Before contacting an SEO company, understand what search engine optimization can and can’t do. All companies will promise results, but quicker is seldom better in the internet world. Understand that achieving results will take time, especially if your website is new, but tactics used to achieve these results often lead to long-term popularity. Never contact an SEO company first before understanding optimization and social media. Once you’re familiar with basic practices for optimizing a website, contact an SEO company to see what they can do for you.

Adding content and developing a linking strategy are the basis for any SEO campaign; Pay-Per-Click and social media – both as off-page strategies – may also be added. When contacting an SEO company, ask them about these. In particular, ask questions along the lines of, “How will you develop a linking strategy?” and “What’s your approach to content?”

Additionally, come up with your own expectations. Are you considering SEO to make your website more visible, or are you looking to optimize your website to make more sales? A combination of both? A company’s strategy should align with your expectations, and the SEO company should give you examples of the approach they’ve taken to increase a website’s visibility or sales.

Facebook has had a policy on users passing away for a while now – they call it “memorializing” an account. At this link, you can report a deceased person’s profile and either have it removed or memorialized. When an account is memorialized, friends of that person can leave remembrances and other messages in the person’s memory or for the person’s family. This has been a successful procedure that Facebook has developed. According to numerous reports, families have found a lot of peace from the messages left from friends and relatives on social media sites.

Now Twitter is following suit, with a specific procedure for reporting the death of person with a profile. However, according to this article, some experts in the industry don’t think that Twitter’s policy is good enough:

“Jeremy Toeman, CEO and founder of Legacy Locker–a site that acts as a digital safe – [wrote that]‘…[t]his policy lacks the concept of desired intent. What if an individual wanted their Twitter stream archived (and not just by the Library of Congress)? What if another user wanted it wiped out (a challenge with any service, we acknowledge) completely? What about any situation wherein the desires of the user who dies are in conflict with those who support them, or a conflict within the surviving family members?’”

That’s the major difference between the two social media powerhouses policies – Facebook allows the total shutoff of the profile no matter if it’s deleted or not. There is no administrator access to the profile, it just acts as a public remembrance. Twitter, on the other hand, will remove the account and/or help the family save an archive of all public tweets, which leaves something to be desired by some critics?

What do you think? Which policy works better?

There are a lot of cool features to Places but its launch is a little curious, coming just weeks after CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public relations snafu over handling public vs. private profile option on his social media giant site. Web critics have reacted with hesitation about the new feature:

“Foursquare happened to be the highest profile company to speak at the event because they were the most at risk of being damaged by Facebook Places. Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare, is still optimistic however, despite appearing to be left in the dark on this one. He told VentureBeat, ‘If Facebook thinks that location is a good idea, then we are on to something.’ Yes Dennis, you were definitely on to something, which is why Facebook just took your idea.” - Nick O’Neill, All Facebook

So if you are concerned about the effect that Places may have on your privacy on Facebook, here are instructions on how to block Facebook from releasing your location to any and every one:

1. Log on to your profile and choose Account > Privacy Settings in the upper right hand corner

2. Go to Customize Settings and choose ‘Only Me’ next to the list item ‘Places I Check Into’

3. Make sure the box next to “Include me in “People Here Now” after I check in” is unchecked.

It’s that simple – now no one will be able to see your location if you accidentally turn on geo-tagging.

In a blog post about the new feature, Facebook says that “[w]ith Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.” This functionality takes it past foursquare, which primarily focuses on one person at a time. It seems that when Facebook releases a new product, it tends to usurp any other site attempting to do the same thing by increasing the number of features available to users.

Since this is the direction that Facebook is moving in, it is definitely possible that the announced Facebook Questions feature is going to try and grab as much of Twitter’s audience as possible. We discussed the Questions feature a few weeks ago in this blog – in short, it will allow users to ask a question of all other Facebook users with the same topic tagged, instead of posing a question to your friends through a status update. Along with the obvious Twitter comparisons (hashtag = topic tagging), Questions also bears resemblance to Yahoo Questions, AnswerBag and other forum-type sites where users can ask a community for answers.

