Speaking of SEO predictions for 2012 and a roundup of search engine optimization in 2011, what about the long term future of the SERPs and how we interact with them? Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the way out there predictions for search engine optimizers…

The Information Age

As the Industrial Age came to a close and the Information Age started up in the latter half of the 20th century, a lot of people were excited about the prospects for a brave new world – hopefully not too much like 1984 (the book not the actual year…)

The Y2k fears came and went as the Internet continued to gain dominance in everyday life. Now, it is hard to imagine getting through the day without being able to “search the Internet” for a quick and easy answer. From how to prepare the best coffee cake to self-diagnosis of health problems to learning how to shoe a horse, the knowledge suddenly available to everyone was overwhelming.

Amongst all the information that was actually helpful, a trend of creating pages (filling space) on the Internet for a solely financial purpose began to dilute the effectiveness of the Internet as a useful and safe place. The Internet has come a long, long way since the early days in the 1990s, but even today there is a lot of changes still happening.

Beyond Basic Search

From auto-correcting spelling mistakes to offering definitions or other information besides just listings of and links to websites, Google and Yahoo / Bing  have come a long way, whatever you call them. (YaBing or BingHoo, dear reader? Leave your thoughts below!) Still, there is a good chance that the first page of the SERPs (especially above the fold) will continue to change and evolve. While some say the search engines are just out to make money, to make the money they know they need to make a good / useful product – which doesn’t always align with letting other people make money on their platform.

As the web progresses, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see “search engines” evolve as well. The search engines today are a far cry from what was available even five or ten years ago. In another five or ten years, it is a little difficult to imagine what may be possible. Take intent, for example. Even today, it is possible for Google and others to try to piece together the intent of a searcher – be it information gathering or to make a purchase or something else. The ability to read the mind (in a way) of a searcher is only going to increase as time goes on. Some day soon there may be something known as pre-search. Okay, maybe that is taking it a bit far, but a science fiction writer should jump on writing a tale about a search engine AI program running wild. Imagine the damage that could be done.

Even back here in reality, the search engines (especially Google) are making great strides in being able to offer searches more of what they want – or more of what Google thinks they want. It will be interesting to see if human powered search engines like ChaCha (to name one) eventually end up doing better than Google at searching for particular answers. For example, now you can text ChaCha a question directly and get an answer for free. While you can search Google for free on most phones these days, there is no human person on the other end making sure there is one definitive answer to the question asked. On the other hand, it is hard for a company like ChaCha to scale well.

Computer, do you hear me?

Remember that scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Scotty is about the Enterprise on modern day earth and he tries to talk into the mouse when giving out a design for stronger glass? While the new iPhone 4S allows for a basic talk to the computer and get an answer, this technology is going to grow by leaps and bounds in the years ahead, imho.

How does this affect SEO efforts? In a big way actually. When you stop and think about it, you can easily see how having quality content – answers not just facts – is going to be important, even crucial. The search engines are going to have to go a lot further than they are today, but with so many smart people working on the problem, it’s only a matter of time before the artificial intelligence used to index the Internet is also able to give us answers to our questions and maybe make life a little easier – at least for consumers.

For those of us who publish websites online, it is going to become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. While black hat methods are always likely to exist, the rate at which the holes will be caught and filled will increase as time goes on, making black hat – short term – methods less and less worth the money. On the other hand, those who put efforts into their website(s) and provide quality information in a fun and entertaining way will be on top – with or without the search engines.

If you have any thoughts about the long term future of SEO, leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts on the topic. We’d love to hear from you!

You heard it here first, folks. Ok, maybe you didn’t hear these here first, but you’re going to hear them here! Seriously, though, I want to take a look at some predictions for SEO in 2012 … and beyond!

