Many have tried, and failed, to write a good post about how to SEO a Facebook fan page.

For example, optimizing the filename of your profile picture is one popular piece of advice that doesn’t really matter, considering Facebook just renames the file something like 198135_10150109366….jpg. Another popular tip: you should link to your main website from your Facebook page. Yes, you should for visitors. But this doesn’t optimize your fan page because Facebook just nofollows, redirects, and clusters your URL in a mess of code anyway.

So let’s take a different approach to Facebook SEO today.

I want you to imagine that your Facebook fan page is your website – or another website for your brand at least. While it may not ever rank first for a keyword, you still want it to be optimized.

If you want to keyword optimize your Facebook fan page, these are the areas that actually pull SEO elements from your page’s content for additional optimization.

Your Facebook Fan Page SEO

SEO title: The name of your page plus | Facebook.
Meta description: The name of your page plus the About description of your page, followed by | Facebook.
H1: The name of your page.

This is like the search optimization of the homepage of your fan page / website. If you didn’t consider keyword optimization when you created it, and you have less than 100 fans, you’re in luck. You can still change your page’s name.

Two things to keep in mind aside from search optimization includes:

Branding: It may be more important to have your page as a recognizable brand than a specific keyword phrase.
Appearance: Whenever you comment as your page, or people tag your page, your entire name will come up, so if you’re page is Your Brand – Keyword, Keyword, and Keywords it might look a bit excessive (and lead to less tagging).

Your title can be as long as you choose, but keep in mind the standard length of SEO titles (70 characters) before getting too crazy. Also, since your page name is also a part of your meta description, you might not want it to make it too long and overshadow that.

To edit your About information to make a great meta description, go to your page and Edit Page > Basic Information, and fill in the About field with a 140 character description like you would with any website meta description.
Facebook Fan Page Updates

SEO Title: The first 18 characters of your update.

If you’re posting a standard status update, the SEO title will be pulled from the first 18 characters (approximately 18 characters, sometimes a bit less). The following update by Search Engine Watch’s fan page has a title of Yahoo Search, which is pretty good.

If you’re posting a link to your fan page wall, you’ll have an option to “Say something about this link…” – the first 18 characters of what you enter in this field are going to be the SEO title for the individual page of that status update.

If you don’t post something there, the SEO title for your update will just be Facebook. Plus it won’t take up as much real estate in someone’s news feed, which means it will be less noticeable. So I would suggest that, regardless of whether you care about the SEO, you fill this part out when adding a link to your wall.

If you’re concerned about optimizing your updates while considering them as individual pages for your overall fan page / website (click on the timestamp for any update to see it on its own page), then you might want to consider sticking some keywords right at the beginning of your comment.

Using the above example, I could simply put the post category / main keyword as start the update such as Google Analytics and then write the rest of my comment. If I continued this trend with my updates, my fan page would have lots of “pages” underneath it optimized for my main keywords.

The best part is, unlike Twitter status updates that don’t go that far back, you can see your Facebook fan page updates at least two years – mine go all the way back to when I created my fan page, which was in February 2009.
Facebook Fan Page Notes

SEO Title: The title of your note plus | Facebook.
Meta Description: Your page name wrote a note titled the title of your note plus | Facebook.

Facebook notes – they don’t get a lot of love anymore, but they do have a more controllable SEO title when you create them and, of course, they add to the additional “pages” underneath your fan page / website. Notes allow you to add lengthier updates to your fan page without having to take your fans offsite to get more of your content.

Some people use them to syndicate their blog posts on their fan page, but I find this feature is a little inconsistent. Unique notes, on the other hand, could add more value to your page.
Facebook Fan Page Discussion Topics

SEO Title: The title of your discussion’s topic | Facebook.

Ever wanted a little forum / discussion board, but don’t want to invest in forum software? Facebook has an often-overlooked discussion board, with each topic giving you a little SEO title credit…More Detail

Google Panda 2.2 is looming to drop sometime soon, and with it, increasing levels of apprehension in the small business community on fears of further collateral damage to organic search traffic. As a speaker at SES Toronto this year, I had the distinct honor of accompanying Dave Davies, Thom Craver and Terry Van Horne on a panel to discuss the impact of Google Panda, and long-term strategies for SEO success.

Diversify Your Traffic

Much to my own amazement and to that of my peers on stage, many in attendance at SES Toronto felt that they received significantly more traffic from Google organic search than any other source, and that SEO traffic converted much better than other sources.

As a general rule of thumb, no more than 40 percent of your referred traffic should come from Google because any significant change is bound to have a negative impact on your bottom line. When you consider how long it can take to notice and recover from an SEO penalty for even small mistakes (such as server downtime, bad navigational links, forgotten redirects, etc.), putting all your eggs into one basket substantially increases your risk.

Normally I wouldn’t disagree with a large group at SES, but to say organic traffic converts better than other sources indicates that very few attendees are properly optimizing their paid search campaigns. Why? Paid search marketing has several distinct advantages over organic search traffic that should yield higher conversion:

Product: Guaranteed exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Match keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.

