This attempt by Facebook should not be easily dismissed as the social media giant is launching its initiative in conjunction with both the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business. The program is due to start later this month (October 2011) as Facebook plans to sponsor a series of educational “road shows” in cities across the US, reaching its apex next January when Facebook will offer a $50 ad credit to approximately 200,000 businesses. Do the math and you’ll see that this will set Facebook back $10 million.

Despite this grand effort by Facebook, they face an uphill battle trying to get small and medium-size businesses to advertise on social media as eMarketer, a digital marketing research and analysis company, reported that only 44% of such businesses use social media as a marketing tool and of those 59% spent less than $100 on advertising/marketing efforts in this area.

In addition, AdAge Digital reports that even though there are 9.2 million small businesses in the US that have Facebook pages, but less than 3.2 million of those actively engaged with their page. Nevertheless, the higher-ups in Facebook are optimistic. “We know that small businesses who use web technology grow more than twice as quickly, bring in twice the revenue, and create twice the jobs as small businesses who don’t,” said David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations.

This point couldn’t have been made better then back in February 2011 when Google’s “Panda” (the name of a major change in its ranking algorithm) drastically reduced the benefits of article marketing, specifically poorly written articles. Up until then, the SEO value of an article wasn’t affected by how well written or how informative it was, just that it existed.

However, since 1995 when my family and I opened our Internet marketing business, I’ve became involved in optimizing websites for the search engines, there have been several consistent on-page elements that continually add substantially affect how a given website ranks in the search engines, Google include. Here’s my list of SEO principles that have stood the test of time and probably always will:

1. Design your website’s structure to make it easier for visitors and search engine robots to browse and find relevant content;
2. Focus your website’s content on a single topic and then follow up by writing articles that answer a specific question on that topic;
3. Make sure your main keywords are in your webpage’s Title tag as they’re used everywhere (anchor text, bookmarks, browser tabs, RSS feeds, etc.);
4. Have your webpage’s meta description tag match the theme of that webpage as it auto-generates description on Facebook and other sites;
5. Use headlines and headings to help visitors scan the page and find the information relevant to them more quickly;

Unfortunately, the trend in search engine algorithms has been, is and will probably continue to be the importance of links pointing to it being the most important factor in how well it ranks in the engines.  You can thank Google for this as before they came on the scene in 1997, all the factors that went into webpage ranking were determined by what was included in the content (visible as well as invisible) of the webpage.

I guess you could say that in the world of SEO, the more things change, the more things stay the same. And maybe that’s a good thing.

As a consultant to the webmaster of a site that sells discount dental coverage, I’m no different than any other webmaster except that I thought I’d share some of the more interesting (or stupid, or asinine, or just plain bizarre) keyword phrases people typed into a search engine and visited my client’s website last month;

MOST FUN: “dental discount plan for dentists who dont accept discount plans”
I’m constantly getting Web visitors looking for either dentists who accept discount plans and/or discount plans that are accepted by their own dentist… but never this! Trust me, though, because on January 28, 2011 a person from Shreveport, Louisiana did just that.

MOST STUPID : “can you get braces without dental coverage”
I almost wish this person had sent me an e-mail with this question so I could have written them back and said, “What do you think orthodontists took as payment before there was orthodontic dental insurance; chickens?”. As a whole, practitioners of the orthodontic-arts usually have more education than even dentist so they’re not stupid enough to turn down private paying patients.

MOST WAIT… WHAT? : “homeopathics for dental pain”
I honestly don’t know what the Web visitor wanted to know here. Were they searching for people blessed with homeopathic abilities (i.e. homeopathics) in favor of dental pain or homeopathic masochists or what? Still trying to figure this one out.

MOST INCOMPLETE : “dentist who can bill you the bill because”
Because… because why? I’m guessing this question has to do with a dental bill but that’s all. Also, if a dentist bills you, is there any other type of correspondence you would expect to find in the mailing piece other than a dental bill?

MOST INTRIGUING : “emergency adult dental without insurance san antonio tx”
Call me a pervert but I think what this person was searching for was a San Antonio, Texas dentist with a XXX-rated dental practice who accepted emergency patients without any health/dental insurance coverage.  I’ve never heard of such a dentist but any do exist, chances are they don’t have too many copies of Jack and Jill magazine in their waiting room!