SEO 2011 Roundup

Before beginning predictions, I want to take a look at SOME of the highlights for SEO in 2011. If I miss anything, leave a comment and take me to task! (Although I’d love to hear from you, dear reader, anytime…)

• Panda – From being pandalyzed to bearing the brunt of the “Farmer Update,” one of the bigger SEO events this year was the rollout and continued use of the Panda algorithm that helps Google determine “quality websites” to display in their SERPs. (I should note that my grandmother asked who decided what quality was when I was talking to her about it the other day. Also, please call your grandparents or parents if they’re around. You don’t have to talk SEO topics with them if your grandparents aren’t as hip as mine, but it’s still a good thing! Okay, that’s done…) Panda was big news for SEO in 2011 and will continue to wreak havoc (or clean up the web) in 2012 and beyond.
• Definition of Quality – For some, 2011 will be the year that an “official” definition of quality content was formed. Well, maybe it’s not an exact science – yet – but as the Internet unfolds, it is going to be harder and harder to fool the bots and rank with garbage content. This is a side-effect of the Panda update in a way, but it’s also a natural part of the evolution of the web.
• Backlinks – Yahoo Site Explorer closed down recently, leaving Majestic as the #1 source for information on backlinks behind Google. There is an article (or three) out there explaining how much it costs to actually run an operation that crawls and categorizes all the links on the Internet.
• (Not Provided) – Google taking away referrer data from signed in SSL users is going to make it more difficult for webmasters as more and more people begin to use Google based products and are signed in when they search (or “Google”) the web. 
• EMD – Exact match domains lost a LOT of strength over the course of 2011. Whether or not the balance will be restored in 2012 remains to be seen, but many exact match domains are not performing as they did in the past.
• Above the Fold – Google has begun to try to take a look at what is “above the fold” on a webpage so they can better gauge whether it is spam or valuable content. Not a lot is known about the “Above the Fold” Algorithm from Google, but it has a lot of people interested in the technology.
• Author Reputation – As Google+ grows and more and more people sign-up, Google has been testing using Google+ profiles tied to a piece of content to help gauge its value. As the future progresses, I believe this is going to be more and more important for SEO – brand and name of writer will be important.
• Google+ – The appearance of a new social network was perhaps missed by some, but almost overnight Google was able to sign-up millions and millions of users to Google+. While they had some snafus, they are still coming out with changes to the network at an astounding rate.

SEO Predictions for 2012

Here are some of my predictions for SEO in 2012.

• Backlinks – New tools will be built and released to help track backlinks across the Internet. Whether it will be the folks at SEOMoz or someone else, I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen.
• Google – Dominance by Google will continue, with Yahoo and Bing (YaBing) unable to catch up to the current market leader. At the same time, I expect more governmental involvement when it comes to everything Google does.
• Links – The backbone of the Google system for ranking – links – are still going to be important in 2012. In fact, they may be even more important – not masses of them but the quality of the links rather than the quantity. This will affect sales of some of the automated tools out there, but so many buy those not knowing if they ever work or not. The value of certain types of links is going to be looked at more closely as well as things like link velocity (the speed at which you gain or lose links over time.)
• Social Signals – Whether it is the Facebook like button or the Google+ plus one button or Twitter tweets, social signals are going to be used more and more to separate the good content from the less than good content. Gaming the social networks will still be a part of SEO, but as with other automated methods, it is going to become more and more difficult.

Their SEO Predictions

Because it’s that time of the year, here’s a round-up of some other SEO predictions for 2012 and beyond.

• Content Marketing Institute News – This is a simple infographic, but it has some interesting numbers on what some companies are going to be doing for SEO in 2012 and beyond. It’s one way to think about what may be coming.
• Serps.com – At the SERPs blog, they have a look at some of their predictions for SEO in 2012. One of their interesting predictions is that Twitter search is going to become mainstream in 2012 and beyond.

Your SEO Predictions?

And, as always, we would love to hear from you. If you have any predictions about SEO in the future, leave a comment below and let us know. Even if you just want to take us to task for something, we welcome the challenge to win you over.

So… what if you don’t have a brand when you’re starting? You need to build one. Luckily, building a brand goes along with attracting visitors (and potential customers), so you can get two birds with one stone – out of the bush?