Price: In this case, it’s not the price of the product or services offered, but the price your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and effort invested into ranking for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.

Promotion: While you can change the content surrounding your products, you may not have the same amount of creative license to change that content as quickly for mainstay (SEO targeted) pages versus paid search landing pages, nor will you necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in results pages for any given query.

Place: Distribution of your product won’t change, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be highly elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.

People: Perhaps the most important component is your inability to control and target behavioral cues in search queries using SEO. It doesn’t get much better than the complete control that multiple keyword match types, negative match keyword lists, and advanced query performance reporting affords a search marketer.

My final argument about why organic search traffic may not convert as well as other sources? Visitor intent.

Visitors coming from organic search results for the first time are extremely hard to convert, and it can take several repeat visits, if your content is good enough, to finally convert them sometime down the line.

Measure Success Using Actionable KPIs

I love data, but much of it is useless and not actionable. In terms of useless SEO metrics, here are a few:

1. “Average position” and “Impressions” as provided by Google Webmaster Tools are useless metrics because Google varies position by geographic locale, personalized results (when logged in), and likely past-user behavior (not logged-in cookies).
2. “Visits” and “Page Views” and even “Average Time Spent” as measured using analytics software aren’t as useless, unless used alone because webmasters have little control over how much traffic search engines send them.

The emphasis should be put on measuring actionable KPI’s segmented by traffic source such as bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty.

Want to get really sophisticated? Try testing out multi-source attribution and start assigning real dollar values to each one of your traffic sources touch points… More Detail

Several Internet service providers (ISPs) are intentionally hijacking search queries to gain affiliate dollars, according to Reese Richman LLP, a New York Law Firm. Reese Richman filed a lawsuit Aug. 4 against one of the ISPs and the group behind the hijacking technology.

The Paxfire-ISP Hijacking Racket

According to Reese Richman, here’s how it works: Paxfire developed and patented a technology that would allow local ISPs to take control of a user’s search query when the user was targeting specified terms. Instead of connecting the search query as normal, the ISPs take users directly to a related site.

Why? The “related site” is typically an affiliate link related to the search term.

If a user was looking for the term “Bloomingdales,” for instance, they would be taken to the Bloomingdale’s website. The ISP would then get an affiliate kick-back for any purchases made on the site. According to evidence gathered by Nicholas Weaver and Christian Kreibich of the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, more than 165 terms are being redirected.

Aside from being at least a little bit brilliant, this monetization system is also (as Peter Eckersley puts it) “a deep violation of users’ trust and expectations about how the Internet is supposed to function.” Additionally, according to the Reese Richman case, the process violated several legal statutes.

Blocking the Hijackers

EFF, the foundation that Eckersley is a part of, has developed a Firefox add-on that prevents hijacking. Known as HTTPS Everywhere, the add-on makes all sites function as HTTPS, and thus prevents unannounced redirections…Read More

Google announced another improvement to Google News called Editors’ Picks. The new section provides links to original news content from various publishers’ sites that have been listed on their respective sites.

The sites providing the stories in your Google News feed are featured in the scrollable Editor’s Picks. Essentially, this feature highlights content located on the news publisher’s site and places them in a special content area on your Google News page, featuring the logo of the news organization.

According to Google, the stories and links selected for Editor’s Picks are “hand-picked” by the news organization, not Google News. News publishers have the ability to provide an RSS feed to Google that will directly feed the Editor’s Picks content area. However, the news organizations’ feeds selected to appear on your Google News page will still be algorithmically selected based on “a variety of factors, including your personalized news preferences.”

This appears to be a win-win for everyone involved. News publishers now have a mechanism to let Google know what their featured stories are.

Readers will be able to see additional content in the form of these features. As a result, Google will likely see a boost in on-site time and stickiness. Clearly the number of articles you read will help you collect Google News badges.

For more details Visit at searchenginewatch.

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Social search updates by Google and Bing have generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks. Instead of separating results from social networks like Twitter and Facebook from organic results, both search engines are streamlining search engine results pages (SERPs) by combining organic results with this social context.

Both Google and Bing have declared that, for some searches, social context will boost the rankings of results higher on the SERP than regular results. These announcements are just further confirmation of the convergence of social and search, and signal the growing importance of social media marketing for businesses.

What’s noteworthy about these changes:

• Both Google and Bing have moved away from showing tweets and sectioned-off “Liked Results” in the SERPs.
• Search engines are now sending users to the correct websites, as well as providing the detail about the origin of the recommendation (i.e., friend’s profile, original recommendation).
• With these social annotations, the search engines are giving users some visibility as to why they’re algorithms are picking certain results over the others.

Google’s Evolution: Twitter Integration

Google’s SERPs have progressed from showing organic results as a website link, to a specific tweet from a user within your social circle who mentions a link, and now to a combination of the two: the website result, a link to the friend’s social network profile (e.g. Twitter account) who did the sharing, and a link to the original recommendation are now combined into one result.