To this end, we here at The Quoizel Source not only believe we have the best customer service, we know we have it and we can prove it too by going to our website’s Policy Page and compared to one or more of our competitors to see who offers the best customer service.  For instance, here’s a brief list of perks we offer our customers;

LOWEST PRICE GUARANTEE: We will match the price of any competitor’s legitimate price so long as the item in question meets the following criteria;

* The item cannot be on clearance
* The item must be in stock with us
* The advertised price must be from an authorized U.S. retailer
* The price must be published online and includes, tax and S & H
* We must be able to verify the offered price.
* The item must not require freight delivery

YES, IT’S IN STOCK: We have a 99% in stock record. No other Internet-based dealer can match that!

CLOSEOUT/SALE DEPT’: Because we are an authorized Quoizel dealer in good standing, we have access to factory fresh closeout items which you may not find on other web sites. Remember, NEVER purchase Quoizel from a non-authorized dealer or your warrantee rights will be void.

DIFFERENT PAYMENT OPTIONS: We accept all major credit cards (Master Card, Visa, American Express, even Discover) as well as personal checks and money orders.

EASY ORDERING: We never requires log-on codes or complicated order forms and we’ll advise via email of your order status every step of the way.

LIVE HELP 24 HOURS A DAY: We have live operators available to help our customers 24 hours a day. Just tell them why you are calling and a highly trained customer service representative will get right back to you during standard business hours.

FREE SHIPPING: There is no extra time when we ship via UPS, USPS, FedEx, or common carrier ground service so long as it’s to the 48 contiguous US states.

NO SALES TAX: We will not collect sales tax on any sale except those shipped to a New Jersey address. Why New Jersey? Because it’s where we operate out of.

LIFETIME ELECTRICAL WARRANTY: We back up our products with an electrical warranty stating that we will assist our customer awith any electrical problem.

PROMPT REFUNDS: If our return policy is adhered to, the customer’s refund will be processed with 10 days of the authorized return to our warehouse.

FAMILY OWNED BUSINESS: Our founder’s family has owned lighting fixture and furniture stores since the 1950′s and was even a personal friend of the founder of the Quoizel Company.

If you’re interested in the simple yet stylish accent a quiet lamp or lighting fixture (for the desk, table, floor, ceiling, wall, outside patio, etc.) will add to your home, your best choice is The Quoizel Source. Get our shopping website combines large selection, low prices and –above all– outstanding customer service policies so you can have the confidence that any purchasing decision you make with us will be worth your effort.

So what do you do if you can’t afford the high cost of orthodontic braces and don’t have dental insurance (or do have insurance but it doesn’t cover braces)? Join the club; the discount dental plan/club. These dental savings clubs offer members at-the-point-of-purchase discounts on braces –for children, adolescents and adults– of anywhere from 20% to as much as 50% or more depending upon where you live. The closer you live to a population center, the higher your discounts will be due to increased competition among orthodontists in those areas, at least according to an article with tips on these types of discount plans.

One such discount dental plan/club I am a member of that literally saved me thousands of dollars on orthodontic work is called Aetna Dental Access which I purchased several years ago.  I only pay something like $140 per year for the plan and it provides discounts on not only orthodontic but regular dental care for myself and my family. I highly recommend it.

Highly Recommended
Two articles I found interesting in particular were “How Long Do I Really Need To Keep This?” and “The New Shopping Model: Different For Vendors, Different for Consumers” which I gathered several interesting ideas from. Other articles I’ve read were “Setting Up Your Home Office on a Shoestring Budget”, “Yes! Throw Away Your Business Cards”, and “Starting a New Business in a Very Small Town”.

Staying Competitive
In order to stay competitive in business –especially in this economy– you need to constantly implement new ways of getting more done with less or you won’t be in business very long.  A great way to do this is to keep up not only with changes in your particular industry but with changes affecting every aspect of our lives and reading one of more of these articles will help you and becoming the best frugal home business owner you can be.

To read all the money-saving entries, and even vote on those that you really like, visit Entrepreneur.com/prospercontest.

Kenn

Before Google came along, building links was a minor part of search engine optimization; after Google came along, it became the most important part of search engine optimization. Google has openly admitted that one of its main goals is to make “off site” factors (back-links) more important than “on site” factors (i.e. content) to how its algorithm ranks a given web page to make it search engine’s results more accurate.

