The Facebook “fan” pages are pages that are set up to specifically cater towards business.  The pages act the same way a Facebook profile page works.  It is fairly easy to set up and maintain.  The best parts of the fan pages are that they are interactive.  The pages allow for the business to post up information and it allows for customers to talk with the business.  The Facebook page can take up as much or as little time as the owner of the page wants.  Within the fan page there are options to add different pictures and information about that business such as the address and a description.

Another key feature of Facebook advertising through fan pages is being user-friendly.  The fan pages are easily accessible through Facebook and can be very informational while at the same time be user-friendly.   It allows business’s to communicate with their customers very easily, and it’s free.

Communication is the best and most useful part of Facebook.  Utilizing the communication factor within the fan page can really help to get the word out about a specific product or company.  Facebook is organized in a way that you can market your company within a specific community.  It also can be helpful with customer service.  The pages allow your customers to communicate with you.

Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the United States.  The United States is responsible for about 30 percent of the 400 million active users.  Facebook can be a very useful tool for any local business; the Facebook “fan” pages are almost a social media form of The Yellow Pages.  It is simply a way for business to get their ideas out while at the same time being user-friendly.  Social media is an important part of every business nowadays, not just Facebook, but even websites like Twitter or Foursquare.

First let’s begin with the customer loyalty programs. Foursquare gives a business the ability to track a customer’s activity and offer them certain benefits for their loyalty. For instance, say you check into a business 10 times, you may be able to receive a free meal. Other specials can work based on frequency, i.e. every 3 times a customer checks in they get a discount on drinks. A business may also choose to advertise a special for any customer that is signed up with foursquare. The final special is known as the “Mayor” special. This special is given to the most loyal customer who has come to the restaurant the most times within a certain period of time. This customer keeps his title of “Mayor” until another customer surpasses him.
So how do these specials work? Do you get emailed a coupon that you will never print out, and even if you do, forget to bring it when you actually go to the restaurant? No. With the new Foursquare application for smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry, Android), a simple display of your phone will entitle you to these specials. Your loyalty card is now your smartphone.

Foursquare gives the user the ability to tell what specials are going on right next door with its geo-targeting system. So say your business is located in a shopping plaza and your trying to alert customers to the great special you offering today. All a customer located in that plaza needs to do is turn on his or her Foursquare application and your offer will pop right up. It will also alert the customer to what requirements are needed to unlock this special offer.

Now for the businesses, a wealth of knowledge is acquired through the use of Foursquare. You are given information on where your customer base is coming from. Information on what time the customers are coming at and on what days is also very useful information. Based on the specials being offered you can check their effectiveness in increasing the current customer base. Normally the only way to advertise specials is word of mouth from customers who have already been there. Now it is possible to attract new customers by simply flashing your special on their phone. No longer will your good deals go unnoticed.

All of this seems great, but it’s still only scratching the surface of Foursquare’s potential . Combined with a company like Mobio, Foursquare can begin to realize its full potential. Imagine being able to not only make reservations on your smartphone and present the special coupon, but also pay through your phone as well. Imagine if your credit card was linked directly to your phone, allowing you at the press of a button to pay for your meal with the discount you had just gotten.

The social media aspect is the final important detail of Foursquare. Through websites such as Facebook and Twitter, local companies involved with Foursquare are able to advertise its specials to its past customers. There is also the ability to thank customers for their business and open up a dialogue in which a customer may discuss any comments about their experience or ask about any future deals. Although the website is still in its infancy stage in gaining a customer base (there are currently only 2000 business listed nationwide), the business model has the potential to be an everyday commodity for most families and businesses.

Twitter has recently become a huge way to meet and follow people or businesses. People can tweet where they are going or new things they wish to share to people. Companies can show links of their company featured on other websites. This will show followers that they are legit and they may continue to follow if they are interested. Twitter can be a very good way to break news in their industry. Being the first one will raise awareness and gain a lot of interest for their business. Companies can also use Twitter as a way to offer discounts or special offers for customers who find them via social media.

Twitter is not only for people to show interest in your company, but it is also a great way to learn about your industry and things competitors are doing. A company can learn from others’ mistakes on what to do and what not to do. Twitter allows people to track conversations, so you can always be updated. This will allow companies to know when it is their turn to maybe go for a potential customer. You can find out who your competitors are talking to and do some competitive intelligence, as Twitter likes to call it. Instead of crappy flyers or calling someone who obviously doesn’t want to speak to you, you can slowly build relationships through your Twitter. Sometimes you don’t even have to do anything. Twitter allows people to follow your page and keep up with new updates.

