LotusJump Blog

While there is some controversy over whether Facebook is an effective way to build awareness, market, and interact with your target market, it’s definitely a cost-effective marketing option you may want to consider.  As with any other social media platforms, there are some obvious and some not-so-obvious do’s and don’ts when it comes to having a business on Facebook.  While the following tips won’t apply to everyone, they’re worth considering and, if applicable, applying to your own business practices on Facebook

• Remember, your Facebook page should be reserved for talking about your business, products and services. Avoid mixing your personal life with business on your business Facebook page – it’s just not professional.
• If you’re going to do it, do it right. Your Facebook page should be a way for you to interact with current and potential clients. If you’re not regularly checking and updating your page, you probably shouldn’t have made it to begin with.
• Facebook can be a great way to assist in your company’s online reputation management. Facebook pages and profiles are now indexed and tend to rank highly in the search engines, so the chance of your business’ Facebook page ranking on your business name and keywords are pretty good.
  
• Keep your Facebook page clean. Don’t join irrelevant, potentially offensive, questionably or controversial groups. You never know who many be looking at your profile and you don’t want to run the risk of putting your company in a negative due to a group that you’re associated with.
• Participate in the conversation. Remember, there are a handful of your current and potential customers that spend a good amount of time on Facebook. The fact that you’re there and interacting with them will impress them. Build relationships carefully and strategically and you’ll most likely see these individuals drive new traffic to your actual site.

Today’s Tuesday tip comes to us from Lorrie Thomas:

If you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else will!  Start a press page on your website, write and add frequent press releases about what is going on at your organization (events, current events, education, opinion) and send them to free wires to boost your search visibility and credibility.

Not only will you reap the benefits of consistently adding fresh content to your site (search engines like that!) but you’ll be giving your business the visibility that you’ll need to succeed!

Leave a comment with your tip and we’ll consider publishing it with a link to your website in future Tuesday Tip editions!

LotusJump user Greg Witt recently asked a great question about optimizing his Swiss Alps tours website:

“As I’ve been doing my Lotusjump SEO, I’ve noticed Google’s SearchWiki that allows me to customize search results and make my SearchWiki notes available to other users.

Is there a way to use this feature as an SEO tool? Could I conceivably boost my site’s ranking by my responses?”

For those that aren’t familiar with Google’s SearchWiki, here’s a summary of the feature from the NY Times,

[Google] is introducing a new feature called SearchWiki that will allow people to modify and save their results for specific Google searches. They can move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results (or are buried too far down in the results to see). Users must be logged in to Google to use SearchWiki and can revisit their annotations when they perform the same search later.

So back to Greg’s question…can you leverage SearchWiki to boost rankings? Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience said, “At this time we aren’t using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future.”

The fact that she even hinted at the possibility of SearchWiki influencing ranking leaves me with no doubt that it someday will. If you think about it, Google is aggregating some really valuable data with SearchWiki–actual human opinion. If their goal is to return the most relevant results for a given search term, why wouldn’t they take the average Google user’s opinion into consideration? This is the “human touch” that the mathmatic algorithm has always lacked. So I have no doubt this data will make it into the algorithm at some point–how soon, and to what degree, only Google knows.

So what now? I wouldn’t go overboard, but I’d give my honest opinion of search results in my niche, and encourage friends and clients to do so also. Be responsible and consider Karma.

But if this data someday becomes a factor, it will be nice to know that you have contributed your 2 cents.