At the same time, it looks like Facebook is making a play for the text question, text answer market embodied by ChaCha and KGB. While ChaCha gives out answers for free with an ad attached and KGB charges per question asked, Facebook is looking to quash that market entirely. Granted, Questions will be integrated into Facebook as a free feature (as with all others on Facebook), but money will certainly be made by companies that seek out their specific topics and trends. With the ability to target specific consumers in Facebook’s API, businesses should look at Facebook as a new stomping ground for new customers.

An article published recently in Search Engine Land gives some insight in regards to tracking seasonal products. But, before you examine results of an SEO campaign on tracking software, first identify if the product being sold is seasonal, including the higher and low points during the year. This will give you a better time frame for expecting and observing increases and decreases. Tarp websites, such as Tarps1 and Wholesale Tarp, carry a distinctly seasonal product, for example, although the tarp material has uses all year long. Tarps are more sought after in hurricane season, which starts officially on June 1, and, as a result, websites carrying this product should have more traffic during this time period.

But what about other points during the year? Although tarps are a product with several uses, including covering hay and truck loads and use on camping trips, the time in which they become in demand is hurricane season. Essentially, the website selling such a product should experience a rise in traffic during the summer months. With proper optimization, the tarps website should be visible on the first page for such terms as “tarps,” “hurricane tarps,” and “blue tarps” to fill this seasonal need and to experience an increase in traffic. Additionally, a tracking program, such as 123count, should show increases in traffic during the summer or whenever the product is in need.

Nevertheless, trends in traffic must also be observed in an off-season, as well. But, because the product being sold has only a seasonal need, traffic over a 12-month period will peak and then come back down. Don’t expect traffic from the start of an SEO campaign to consistently increase. Rather, notice the increases made during the in-season and the rate of decrease during the off-season. How far is the drop? Does the traffic dip down and stay at a consistent rate for the rest of the year? Ideally, significant increases should be seen when the product is in demand and the rate should drop down but stay at a consistent rate in an off-season.

A recent research study by Nielsen found that the phone call is becoming less and less popular by the month, particularly driven down by teenagers and adults up to the age of 34. While phone calls have gotten shorter and less common, texting has more than doubled in the past two years. Combined with the popularity of social media technology, this information shows just how important technology can be to your company. Teens are using their smartphones and other devices to connect to sites like Facebook several times daily, and knowing that the number is only going up is significant to driving traffic to your web site.

To give you an idea of how often teens use online media as a means of communication, one 19-year-old renegade speeder wrote on a car forum about his dangerous driving. After an anonymous tip, the teen was picked up by police not long after. The amount of information (like this) and interests that teens and social media users are willing to give up online can be used effectively to promote products to appropriate buyers.

Basically, if your company has not established itself as a social media brand, now is the perfect time. No one can predict how long the Facebook boom will continue and with over half a billion users, you can’t afford not to make your business present on this kind of network. It could make a huge difference in your business future.

Creating content pages – new HTML pages added to the sitemap – allows for more keywords to be added. These pages don’t necessarily describe the services on the website, however. Rather, the content has an informational focus and is a supplement to the site. Much like creating SEO content for existing pages, the copy on the new pages also needs to be keyword-focused.

While one to two keywords for an existing page may be acceptable, however, new pages should only focus on one keyword at a time. In many cases, this means writing new content for singular and plural terms. The search engines consider these terms to be different keywords, and targeting both through new content pages allows the search engine to find the website for either term.

When considering keywords, optimization of new pages needs to go beyond the general words. Someone looking for a service or product often does not look for a larger or greater term; instead, he or she will look for a more specific term. Optimization, then, should target the term for which the customer would be searching. For example, content pages for a tarps website should go beyond “tarp” and “tarps.” New content pages, in this case, should focus on specific uses and needs for tarps: camping, hurricanes, boats, RVs, hay, mesh, vinyl, and trucks. A user looking for “camping tarps” for a backpacking trip may stumble upon the page of the same name on your website and consider purchasing the product or using the service.