Twitter allows small businesses to get out of their shell and be themselves. They can put what they want whenever they want to. Potential customers stay interested because Twitter allows businesses to branch out to anyone. Businesses can hold weekly Twitter chats to get advice or talk to others in the industry. Twitter allows people to stay on top of their game and never fall behind. Small businesses can learn from others and expand. Normal marketing still works, but online outlets can be very helpful.

Four-square is another way for small businesses to grow. Are you a start-up business trying to advertise your new specials? Are you a customer simply wanting to know what restaurants around in your area can get you the best deals? Do you just want credit for going to the same restaurant every day? If you answered yes to any of these questions then Foursquare might be for you. Foursquare not only provides loyalty programs for its customers, but it also helps provide promotion through social media. Combine that with the ability to track your customer base, and Foursquare has the potential the change the world of e-commerce.

Facebook is another great way to expand your business. Facebook has advertising that goes on different peoples pages based on their likes and dislikes. Can local businesses utilize Facebook? Or is it just a waste of time? For many smaller local business Facebook can be one way, and a very useful way, to spread information throughout the community. One of the important ideas to think about when trying to market through Facebook is the targeted age group. Facebook mainly caters to the younger, college crowd. Out of all the users of Facebook, the 18-25 year olds serve as the highest percentage of users in the United States. But, the amount of users over the age of 35 are growing at a very rapid pace, within the past . Facebook can change small businesses, just as with Twitter and Foursquare.

Our client whocanisue.com was having in indexation problem after a shift over to a new CMS.  While still ranking very high for their well converting keywords they went from about a 70% IR (Indexation Rate) to an IR of about 20 percent over 120 days post New CMS. Although it seems very  commonsensical, whocanisue.com had the standard subfolder structure with a deep page hierarchy that we felt may have been making it difficult to get all the pages indexed. After confirming our theory with SEOMoz and their post about how flattening your site could yield better indexation results we put it to the test.

Less than one month after migrating 1800 pages of content into 140 subdomains we have found that we have 1710 pages indexed for an IR of 95%. Additionally, our search engine traffic increased 7% over the same time frame. Although some of our keywords dropped position on a nominal level we now have more pages indexed which are resulting in far more keywords appearing in search querys.

We are elated by this move as is our client. It’s important to understand that if your goals are to make the user experience better, chances are Google and the other big Search engines will take note and help you out.

My goal in owning the trademark for the word SEO is not to try to force people to change their SEO process, but rather, prevent companies from selling “SEO” as a service under false pretenses.

…We will also be forming a board of directors to oversee changes to the process, and format in which SEO can be sold (basically the BBB for the SEO industry). We will restrict businesses from selling the process of SEO as an “SEO” service if they do not meet the process approved by the SEO trademark requirements. Those approved will use SEO as normal, but will now be able to use the term as SEO™, and will be able to claim that their SEO service is approved under SEO trademark guidelines.

This power is for the people of the Search community and the protection of the general business consumer.

In my best Rosie Perez voice “REEAAALLLY?”

On April 24, 2008 the nice folks over at SEOmoz made the SEO world aware of this Jason character and his attempt to regulate the industry.  Thanks guys!

Today Rhea Drysdale has successfully defeated Jason Gambert, you go Rhea! Today you are our hero in the SEO world.

Click here to read Rhea’s thoughts in her own words.

1. If an enduser ends up at a 404 on your site they may get confused and leave your site.
2. Google likes URL’s and links that actually link somewhere. Overtime google may stop indexing the page the URL is pointing to.

How do you know if you have a 404 problem?

If you have webmaster tools, it will actually tell you what pages are resulting in a 404 and if you don’t, it’s actually pretty simple. Let’s say your domain name is www.dogdayafternoon.com, just add any obscure word or phrase after your domain like www.dogdayafternoon.com/i-fly-kites. It will most likely see something along the lines of page not found or 404 error.

How do solve this problem?

First, make sure your link’s are pointing to the right URL’s. Secondly, you want to create a 404 error page like our client whocanisue.com. Some site’s get creative and funny. It’s recommended that you have links on your 404 page that act almost as a sitemap to your most important pages, that way your enduser doesn’t cut and run, but knows that you understand there is a problem and they can start over or be guided through another path.

Digital Footprint can help you with any of your Search Engine Optimization needs. Contact us today.

Google Buzz is just like facebook, you follow people, they follow you, you create a status update, upload videos and pics and then your followers can comment.  I personally find it more efficient to have everything in one place. The problem is getting everyone else to move over to gmail. I’ll do my best.

Not having these redirects can be fatal to a website, from an indexation standpoint. Let’s say you were a small website with 500 URL’s and you had 385 indexed. If you were to completely restructure your url system, without 301 redirects. Overtime, Google and the other major search engines would stop displaying your URL’s as they would most likely return a 404 error.