Brute Force SEO (is Dying)

Ah, the glory days of SEO. While some may say they are pre-Google, the number of people on the Internet those days was not as high as it is now. Nor were there as many people popping out their credit cards to snap up deals.  So for many the glory days were the early days of Google when you could employ easy methods to get good rankings – at least for a short term.

As Google’s ability to crawl and index the web increased, it became necessary to use more and more automation in black hat SEO attempts in order to keep up. These days, it’s easy to see people “selling” thousands or tens or even hundreds of thousands of low quality links in order to try to “rank” a page or an entire website.

And while brute force methods like SENuke worked for a while for some people, the fact the tools are easily available is making them about worthless. While $200 or so a month plus expenses may seem like it would keep the software out of people’s hands, SEnuke and SENuke X really opened up mass link spam to a lot of people. And the web was filled with junk pages on forums and thin article directories as well as Web 2.0 properties. These “link wheels” eventually began to work less and less – especially if just pointed directly at a “money site.”

Today, there are still some brute force techniques that are working, but their time is short as Google and the other search engines continue to advance. Because of this, it is going to become even more important to pay attention to brand – especially when building a money site to make profit. Having link spam associated with a brand is not a good thing – especially as the brand gets bigger. (BMW, anyone? There are many more examples to be had…) Even if the link spam is pointed to a “buffer layer,” there’s a good chance it’s going to be noticed.

The Power of Brand

You are still welcome to try link spam if you want – even high quality link spam – but at the end of the day, if you’re not building a brand, all your efforts are going to have to be repeated over and over and over again as Google catches up with all new methods to rank eventually.  Let’s take a look at some of the power of brand.

• Trust – One of the big things that comes as you build a good, strong brand is trust. This is true for the visitors and customers you accrue over the years as well as trust of the search engines as you are not doing anything they frown upon.
• Authority – Along with the trust – when it comes to visitors and the search engines – there comes authority. Being considered an authority website in a niche can have tremendous help on your rankings in the SERPs.
• Rankings – In addition to the trust and authority you can build up with a brand, the other byproduct is going to be good as well – great rankings in the SERPs. As you build a bigger brand you can get away with using lower quality content. This is a catch-22 of sorts, of course, because if you abuse this and do too much thin content, you’re going to mess up your brand and lose the benefits.

Tips for Building a Brand

Now that you have a better idea of some of the benefits of having a good brand built up, we are going to give you a few tips that can help you enjoy the benefits of having a brand. Be warned, however, that it is not easy work.The good news is that it can be fun if you go into it with the right mindset.

•  Go Big or Go Home – If you want to build a “small brand” you need to stop now. When building a brand you need to constantly be thinking about the big picture. At the same time, you need to make sure you also take care of all the day to day details. As mentioned, building a brand is hard work, but the efforts are really worth the work if you can build a brand with a good reputation that people love.
• Be Honest and Trustworthy – If you want people to give you their trust so you can become an authority and build your brand, you need to be honest and trustworthy. Being worthy of a person’s trust may actually become harder as people become more jaded to marketing and advertising online. By being honest and establishing real communication with your visitors and your customers, you can begin to build trust – which takes time.
• Keep it Real - This is hard to explain, but it goes along with being honest and trustworthy in a way. You want to make sure you “keep it real” as the kids say when you are dealing with your customers and visitors. This will allow you to establish your brand in a good light – which will help it spread and grow. If you have something really special connected to your brand – a certain sense of “realness” for example – you can really build up a brand quickly with a lot of passionate followers and fans – and we’re talking real people who have real friends, not Facebook or other social network accounts.

 There are other things to consider when building a brand, but you should see that a brand is better than utilizing brute force SEO techniques to rank in 2011, 2012 and beyond.  As always, if you have any thoughts or comments about brand or brute force SEO tactics, leave some words below and let us know.

Captain Quality here.

Yes, I will explain the name at some point – most likely in every post going forward.

You see, I am going to be writing for Lease a SEO and wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. I also want to start with a little rant about hats and why you shouldn’t call me a white hat or black hat or grey hat or even one of the newfangled purple hats or green hats!

