SEO and website marketing tactics can be incorporated into the design of a website and its development to make optimizing the website for search engine ranking easier for all of the parties involved. The technique of Search Engine Optimization falls into the broader category of Internet marketing because businesses use SEO and website marketing to help with the marketing and sale of their products and services. Most people browse the Internet by themselves, making the Internet a popular outlet for companies and other entities to market their products and services to the public. For the most part, people search the web alone, which makes it easier for companies to market their products and services to an individual and not a group of people.

The specific interests of the public are kept in mind when companies market their products and services using SEO and website marketing techniques to obtain higher search engine rank. Instead of focusing their marketing on a broadly defined demographic, companies will market their products to a specific interest to have be more successful when it comes to making money. Other methods of SEO and website marketing include article marketing, pay per click, digital marketing, lead scoring, media transparency, in-text advertising and inbound marketing. Companies use SEO and website marketing to market the shopping cart on their site, certain web pages on their site, and other areas of their website. In terms of market share, Internet marketing has overtaken radio marketing.

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Facebook currently is the fifth most visited website in the entire Internet with 36 million users in the United States alone and as of last May, attracted almost 124 million unique visits to the site.  Keeping in mind this site is only four years old; Facebook is one of the most popular and fastest growing beehives of individual internet activity.  It is up to other online websites to piggyback this success and ultimately, turn these Facebook users into visitors to your site as well.  The theory seems simple, however, as with any social gathering spot, there is complications, rules, and etiquette one must follow, even online.

Step One: Create Your Personal and Company Profile

Given that Facebook is a social media platform for individuals, hiding behind an organization or company is inadvisable.  In fact, putting a face to your company or business has never been easier through adding photos to your Facebook profile and photo albums applications, but more on this later.  Anyone can join the Facebook community with a valid email.  Once this process is complete, individuals and companies must set up their personal profiles.  Initially, Facebook was intended strictly for college-aged individuals to interact with one another via the web, and the current feel and design of the site still reflects this, however, a recent trend of companies creating “individual profiles” as the face of their entire organization is occurring.  This should be the base of your Facebook operations as a company, and in addition, individual webmasters should create personal profiles that tout their affiliation to the company and company profile.

Step Two: Fleshing Out Company and Personal Profile

Fill in both profiles with the available information.  At the top of the web page when you enter Facebook, there is a “Profile(edit)” hyperlink, which allows users to choose from a variety of categories to express themselves and what they are all about via Facebook.  Keeping these things in mind, your marketing strategy should seamlessly fit into these profile boxes, which will appear to all person who view your profile.  Other information to fill out in the profile includes photos, profile picture, videos, and of course, links.  The pictures and profile picture are vital in giving a site the complete look that established credibility and rapport that social media users crave.  An incomplete profile is not attractive, and as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.  There are a number of linking opportunities throughout the Facebook profile alone.  First, the “Profile(edit)” area has a box dedicated solely to “websites:”, which is where one can easily market their domain name.  Other areas include through commenting on other users profiles, throughout the “about me” section, and within the “work/employment” section found when browsing through “Profile (edit)”.

Step Three: Other Areas to Saturate Your Marketing

Interests Groups, Events, Pages, and Friends are four categories Facebook users are familiar with in this internet community.  “Groups” are when individuals join a “group” page and proudly display their allegiance to this group in their personal profile under the “Groups” category.  Individual users can create “Groups” and flesh out the group profile in a manner very similar to the individual profile.  By having a Facebook user join your group, all his or her friends will be notified of their newfound group affiliation, and if enough curiosity is garnered, they will at the very least inspect your group page and potentially join the group as well.  Thus, the viral marketing aspect of the “Groups” section is very high and potentially very contagious.