Aside from increasing the terms for a website, new content pages also offer interior links. A new page should point to an existing keyword-relevant category page on the website, and this interior, one-way link will also optimize the existing page. While these new pages shouldn’t be glutted with interior links, one to three links per page for relevant keywords shouldn’t make the new content seem like spam.

After setting up your pages and beginning reeling in a fan base, one of the most important things you or your social media spot person can do is keep up-to-date with the potential changes that your particular site will make. For instance, when Facebook began making drastic changes to its privacy, I’m sure that companies (just like the multitudes of regular users) were caught off-guard by what could have been potentially released to the public.

So while browsing through Facebook’s development blog, I stumbled upon a new feature that Facebook will most likely be incorporating in the next month – Questions. Questions seems to be a decent idea which, like most changes Facebook has been making, will grasp at the elements of Twitter that Facebook doesn’t have. Questions will enable users to ask questions of fellow Facebookers that share the same interests in a labeled topic. So if you asked “What kind of camera should I buy next?” and labeled camera as a keyword, everyone else who has asked a question about them or has them as part of their interests would be able to respond to your question.

Aside from privacy concerns that some users may have (Questions will be broadcasted to the Facebook public) this new feature may have wide-ranging implications for businesses looking to get a better grasp on what consumers want and what other consumers would recommend to people. This may have the same pull as hash tags on Twitter, if Facebook can make it as user-friendly.

In the end, we will all have to wait to see if Facebook’s Questions feature will be useful (i.e. a hit) or just another relatively useless app like Gifts. Until then, we’ll have to wait to see if Questions will have any use beyond asking random questions of the Facebook community. As with anything on Facebook, Questions will be released to everyone eventually and will just pop up without warning, like most Facebook changes.

Now Facebook has been a bit fickle about letting connections between it and other sites come easy, probably because of its extreme popularity comparatively. Facebook just recently hit half a billion users, which is a triumphant figure for the social media universe. This number proves that people care about your company’s public online persona because they care about their own.

There are few ways to work your way around Facebook connections if your favorite social sites don’t have a Facebook application or direct connect option:

· Make sure to optimize your business page with customizable tabs and RSS feeds – if you can’t get Facebook to make connections for you, make the connections yourself.

· Constantly link between Facebook and other social media sites if an automatic connection cannot be made. Posting bare bones links on your news feed may not look as good as a customized RSS, but it will still drive significant traffic to your homepage.

· Never underestimate the number of friends you can potentially have on Facebook. Since the majority of users are on Facebook, you must be to. You will truly be able to maximize your audience with a fully customized business page for fans.

· Understand the ins and outs of Facebook promotion – its rules are constantly changing and you don’t want your account removed or banned for a silly slip-up

By making Facebook your main hub for communication with the social media world, you will really open yourself up to the potential that is inherent in connections.

The first thing to realize about Facebook is in its name – you are giving your company, brand, etc. a digital face of sorts. Everything you put out on your profile becomes part of your company’s newly adapted personification. The initial push by companies should not be to advertise first and connect later. In fact, it’s the exact opposite approach that should be applied to utilizing a site like Facebook. That’s what makes Facebook marketing so dynamic and sets it apart from the classic advertising techniques of print and even television. You need to know your client base as a person before you push your brand on them.

If you’re a local pet shop, join groups of animal lovers and start talking, not pitching. There is nothing easier to ignore than a blatant advertisement for your site on a discussion page. If someone is talking about healthy food for their dog, just talk about healthy food as if you were having a conversation over lunch. Make your company relatable in direct ways. The purpose of this approach is to build trust with consumers and fans, setting your brand apart from the crowd in a very direct way. This will help you turn ‘likes’ into comments into conversations about your brand or product, therefore instilling a sense of brand loyalty in social media users.

This is only the first step to understanding how the Facebook world revolves. In upcoming posts, we will discuss more in-depth about how to accomplish your company’s needs in the social media universe.