Captain Quality: Striped SEO Hat

I am not going to give you too much information about myself, but just know I have been around since Archie, Gopher, and Veronica were the dominant ways to search the then fairly small Internet.

Over the years – through Lynx to Mosaic to Netscape to Firefox – I have seen search go through many changes as the web has evolved.

In those early days – before the term “search engine” even existed – the Internet was primarily a non-commercial place, a virtual space not too many people knew about or could afford to access.

As the Internet blew up, there was Northern Lights, AltaVista and Yahoo – the leaders in early search. They either had slightly wonky algorithms (that were easy to game) or were human edited and were finding it difficult to scale.  Then came Google and PageRank and the game was changed.

It’s always been interesting to me that Google tried to sell their search engine to Yahoo for around a million dollars (I can’t remember the exact amount – leave a comment below if you do!)  Yahoo brushed them off because at that point they were still on top of the game.

And then came Adwords, and Adsense and all other things Google. Soon, instead of geeky webmasters telling others about Google – the great new search engine – the viral effect took off for them and they were able to take the number one spot in search. They were monetizing the searches a lot better than Yahoo and also doing other things better as well.

Not This Archie, Silly

Today, I look back to those early days of the Internet and feel a bit naive. How far the Internet – and search – has come over the years. Indeed, a whole industry has come about – SEO. Good old search engine optimization. In the early days it was easy in some ways, but every year it becomes more and more difficult to “game” or try to trick the search engines.

This is why I am going by the name of Captain Quality. It’s a bit grandiose, perhaps, and maybe my big words (when diminutive ones would suffice) are going to give away my identity, but I think something needs to be said to the SEO community at large.

You see, links and PageRank and other factors – the 200+ that Google alone uses – are all important, but sometimes paying too close attention to the small details, you forget the BIG PICTURE. This is where I can help, I think. In my posts I am going to give you SEO tips for the 21st century. These are not going to be churn and burn techniques, but they may not be entirely “White Hat” either.

When it comes to SEO in the future, I strongly believe that quality is going to be the key defining factor. While computers may not be able to 100% accurately predict or spot “quality” content at this time, they have come a long way since the early days of search. With the abundance of spinners and other techniques to get “unique” (but not quality) content, don’t you think the thinktank at good ole’ Google has come up with a way to recognize all the re-spun and re-hashed garbage that exists on the web?

So what is quality, then? Perhaps value has a large part to play in it. We will go into this more in the weeks and months ahead, but for now I’m going to stick with that simple definition. Quality content is content that is valuable to the reader in some way. That value may be different for different people, but the value must be there.

It is easy to acquire mass amounts of links or even small amounts of targeted links, but everyone else is doing this as well. The thing that is going to set you apart – as a website, as a brand and most important in the SERPs – is having a voice that speaks to people, having content that engages them beyond simply trying to satisfy a word count or keyword density percentage.

A Brand New Internet

I need your help as readers, however, for the magic to happen. Having a background in English literature (there’s another clue for you), I have done a lot of research on the “reader” and how they affect words – how they bring themselves to the text and something either sparks or doesn’t. The Internet offers a chance for you – the reader – to interact with me.

If I go too far one way or another, let me know! I’m happy to listen and even respond. As I begin to give you more information about SEO, it is important to me that you become involved and let me know what you want to hear about most. If you are tired of yet another keyword research post, let me know!  If you have any questions or want to guess my secret identity, leave a comment below!

We care about our readers and – as my name implies – strive to create great content that will make you laugh, make you smile, or maybe even teach you something. If nothing else, something I write may upset you enough so that you use that little comment box down there to interact with the team here at Lease a SEO.

If you live in LA, or any major U.S. city, you have probably experienced your share of rush hour traffic. The commute to and from work stuck in traffic can test your patience, and ruin a perfectly good day.  It’s the reason you’re late to a morning meeting, or why you couldn’t pick your child up on time.  As much hate and destane as you have for it, traffic is just a part of your daily routine.