Let’s use the example of a made up boat company xyzboatco.com. We decide to make our structure more effective with less folders and change xyzboatco.com/boats/engine/speed to xyzboatco.com/speed-boat-engines. If your initial URL was on the first page of Google and you didn’t redirect it to the later URL, overtime Google would drop that link. Google would still be sending traffic to the old link and it would result in a 404 error, which is an SEO no no.

If you are considering a URL overhaul it is absolutely imperative that you create a 301 redirect for your website, so you don’t lose all the hard work that you have put into your site.

After converting one of their extremely confused, annoyed, and down right pissed off PPC clients into one of ours, I had some info gathering to do. What was the service, what was their pitch, and how did they talk potential clients into their pay per click campaign? So I actually called yellowpages and told them that I needed help running one of my campaigns cause I was just too busy and yellowpages sent out a sales rep and a Search Engine Marketing Manager. This is what transpired:

Service Highlights:

• onypc.com (yellowpages) manages your campaign in Atlanta
• PPC Campaign is spread among many major search engines; Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, etc..
• Choose a comfortable monthly budget
• Cool Online Portal for Transparency
• onypc Landing Page
• 12 month contract (NO OUT)

Major Onypc.com (Yellowpages) Flaws:

• With onypc.com (yellowpages) you don’t actually get to speak with the campaign manager, you work with a Search Engine Marketing “Manager” that probably has never managed a PPC account.
• I had the rebuttal, that if I knew Google converted at twice the rate of the other search engines, and was the same relative Cost per Click (CPC), why would I be forced to display ads on less effective search engines. The response was, “We have you covered on 92% of the Search Engines, why would you only want to be covered on 72% of the searches!” Really, who was this guy kidding? I have been managing $100,000+  monthly PPC campaigns for over 3 years. It’s common advertising sense to appropriate your spend to the medium that converts at the highest rate and lowest cost.
• Cool Backend Portal; this was the biggest selling point for them (very sad.) Apparently this offers transparency, which is very important to someone investing money in advertising. With the portal you can see how many clicks you had and how much you spent, with one very important metric excluded, the cost that yellowpages paid for that click.
• How much Does yellowpages make? We all know that there is an inherent cost for a click. There are various models out there for pay per click but typically there is a one time setup fee and then a monthly management fee relative to the monthly PPC spend. Only yellowpages has a far different model, for this example you (Painting Professional) would give yellowpages $2500 and they would show you 80 clicks in the report on your cool back-end portal. Doing simple math you know you spent just over $31 per click, seems ok right?  Absolutely not!!! Only If you are a personal injury lawyer specializing in Mesothelioma.
• Obviously you have to get paid for services rendered, but if you are only paying $3 a click on Google and charging them $31 per click, that’s strong armed robbery. I asked how do I know that I’m not getting ripped off? Response. “We’re Yellowpages.” hahahah, riiiiiight!
• A Landing Page? check this out  S & J Roofing. From an Analytics standpoint you are dealing with a limited # of page views and time on site, why would you want another obstacle up to keep you from securing a client? I have no clue either. It is no wonder that their clients hate them.
• Agreement Length = 12 Months. So after everything is said and done, we have ripped you off, stolen your money, landed the potential clients that you over paid for on our site, and now we are locking you in for 12 months!

My fellow readers! I scream SCAMMMMMM. Please do yourselves a favor, do not spend your money with onypc.com (yellowpages) they are giving the SEM and more specifically PPC world a bad name. If you are interested in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign where we land your potential clients on  your website,  show you what the clicks cost on Google, and then focus on increasing your conversions overtime please contact Digital Footprint Media.

Recently blogs have become mainstream for businesses and it makes perfect sense. Business blogs have quickly become a very affordable marketing and advertising tool. If you choose to blog for your business here are some of the benefits:

Blog equals Content, the more relevant content your site has about your niche the more the SE’s (search engines) will like you. Acceptance may have not been a big deal when you were a rebel teenager, but believe me, now it matters. The more the search engines like and accept you, the higher your site will rank. Higher rankings mean more traffic to your site. We all love traffic just as long as we are not sitting in it.

Blogging gives you a way to share your insight and knowledge. Sharing is good! A blog gives you the opportunity to share information and ideas freely; doing so will establish you as a respected expert in your industry.

Blogs are conversational and a great way for you to reach out to your clientele. Your blog will give your clients the opportunity to rave about how great you are. Positive affirmations make everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside. Imagine how a potential client will feel when they read how amazing you are.

By blogging frequently with good information you will build a following. Your readers will become your biggest fans and in turn provide you with referrals. A good blog can spread across the web through social media outlets like wild fire. If your posts are interesting, informative and done on a regular basis, your readers will share.

If you are interested in establishing your Digital Footprint on the web with a business blog contact us today.