• Classic result: Google’s organic result for a keyword search pointing to a website.

• Tweet result: An link to the actual tweet from friends within your social network, mentioning your search query.

• Combined result: The website result, with additional annotations linking to your friend’s profile and a time stamp that redirects to the original recommendation are all combined in one result.

Bing’s Evolution: Facebook Likes

Bing has primarily focused on the integration of Facebook Like data in their SERPs and algorithm. Their social search features have evolved from showing organic result as a website link to a module within SERPs that’s set apart the organic search results with the header, “Liked by your Facebook friends,” to listing organic results with an added social annotation mentioning friends from your Facebook network who have also Liked the URL.

• Classic result: Bing’s organic result for a keyword search pointing to a website.

• “Liked Results”: A separate module included alongside organic results in the SERP (includes the website result, friend’s profile).

• Combined result: The website result front and center, with social context (friend’s names and profile pictures who have liked the link).

Facebook Uses Bing Search Results

Another development of note is coming from Facebook, which has started providing Bing’s web results as a part of their internal search feature. Twitter isn’t using Google results, just yet, but judging from Facebook’s and Bing’s partnership, it might be a matter of time before we see this unfold Read More…

We talk all the time about keywords. When the search engine marketing industry talks about keywords, you’ll frequently hear the terms “head,” “torso,” and “tail” to describe the amount of volume that each of the keywords receive.

Head terms are the high volume, more generic and competitive terms. Tail terms are just the opposite.

I’ve recently had a lot of internal and external conversations around the value of the keyword spectrum. We’re asking ourselves:

• Has Google Instant killed the long tail?
• Do head terms provide brand awareness, and feed tail traffic?
• At what point are you done building keywords, and exhaust the long tail?

In order to answer some of these questions I dove into some keyword level data for our clients, and found some interesting stuff.

CTR by Keyword Phrase

Most would broadly define what is a head or tail term by the number of words contained within the keyword phrase. The general thought is you should see a higher CTR when there are more keywords in the phrase because it’s more descriptive.

I took data from two different clients (both one name companies), and plotted out the CTR by word count per keyword phrase. In the first example I included both branded and unbranded terms, and in the second example included only branded terms.

In both examples, the CTR peaks with two-word keywords (e.g., “tablet computer”), and trails off as the number of keywords in the search phrase grow.

This was eye opening. If users provide a deeper level of information in the search query, you’d think they’d be more likely to find what they wanted. In these instances, I suspect organic listings, due to their ability to bold more keywords in the search query, are picking up a majority of the clicks.

The search experiences for these longer tail keywords isn’t up to par like it is for head terms. Do a search for almost any two-word phrase, and then add two more descriptive terms.

Notice how the ad copy isn’t as tightly knit? Some of this is due to paid search ad copy limitations, but most of it is probably due to broad matches showing for these terms. That will most certainly impact your CTR.

Conversion Rate

So if the CTR doesn’t improve, and the search experience is worse, what’s the value of the tail terms? It’s in the conversion rate.

Those consumers who are typing longer phrases have a better understanding of the products or services they’re looking for. This leads to a better conversion rate.

The data shows that keywords with three or greater words in them convert at least two times better. It’s also consistently better with additional keywords being added into the phrase. This means a better ROI for your program. Read More…

Today’s column is going to be a case study of a web site that made great progress simply due to basic code cleanup work. What’s interesting about this case study is that the things we did aren’t the first things you think of when you think of SEO, yet addressing these types of things can often make a huge difference.

The site is Work Coach Cafe. The site is a blog with regular posts on career advice and coaching.

We got involved in the site at the end of December 2010. Because that was the holiday season, there was a natural dip in traffic, but if we look back to November it was doing about 5,000 visitors per week. When we looked closely at the site we found some structural problems:

1. The site performance was slow, with Google Webmaster Tools showing page load times taking up to 15 seconds (slower than 92 percent of sites).

2. A crawl of the site by Xenu’s Link Sleuth revealed up 49,662 broken links.

3. There were 743 301 redirects in place from pages that were long gone, including double redirects in some cases.

We were concerned about site performance since Matt Cutts had identified performance as a ranking factor in April of last year. It turned out that one of the big problems was that the site was on a low performance shared server.

We moved the site to a different server where it continued to share space with other web sites, but in a much more controlled environment. For the record, the cost of this new server (from Pair.com) was quite a bit more, but offered a much higher performance. As you can see here, performance improved quite a bit, with average page load times in the 5 second neighborhood:

The SEO impact of the broken links is a little harder to assess. However, given the sheer quantity, we were concerned that it could be affecting the perceived quality of the site.

When we investigated the broken links we found that many of these were related to template specific issues, such as references to missing CSS files or images. Through a lengthy process of fixing problems and then re crawling the site we worked until all broken links were eliminated.

We also dug into the 301 redirects. You may ask why we spent the time on this activity. Read More…