There is a good kind of traffic though.  It’s the term used to describe the amount of online users who visit your page.  It’s the amount of visitors who click on your ads and links, and search through your pages.  They are the visitors who hopefully convert into customers.  This is the kind of traffic you use SEO to attract, and the kind of traffic you work tirelessly for.

There are thousands of blogs relating to the topic of acquiring traffic.  There are tons of tips on how to get the type of traffic you want, and how to turn those clicks into sales.  One strategy worth using is to “own” your niche.  Be the King or Queen of your niche market.  You have to study your industry like you’re about to take the SATs and every question is about your field.  Find out who the major players in your industry are.  It’s important to define who your competition is.  Know your industry in and out.  Stay up to date by reading blogs, articles, and news about your industry.  Knowing your market is also important.  Find out who your market audience is, and how to target them.

An important thing I’ve learned is that Google isn’t the only way you can earn traffic.  Depending on any one method of advertising is never a good idea.  Say it with me, I can get traffic without Google!  This statement will free you.  Advertising using Google is tricky and expensive.  Keep in mind that 1% or less of the population is interested in what you are selling.  Targeting the entire population is a way to waste clicks and run through budgets. Instead create a marketing campaign that strategically targets consumers already looking for your product.  Offer something valuable, and make sure your website doesn’t look like a hot mess.

You can earn traffic without Google in a variety of ways.  You can earn visitors by offering back links.  Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can help get the word out as well.  Business Cards and email lists are traditional methods that nevertheless work. Include a link to your website in your email signature.  By doing this, you share your website with every person who receives an email from you. Traditional email marketing can lead to spam claims, but providing a link in legitimate emails will not. Posting onto forums, commenting on relevant blogs, and guest posting also helps attract relevant traffic. Looks like you have a lot of work to do, so I’ll let you get started.

You’ve probably never fought harder for attention, not even if you were the middle child to working parents growing up.  In this economy every click that brings you closer to a sale is valuable, but how do you stand out against your competitors?  Yes moving up on the search engine rankings is important, but you need something that will grab and hold the visitors attention once they reach your page.  That is why paying attention to the content you provide is so vital to the success of your website.

Writing your own content can be time consuming, but you can’t expect users to spend time on your page if you’re not willing to put in time yourself.  Outsourcing your content can lead to stale, error-prone sentences that make little sense.  Hardly the kind of content that will capture consumer attention, and lead to conversions. If you are going to outsource your content, make sure you know what you’re buying.  Take the time to review and edit your content, looking for specific criteria.

What defines quality content?  To grab consumer attention you need content that:

A) Solves a problem, Adds to a discussion, or Answers a question

When conducting a search, users are looking for answers to a question or need.  They want to know how to solve their problem, where to find what they need.  If you aren’t offering something more valuable or at least different from your competitors, you will not stand out.  Try clearly defining answers and
solutions.  Make it easy for visitors to find what they need from your website.  Provide clearly defined content, and your visitors will learn to depend
on you.

B) Is Fresh

If users can find your content on another site, why would they come to you?  If you are working on SEO, chances are you don’t have your market cornered.  People are creatures of habit, they keep returning to the same sites, because it’s easy.  If you can prove that you offer something fresh and new, you can
convince them to make the switch.

C) Has Substance

If you’re going to provide thin content, you might as well leave your pages blank.  If you outsource a bunch of useless content visitors will bounce your website quicker than they came.  Make sure your content provides useful, in-depth information on whatever industry you are in.  Statistics, graphics, and instructions often help.

D) Is Targeted

Chances are, you’re not going to grab a pre-teenaged girl’s attention with information on how be a good janitor.  As useful as that information might be, she’s
more inclined to visit your website if you have the latest news on Justin Bieber, or how to dress like Selena Gomez. The point is, it won’t matter if your content is full of information if it isn’t geared at your target audience. Know your audience, and provide content that will attract, and keep their attention.