The Latest Search Engine Twist: ‘Activity’
Recently, it was reported in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog that a given site’s “activity” will also affect it’s ranking in Google.  For the purposes of this article, a site’s “activity” is defined as any action taken by someone on the web that indicates that they think your website is worthy of mention excluding actual back-links. Usually this takes the form of someone making a reference to your site (a.k.a. citation) by mentioning the site’s name or the company, phone number, physical address or the name of a particular product/service unique to that web site (e.g. a McDonald’s “Big Mac”), but a website’s activity can also be how long a visitor stays on a given site before they leave or if they decide to interact with the site (such as commenting on a website’s blog posting).

It’s important to keep in mind that Google has never officially stated that activity/citations are actual benefit to your web site. However, it is widely known among search engine marketers that  or more a site is noticed, monitored, talked about and referenced to the more chance it will rank better in Google for whatever keywords is optimized for. In other words, where there’s smoke there’s fire.

Webmaster Confusion Run Amok
What is clear from Google is that there are certain types of visitor-inspired activity that tell Google is that a given site is significant and therefore should rank higher in a search engine than the plethora of junk web sites that make up the vast majority of websites out there. In short, this is the type of activity Google likes to see;

1. Longer Visitations. When a site’s visitors leave right away, that results in a high bounceback ratio leaving Google with the impression that the site is either of poor quality or not on topic to the keyword the visitor used to search with.
   
2. More Revisitations. The higher to the amount of people that revisit a web site (i.e. revisitations), the higher-quality Google considers that site to be. The good news is that “re-visitors” are also more likely to be customers in addition to helping that site to rank better in Google’s search engine.
   
3. User Participation. For those sites that allow visitors to interact, the more Google sees different people posting in forums, placing comments, joining e-mail lists or just bookmarking a site, the greater chance that Google will see your site as worthy of better rankings.

However, while Google’s does consider activity/citations in its search engine algorithm, I can say with complete confidence that one quality back-link is worth dozens if not hundreds of citations.

For Home-based entrepreneurs looking to promote their website, online marketers and savvy online business people around the world, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter are great places to come to take advantage of some seriously useful marketing data that can turn your marketing heavy club into a hybrid cruise missile rapid marketing attack needle.

While Google Adwords may be the standard for search engine marketing, MSN AdCenter has some interesting tools which are worth exploring as they provide some unique options to help to improve your ad exposure to the right people. Amidst the menagerie of tools in AdCenter there is one section called Audience Intelligence which is particularly clever.

Audience Intelligence is a group of tools which are orientated to allow advertisers to improve their online advertising success by “accurately modelling users and predicting their intent”. Knowing more about a user through the sorts of keywords and phrases they type into search engines is a valuable weapon.  What people search for is influenced by: their demographic (age, gender etc), the context in which they are searching and the social networks they are a part of. Also, being able to judge a user’s hidden intent based on their search queries and browsing history is another powerful armament.

The following three components of the Audience Intelligence tool help you to discover these important details about your users.

Demographics Prediction
Like the name suggests, this tool predicts what demographic a user is likely to fit into from the keyphrase they input. So if you put in ‘Ford Ka’ you might think that the key demographic for that phrase is 17 year old girls. When in actual fact the results showed that 67% of males between 25-34 searches for ‘Ford Ka’. This prediction is based on the online behaviour captured while people make searches and visit websites. This is a great tool for giving AdCenter advertisers the opportunity to better tailor the keywords they select in order to target their desired audience more accurately.

As you can see, you can also search by URL as well as by search query. The percentage of gender orientation is shown, with handy examples of male and female appearances, and the age distribution is shown at the bottom. The age distribution is an age breakdown of MSN Search users. The General Distribution column is based for each search on one-month search logs and is not dependant on the actual search query. The ‘Predicted Distribution’ column is the same but is tailored to the search query you are researching and AdCenter’s predictive model.
Detecting Online Commercial Intention

Websites in general have two uses: as a source of information or as a destination for shopping (transactions). This ‘Detecting Online Commercial Intention’ tool detects, based on the keyword or URL you input, whether people that make this search are looking for information or to make a transaction. (Commercial or non-commercial.) It seems pretty straight forward really: if you typed in ‘black shoes’, the likelihood is that you would only be putting this in if you wanted to buy a pair of black shoes from somewhere. It is less likely that you are researching different coloured shoes, even though you might be, but it would certainly be less likely. ‘Black shoes’ has a 95% commercial intention rate, i.e. Microsoft has found that when someone searches for ‘black shoes’ there is a 95% chance that they are looking to buy some black shoes.

