Remember that the Facebook page for your business is not the same as a group, or place page. You can create a stand alone business page on Facebook here – http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Things to think about – You (the business owner) should be the owner of the email address used at the sign up process as the the original creator of the page may never be removed by other page admins. So don’t ask your P.A, marketing manager or receptionist to handle this task for you. Each page can have multiple administrators. Each page administrator will need their own business account or personal account. Admins can manage your page from their own Facebook account using the “Page Manager” application that will appear in the left hand column of the applications section once they become an admin for a page.
And last thing to remember, your Facebook page will be tied to your personal profile as the admin of your Facebook page; however, only you and Facebook know the connection exists

2. Why your business should have a business page.
This really is a classic example of answering a questions with a question. Our first response to our clients is typically, what is your online business strategy? Are you engaged in raising brand awareness, improving customer service, directing traffic back to your own website, building your email marketing list or to improve sales?
If you answered yes to all of these then to be honest – you will need several strategies and methods, however Facebook is an excellent tool for starters.

Other reasons you should have a Facebook page is that users don’t need to be logged into Facebook to find your business page. For example – http://www.facebook.com/thesilvershop
Facebook business pages are now listed in Googles search engine index, and a recent youtube video by Matt Cutts (Google SEO spoksperson) has confirmed that social media platforms and data are used in the complex algorithm that help to get your pages listed.

Here’s another good one – Your Facebook page can be suggested to friends. Seriously, word of mouth was very powerful, word of mouth via social media is more so due to the fact that you can “hear” what people are saying about you and engage or interact to amplify or placate.
The last point about listening or hearing your advocates is so important. There has never been a time where you could gain a better understanding of your customers. Forget focus groups, or strategic studies – the insights presented via many of the social media metric tools outstrip anything that has come before it at 1 /100th of the cost.

I’m sure we have mentioned it before – but don’t start without a strategy and invest in some good metric tools (Twitalyzer, Sprout Social, Radian 6 or Social Report)

Please visit our friends at OurNoosa.com. Help increase your search engine ranking by getting a free link back to your Noosa based business. Noosa businesses can submit their details to Our Noosa’s free noosa business directory today.

Categories include:

The answer is YES !!! and No …..

Well still a bit more no than yes (at the moment)

Lets explore.

Google and Yahoo have been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files in conjunction with Adobe who provide the Adobe Flash Player technology to both companies ( poor Microsoft – gee the other kids just don’t like playing with him do they).

Adobe have also stated that content owners and developers do not have to do anything to the millions of deployed SWF files to make them more searchable. Hmmmm… so does that mean that they will all just start ranking now?

Well Google have made these comments regarding flash that help designers understand a bit more about the technology and how goolge sees it.

“Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely.”

So it seems that the old flash sites may still have issues and not be index right away. If your flash was built using text elements as well as images then the text can be indexed, if the flash was developed where all elements are images then it will not work as yet.

There are some other areas that have been pointed out by other SEO sites globally. Essentially the message is the same …. act with caution here. Flash sites are not cheap and essentially what you are doing is hoping that the flash designer understands what is needed by google and others to pull info out of the flash movie to give it an index.

Also  – I have never seen a flash file with the hireachal qualities that the search engines base so much of their algorythims on. I am talking about heding tags (H1 – h2 etc) or anchor, title tags etc. It is just the bare basics that can really help a standard HTML site, so unless a flash site is given exceptions to the rules – I wouldn’t be recommending any of our clients to go full flash just yet.

There is a big difference to submitting a normal website to search engines compared to CMS sites or even ecommerce websites. Different rules apply, and don’t let anyone tell you that submitting to 3,000 search engines for a one of payment will do the trick ……. it hasn’t in the past and never will.

1. Listing with the top search engines and indexes.

There are thousands of search engines, portals and directories on the internet today. Many search engine companies will promise to list you will 13,956 search engines and re submit you every hour for 10 weeks for $40. It’s rubbish…… it was always rubbish. The internet doesn’t work like that.

Try this – concentrate on 3 search engines this week and commit to submitting your web address. Then next week pick out another 3, and so on. So today, start with Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

To be honest – these search engines have such good crawling software that as long as you ahve a link coming from somewhere – they should be able to find and list you.

What you will find over time is that this gradual submission strategy will be rewarded. We’re touching on sandboxing here and a few other rouge theories, however with 8 years in the search engine optimisation business, we can say that there is a fair amount of truth behind these. (More on sandboxing and search engine submission conspiracy theories later).

2. Are meta tags useful?

We need to talk about this. There is much talk out there in forums by “search engine experts”, claiming that meta tags are a strategy of the past.