E) Can be Shared

These days having people “like” your content is very important.  Providing content that can be shared by your visitors will attract more attention and traffic to your website.  People love to laugh, so try creating funny clips or videos for your webpage.  Write an interesting article or blog.  Give your readers something to talk about with their friends.

F) Is Relatable

Talk to your visitors as if you are a friend.  People take advice from friends before authoritative, “preachy” figures.

G) Leaves Room for Discussion

Open ended questions or opinions can leave room for discussion.  Give your visitors a chance, or the ability to, respond to your content.

H) Is Easy to Read

Most importantly, make sure your visitors can read your content.  If you outsource your content, chances are there will be a ton of misspellings and grammatical errors.  Avoid using big “fancy” words.  Remember, your content should be relatable to your audience.

1. Using keywords you want to use, instead of what you should use.

When you use your keyword tool to generate keywords you will be provided with a list of keywords, but you will also be given information per keyword.  Google Adwords provides you with bid price and traffic data.  Next to each keyword is a number telling you how many people on average search for that keyword.  You might be compelled to choose the most searched keywords, but there is a significant problem with that strategy.  The more popular a keyword is on Google, the more expensive it will be. Running a campaign targeting these highly searched keywords can lead to astronomical budgets.  If you are working with a small budget and the top searched keywords, you will find that your campaign will run through your budget quickly. When I say quickly, I mean like within the hour.  Spending money on the top searched keywords isn’t the best use of your advertising dollar.

Instead of using the most expensive keywords, try focusing on keywords with moderate search numbers.
Google will notify you if your keyword search volume is too low, and you can choose to pause or delete that keyword after the fact.  Using less searched keywords will prevent you from wasting your daily spend, and will lower your CPA.

2. Selecting Broad Match instead of Exact Match

This comes down to search volume.  When you target Exact Match keywords, then you are only receiving clicks from people who typed in that exact keyword phrase.  The conversion rate is higher, because these are consumers already looking for your product or service.  Why do people use broad match?  Some keyword volumes are so low, that using exact match would mean missing out on good traffic, or any traffic at all.  Test your keyword phrase using exact match first.  If you find that your keyword isn’t receiving enough traffic, then you can choose to target broadly.  If you do decide to target using broad match, make sure to create a good list of negative keywords to deflect any poor traffic.

3. Ignoring Conversion Rates

Whether you are doing your own SEO, or hiring a professional, you should be focusing on acquiring quality traffic.  We understand that you are taking your business online to find new customers and grow your business.  More often than not, business owners want to target the keywords with the most traffic, but what you should be looking for are converting keywords.  These keywords might have lower traffic volume, but if the conversion rate is high you are getting more for your dollar.  After all, you are looking for customers who will actually purchase what you are selling.

Imagine one hundred people visit your store on Monday, but none of them buy anything.  You change some things around on Tuesday, and only five people visit your store, but all five people spend a ton of money.  Tuesday sounds like a better day doesn’t it?  The same applies to your online campaigns. Better to have less traffic with more conversions, then a ton of useless traffic.

4. Choosing out of context keywords

Some keywords might sound like a good idea, but they might not be has highly relevant as you think. Take the keywords your tool has come up with, and enter them into a search engine.  This is a good way to measure whether or not your keyword applies to your business.  If the links do not relate to what you sell or do, then that is not the keyword for you.

5. Never conducting keyword reviews

The online marketplace is always changing.  What worked last month might not work this month.  You shouldn’t make drastic changes to your campaigns too often, but doing monthly reviews is a good idea.

If you are running any sort of campaign, you want to track your return on investment. Your website is an investment, something you created to earn more business. It is important to track how your website is performing, in order to determine if you have a profitable website or if changes need to be made. However, there are tons of numbers and categories to look at. Do you pay attention to all of them? Or are there certain statistics that are more important than others? The following are categories you will find in your website statistics that you should pay close attention to:

1. Unique Visitors

An important part of ROI and monetizing a website is traffic. You should be aware of your traffic quantity and quality. By staying informed on how many unique visitors you get a day, you will be able to make the right optimization decisions. If your unique visitor statistics are low, then you know you need to make changes to your search engine ranking, brand building, or your website content.