“Events” are similar to “Groups” in that an individual user creates an “Event” and invites all their Facebook friends to join the event.  The event is usually a physical gathering of some form, however, online events are also common as well.  “Events” are a great way for an online marketer with sufficient Facebook friends to alert consumers or website users of new developments, ideas, or marketing endeavors occurring in the future.  In addition, “Events” pages allow invitees to publicly announce their intentions to accept, decline, or remain unsure about the attendance at the event.
“Pages” is relatively new in the Facebook world; however, they are nonetheless just as effective.  Basically, “pages” are profiles for established entities and fall into categories such as websites, politicians, musicians, artists, corporations, retailers, and student organizations.  There is an ever-expanding list of categories, so, pigeonholing into one is not a big deal currently.  The main thing, along with the two aforementioned areas, is to attract “friends” to these groups, events, and pages.

“Friends” are your personal Facebook associations within the site.  Generally, each profile shows a list of all your friends and keeps a running tally of how many friends each individual profile has.  For an online marketer or website owner, the more friends you have the better.  It is possible to get friends through a variety of methods, however, there is some strategy involved in all this just like in real life.
Step Four: Making Friends on Facebook

When attracting attention to your website or company, making friends, whether online or in person, is vital.  Keeping this in mind, Facebook is no different, but also offers superb ulterior benefits as well.  Every time a person becomes your friend on Facebook, all of their friends on Facebook are alerted to this newly forged association as well.  Mutual friends then can also become friends of you as well if they choose, which in turn, could lead to a viral marketing snowball effect that will cause your profile to garner many, many friend requests.  The only way to get friends is to be a friend, so, making friends in Facebook is as simple as finding them and requesting them as a friend.

Step Five: Taking Your Facebook Friends Back to Your Place

Once your become “friends” with an individual on Facebook, they will be able to view your profile, review your groups, events, pages, and other friends, and in turn, explore your websites as well.  Creating a profile that will drive these new friends to your website is of vital importance, and this is done in a variety of methods that suit each individual company or website.  Continuing to request more friends, accept friend requests, create groups, sponsor events, and add to your profile will cause your name to continually appear in your “friends” Facebook mini-feed which is essentially an RSS feed to all their Facebook friends activity.  This will in turn keep your website’s presence in Facebook and garner more traffic to your website.

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To start this off, take a look at anchor text.  Whilst doing your onpage optimization you will highlight the keywords that you consider most important.   What many people will over look is the links to internal pages that they create using these keywords.  Whilst we know that one of the key factors search engines rank a site page for is incoming links to pages, many people will pass by the opportunity to include incoming links from their own pages.

Linking your own pages is a great way to create one of the strongest types of incoming links.  Maybe you have heard that incoming links that are directed toward your page via anchor links are some of the strongest links.  If you have wondered just how to get these types of links to your pages – well here is the perfect opportunity.  Anchor text is the word or phrase that holds the hyperlink to your page; when you link your pages together using anchor text, it is the perfect opportunity to get exactly the kind of strong links that will boost your site in the search engine page rankings.

When you are preparing you onpage optimization factors, this is a great time to check that the anchor text and internal links you have established are in line with the onpage optimizations you have done.  The first thing that you want to do is make sure that the page title contains the keywords.  For example if you have a site that sells shoes, if the page you are trying to direct the links to is for ladies shoes, then you want to make sure that the onpage optimization reflects this.

Make sure that you have the write heading in the navigation bar.  If you have a page that is about ladies shoes, then you need a ladies shoes page within the navigation bar.  Following this, ensure that you have the keywords ladies shoes in the page title – this means making sure that it says ladies shoes at the top of the browser window.  Next make sure that you have bolded the keywords ladies shoes somewhere in the page.  Also make sure that you use the keywords at regular and natural intervals throughout the page text.  When you have done all this, the last step is to check that the term ladies shoes is in the main heading of the page.

When you have completed these onpage optimizations, you then want to make that final, crucial internal link.  Establish direct links to the ladies shoes page from your other pages – via that anchor text.  Ideally if you can create anchor text links tied to the term ladies shoes on every page of your site then do so.

Generating these internal links may well be the simplest link generation that you can do for your page, and yet it is one of the most often overlooked.  Remember that your website is yours to do with as you please.  Getting other links is not going to be as easy as this, so make the most of it.  Create strong internal links that are focused and effective; it’s a great way to quickly and easily boost your search engine ranking.

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