12 months ago, Google was able to obtain its description of your site from the content on your page, so therefore, optimisation specialists deemed meta tags useless. Despite the fact that so many other major search engines NEED these tags.

Not only this, but Google realised that the meta tag was actually a useful piece of information and decided to start including it. So for any sites that has the right meta tag information , Google will display this as the sites description in their index. If a site does not have this meta data – Google will use site content or infornation from Dmoz to determine the best keyword set to match with the indexing process.

Our thought here is simple…… stay in control of your own site and use Meta tags. Decide what description you want to display under your title tag.

3. Best way to get your site listed.

Everyone has their own theory and methods. After all, the search engines keep the exact algorithms closely guarded. As a result of this – we are left to some degree to our own devices or look to search engine specialists using magic formulas. The truth be told, the search engines give us more than enough information about what to do and what NOT to do.

Problem is ….. it’s usually difficult to find, or long winded or doesn’t provide the one definitive answer (and can be incredibly boring). Not to mention, we as busy business people, don’t have time to be analysing every search engine and each requirement.

For example; MSN give this wonderfully simplistic explanation on how to do well.

“MSNBot is the MSN Search Web crawler that automatically crawls the Web to add information to our search index. MSNBot crawls the Web by looking for links within websites. So one of the best ways to ensure that MSNBot can find your website is to include valuable content that other sites will want to link to. ”

“Right” you say …… “I thought I was already doing that!”

Well then, what about this from Google.

“Google is a fully automated search engine that employs robots known as “spiders” to crawl the web and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process doesn’t involve human editors, it’s NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed aren’t manually submitted for inclusion. ”

“OK … so do I or don’t I submit my site?”

At the end of the day – there is no quick fix. If you want to succeed and compete, you need to spend the time to read, analyse, put it into practice, then analyse again. Lucky you have all that time on your hands. (For those that don’t, and want to succeed,

Web sites aren’t magical. You cannot build it and expect “them to come”. No matter what anyone tells you, a well crafted site still needs to be designed and managed by someone who understands basic communication, advertising, marketing and sales principles.

Search engine optimisation consists of multiple techniques that are used to follow the rules for each individual search engine and apply these to your website to gain the best possible listing in each search engine index.

Sound like a mouthful? …… You should try actually doing it.

Search engine optimisation is not a simple case of following guidelines. At the time of writing this there are arguably 3 main search engines and several directories that should be the main focus of your marketing strategy. (See the Search Engine Tips section)

There is a big difference to submitting a normal website to search engines compared to CMS sites or even ecommerce websites. Different rules apply, and don’t let anyone tell you that submitting to 3,000 search engines for a one of payment will do the trick ……. it hasn’t in the past and never will.

It’s not enough to just design these days. You must design your site to ensure it is optimised for search engines. You must ensure that your visitors can navigate through your site to reach the information they seek. Once found that information must be easy to read, understand and prompt the visitor to act. Finally it must be good enough to invite them back and to have them tell their friends or work colleagues about you.

All marketing strategies are based on three main principles. You either need to increase the amount of customers you attract (acquire), keep hold of current customers (retain) or increase revenues from your existing customers (maintain rappor) and in most cases all three.

We can improve your business in any of these areas. As you would expect, we tailor our strategies to your business model, so that they are financially sustainable in the long term and where possible have an inherent competitive advantage.
Definitions of Search engine optimisation on the Web:

The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.

At its most basic level, search engine optimisation is a process of choosing keywords or phrases related to the site so that the site will receive a high placing in a web search. We say at its most basic level because this is an area all to its own when it comes to website design.

Lets consider this;

• Does your site have the right title tags, meta description and keywords?
• Is there a theme set to the site?
• Have you got the right alt tags set for images – do they match your theme?
• How about your heading text – have you set this yet – did you use style sheets to do it?
• Have you commented any flash correctly?
• What about the C-class of your server – is it ok?
• Titles in any href  tags  – did you set these?
• Do you know the highest KEI for your keyword groups you have chosen?
• What is the competition for each of your keyword phrases on Google, Yahoo, MSN?
• Did you check your frequency for keywords on the home page (or all pages)?
• Have you thought about a link strategy – who are you approaching?
• Have you thought about the socio tagging of your site?
• Are you listed in the main directories
• Do you have an active site map – either self generated or using xml to feed to google?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a very large set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. This is seriously a completely separate area from design in many respects, and this is the main reason many design companies don’t do it, don’t know it or don’t offer SEO services. It can get very scientific and it is very analytical in nature – the very thing designers tend not to be.

The short of all of this is that search engine optimisation should be your friend …. embrace it!