2. Location

Location is important for different reasons depending on what your objectives are. If you run a local business, than you probably want customers who are located within a specific mile radius of your business. By checking this statistic you can determine if your website is reaching the right audience. If you are running an ad campaign, you can set the campaign to only target users within your state or city. If you are trying to expand your market, you can study your location statistics to find out which locations need improvement. If you are missing visitors from certain states, you could create ad campaigns that reach out to these areas.

3. Search Terms

By studying your search terms you can find out which terms people are using to get to your website. This statistic will help you generate the best keyword list. Once you have a highly converting keyword list, you can do great things. You can improve your website content, create converting ads, and improve your page ranking.

4. Referral

Studying referral statistics will help you determine where your traffic is coming from. If a certain article or blog is sending a lot of traffic your way, you can submit it to other websites. You can also find out what readers are looking for, and write more articles and blogs like that one.

5. Pages

This statistic will show you which of your pages are the most and least popular. If one of your pages is receiving a low number of visits, you can find out how to improve it or delete it all together.

6. Time

By finding out what time of the day you get the most traffic, you can determine when to add posts, articles, ads or sales.

7. Days

This statistic will tell you which days of the week you get the most traffic. You can apply this information the same as you would with the time of day statistics.

8. Visit Length

Your Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate are important. You want a high CTR, and low Bounce Rate. By studying your length of visit statistics, you can determine why visitors are clicking and leaving your page, or sticking around.

1) Posting Direct Backlinks

Relevant backlinks help boost your website rankings on Google. The same is true for Facebook. If you post highly relevant hyperlinks in your status updates it will increase your Facebook page rank. Google punishes those who include random backlinks on webpages, and the same will be true for your Facebook page. Be sure to only post hyperlinks that are related to the business you are promoting on your Facebook page. There are two ways to post hyperlinks on your Facebook page. You can include it in the text of your status update, or you can post it using the Facebook “link” function.

2) Pictures, Activities, & Discussion Boards

Posting pictures is important, because you can add captions incorporating your relevant keywords. Discussion Boards allow you to communicate with followers, include additional content, and gain more followers by word of mouth.

3) Link to Your Facebook Page

If you operate other websites, you should include backlinks to your Facebook page. Your customers should be aware that you have a Facebook Page. Linking will inform your current customers, and help you gain more followers.

4) Get More Supporters

Probably the most important task for Facebook Page owners is to gain more followers. Your page rank will always improve with more supporters. Supporters work as living, breathing backlinks to your page. It’s important for business and for page rank.

5) Get Visitors to Like You

The more comments and “likes” your page gets the more backlinks you will gain. Comments and Likes get more traffic to your page, and will increase your ROI and conversion rate. The more comments and likes your page gets, the more attention Google pays to your Facebook page as well. Google will recognize that your page provides a positive user experience.

1. Pick a Title and Stick with It

First, it is important to pick the right title. Don’t try to get too creative with your page name, but you shouldn’t have a generic title either. Make sure that your title accurately describes your business, and incorporates any brand names. Secondly, once you name your Facebook page keep it. Every time you change the name of a webpage Google responds by taking points away from your ranking score.

2. Take Time to Consider your URL

You can only change your URL once, so make sure you choose something that will accurately represent your company and what you do. For example, include your best keyword in your URL.

3. Be Selective with Content & Placement

You don’t have many options for content placement on your Facebook page, so place key phrases in the “About” section. It is the best location for any original content you have. There are only 250 characters allowed, so be selective.

4. The Info Tab

Use the info tab for quality backlinks, and any important content you couldn’t fit into the “About” section. Complete all the fields in your “Info” section. Keyword phrases, content and hyperlinks can be placed in this section.

5. Lengthy Content

You will find that you are limited on space for content, but Facebook does enable you to create supplemental tabs or boxes to be filled with content of your choice. This is the area where you can include additional content, hyperlinks, or even images related to your business. This will help increase your page score.