You will notice that they ask you if it is accurate with a ‘yes-no’ check-box. This is what, in the ‘learn more’ section I believe they mean by ‘human evaluators’, though they may well have in house teams too. Here is an example of a non-commercial result for a URL search.

With a little persistence you can use this tool to find keywords that have commercial value but don’t have particularly high ad coverage, so will therefore be cheaper. Finding keywords with a low bid density but high commercial value is an important goal for any PPC advertiser.

Microsoft provides a link to the research they have conducted into commercial/non-commercial user intent in the ‘learn more’ section. It includes some reassuring information to back up their engines results.

MS’s Interactive Query Manager
This tool is basically an interactive query manager which analyses a web site’s content and its audience for ad placement and targeting. It lets you specify your search query and the audience you want to reach, then provides you with advice on where in Microsoft’s ad network you should run your ad for best results. So say you want to know where it would be best to run an advert for ‘Rod Stewart tickets’ you can input this in, or the URL of your site, along with your target audience and the Explore MSN tool will provide you with a list of URLs where they think your advert would best perform. The ‘i’ icon can show you information on the audience and the location of the people who view each particular page so you can check you are on the right track.

By letting this tool help you find a location for your advert, you can, if you trust it, cut out a lot of time spent trawling through websites trying to find ones with content similar to that of your site or your search term. Explore MSN can also help you make sure that where you place your ad is the best place for people who are in that area. For example, you could place your ad on a great site that is perfectly suited to your topic and has loads of massive Rod Stewart fans visiting it regularly, but if 99% of these fans come from the other side of the world, there might be little point in placing your ad here.

In Conclusion
Audience Intelligence is indeed an impressive range of tools which could seriously improve the success of your online advertising quickly. While each tool in this section is in itself valuable, they are best used in conjunction with each other. Unfortunately for Microsoft though, Google Adwords is still better overall compared to Adcenter, not least of all due to its wider audience. At least one of its rivals ‘Yahoo Search Marketing’ is coming under Microsoft’s wing soon. But then, there is that behemoth in waiting looming nonchalantly on the horizon…Facebook.

Apparently the next tool to be included in the Audience Intelligence segment of AdCenter will be called the ‘Behavioural Targeting System’ which will “create precise, flexible behavioural segments by taking advantage of various data sources, including click stream, search query, and demographic information.” Nice. This will no doubt provide us with an insight into the typical pattern of exploration that users follow, allowing you to use this information to discover where a website might be causing users to leave prematurely, so that you can work to avoid this from happening with better usability and more compelling content.

Knowing how to use Twitter to benefit your business can result in some significant marketing benefits, because both Google.com and Bing.com are now incorporating Tweets into their search engine results via the “Real-Time” search option so that searchers can get real-time information on a hot topic (such as a breaking news event).

In order for your business to make the most of searchers using the “Real-Time” search option, there are a few simple Search Engine Marketing (SEM) rules you should remember to follow when Tweeting about your business to increase the chances that your Tweets show up in the search engines;

1. Because the first 42 characters of your Tweet is what Google use is to index your Tweet in its database, make texture sure to use these characters wisely.  For instance, use abbreviations whenever possible such as “&” instead of “and”.
   
2. Include your most important keywords in your Tweets if at all possible, being careful not to sound too spammy. Always follow the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) in mind went composing business-related Tweets.
   
3. Encourage your followers to Retweet your messages by limiting your Tweets to no more than 120 characters so as to save room for the “RT @ username” that is added when someone Retweets your messages to their followers.
   
4. Do your best to increase your Twitter account’s “Usage” (i.e. number of new visitors to your account, referring sites, page views, time spent on the site, etc.) as it’s generally believed that the higher your Usage, better chance your Tweets will rank higher in the search engine results for your keywords.

Remember, having and using a Twitter account for your business will get you more visitors is the search engines but the real value lies in non-SEM benefits.  Links from social media sites like Twitter can improve your business’s overall reputation both in the search engines as well as on the Internet, and this increase presence comes to facilitate branding.