way to get an amazing inbound link from Facebook.  In future articles I will go through other ways to use Facebook to get more traffic to your website and business.

To create a fan page I would recommend that you have a normal Facebook profile.  Its beyond the scope of this article to go through how that works but here is a tutorial (with pictures and videos) that should get you up to speed if you need it.

Next were going to want to create the fan page, you can do that by going here.   Once the page is created your job is to make it as appealing and attractive to your customers.  You want to create a reason for people to come back instead of just becoming fans and never returning.  You can do this by adding applications to your fan page.  There is an unlimited amount to choose from and if you want something custom made you can find a developer to do that as well (Optimal Web does does this tooJ).

Selective Twitter Status- Already on Twitter?  Install this application to your fan page and end your tweets with #fb and it will automatically update your fan page status.  This is great as it eliminates the need to log in twice.

Social RSS- This nifty application will pull your websites blog and display it right on the homepage of your fan page.  This again is another automated process so you do your social media work on one site and it carries over to others.

Last, I just wanted to touch on how to get a great inbound link from Facebook.  I talked about inbound links in a previous article but to refresh your memory these are links from another website to your website.  Most social media websites don’t give you any credit for links you have on them (they use a no-follow tag that tells the search engine not to count it).  But for whatever reason this method does work (not sure for how long) and it’s a fantastic way to get a link from Facebook.  Below is a quick little tutorial on how to do this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_wcka4Gcmw

Notes:  If your unsure how to make a hyper link use the following as a guide: <a href+”websitename”>Hyper Link Text </a>.  Replace websitename with your websites address and Hyper Link Text with whatever you want the click able text to be.

Best Regards,

P.S. If you have any questions please leave them as comments below!

I have been hearing a lot of buzz about Google Wave but until I watched the below video I could not quite wrap my head around it.  The basic premise is that email is old (40 years old) and Google asks the question, “What if Email was invented today?”.  Google Wave looks amazing and could very well be the future of online communication.

Right now Google Wave is still being tested and currently is on a invite only system right now.  No word on when it will go public but I when it does I will be sure to do a thorough review.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo

Best Regards,

Today like most days I walked over to grab the mail and saw a familiar site.  Yellow Page books in weather resistant packages parked by the mail boxes.  They have been there already for longer than a week.  I guess I wonder what will happen first, will they simply decompose or will someone simply get annoyed at seeing them and toss them in the garbage (most likely the later).

The Yellow Pages topic comes up almost every time I meet with a potential client.  “I can’t track it”, “They over promised and under delivered”, or the most common “It is too expensive”.   Is there room for the Yellow Pages in the Information age?

So I decided to check out Google Trends and run some numbers to see what type of search traffic the Yellow Pages is getting:

I knew the Yellow Pages market was shrinking but not this fast.   How long do you expect the Yellow Pages to be around (post comments below)?

Best Regards,

P.S.  I estimate that the Yellow Pages will discontinue distribution in 3 years in case you’re wondering

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

If anyone has watched the original shift video you are familiar with the concept of these fun videos.  After watching there is no doubt that social media is and has already taken over many other traditional marketing streams. But how does a business take advantage of social media?  Social media is still in its infancy, make sure your leading the parade and not trailing behind.  Whenever there is a paradigm shift the people that are at the front of the change benefit the most.

Below are some of my previous posts on social media and I’m currently in the process of creating diffrent marketing kits to help business owners understand and take baby steps to get started.

• Blogging is an investment
• Understanding the benefits of Twitter
• What on earth is Social Media?

Best Regards,

P.S. I know social media can be a bit overwhelming and scary but stick with it, its not so bad.

In 1979 a study was conducted about graduates from Harvard’s MBA program. The graduates were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” Only three percent of the graduates had written goals and plans; 13 percent had goals, but they were not in writing; and a whopping 84 percent had no specific goals at all.

Ten years later, the members of the class were interviewed again, and the findings, while somewhat predictable, were nonetheless astonishing. The 13 percent of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all. And what about the three percent who had clear, written goals? They were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.

Have you defined your website goals?  Take out a piece of paper (or open notepad) and just jot down some of your primary and secondary goals.  Is it to sell your product online, gather contact information, view corporate information, subscribe to newsletter, stop into your retail store, change their mind about something, comment on your blog, etc.

Now review your website and see if you’re hitting these goals.  Is there a clear path from when a customer “lands” on your website to the ultimate goal?  The web is very non-linear and you must make sure you make a clear path for what you want your visitors to do.  Make sure to always have calls to action for your desired goals on each of your web pages.  Believe it or not, most customers will not “land” on your homepage but one of your many other pages depending on the search phrase they used.  This is why you want to include calls to action on each of your web pages.

Please don’t tell me your goals for having a website are “So we have a website”.  Give this some honest thought and find out if you’re hitting the mark.  If not then make the necessary changes and you will greatly increase conversion of just visiting customers to actual customers.

If you don’t know what Bing is then this is a must read for all local business owners.  Within the last few weeks a major deal has happened in the search marketing arena.  Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered up (though not an official merge) and will combine their search technologies.  As of right now Google owns the lion’s share for amount of searches (72.34%) but after this partnership Bing will have acquired nearly 15%.

Now this may not seem like a large percentage but there are some things to take away from this.  First, Bing’ search traffic is more likely to convert than on any other search platform.  Conversation simply means to sign up for your newsletter, make a purchase online, or to call your business.  Second, and more importantly to your businesses, Bing’s local search will become a major player. Local search, if you’re not familiar with it is separate from the overall search.  When you search Google for “City Name Mechanic”, you will get 10 results at the top of Google from their local search engine.  Now most businesses are already listed in Google’s local search, this may not be true for the younger Bing local search though.

To get listed in Bing’s local search follow this link and go through the simple steps to get your business listed.

Best Regards

P.S. Local Search is where small businesses get the majority of their business; make sure to submit your business!