Using Facebook to Boost Your Business

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My grandfather, my sister-in-law, my university, my local bakery, my best friend, my governor, what do they all have in common?

They all have a facebook page. Like it or not. Facebook has become part of millions of peoples everyday lives and that is reason alone to get on the bandwagon. What can facebook do for your business? Facebook can be an extremely useful and powerful tool for you and your business and the best part is it’s free. Having a facebook page for your business is a very easy way to get out information and grow your customer base, not to mention improve your websites rankings.

First lets talk about using facebook to get information out to your current patrons. After signing up for a facebook page it’s easy to get clients to like your page, assuming you have a established business with an established customer base.
When you make a page you can tell your personal facebook friends about your new page this will start the friend adding process. Your friends will “like” your page then your friends friends may see that page. If your business is liked by your community it shouldn’t be a problem to get “likes” on facebook.
As the amount of people that like your page grows, your free advertising potential grows.You can essentially use the status update to promote your business and any promotions or current happenings. This is an easy free way to make your business relevant and hopefully increase actual business.

As your friend list on facebook grows it will grow your customer base. If you own a restaurant in Wasilla, Alaska and you have a facebook page your friends will like the page, that will show up on those friends’s friends page… If they see that Bob likes Your Wasilla Restaraunt they will probably be interested in giving that a try too!

Now website rankings, the big one. What does facebook have to do with your website ranking? Well it all is tied to what I have been talking about in my previous posts: links, traffic, credibility, etc. You can provide a link from your facebook page to your website. That’s one link. Everytime someone posts a link to your website on their facebook thats another link. I don’t work for google, so I’m not sure how google analyzes facebook links, I’m sure a link on facebook isn’t going to do you as much good as if bill gates personally linked to you from Microsoft’s homepage; but, it can’t hurt!

The other part of this is that by providing links on facebook and even just having a facebook presence will help increase your websites traffic. People will see your business on facebook, they’ll be curious, and they’ll check out your website. Score! Not only does this help increase your rankings because search engines see more traffic going to your site, but it also is connecting a potential customer to your site.

This is some of the basic ways facebook can help your business but its certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many ways you can utilize facebook to benefit your business this is just a good starting point. Make a page, update it, and watch as you see new customers that would have never found you otherwise.

I hope this helps get you started! Here’s a list of 32 points on how to use facebook for your business in you’re interested in more and you like lists. HERE.

Why web SEO is unfair to small business

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I wanted to quickly point out something that may be obvious to you or may help explain why you are pulling your hair out over poor SEO results.

SEO is UNFAIR! Yes, it’s true and there is nothing you can do about it except keep on at it and power through. This is what I mean when I say SEO is unfair to small business. Say Joe starts up his bakery in Wasilla, Alaska and has no web presence. For Joe to get his website to rank well with google is going to be a challenge. Joe can have a great site with all kinds of content but the problem is that he has virtually no web traffic or links to his site on other websites (because he just started). If you search for Joe’s bakery you will probably see it come up in google but if you search for “Wasilla, Alaska Bakery” you will get giant web companies like “Urban spoon” or “Yelp“. To beat these giant websites it is going to take a lot of work, money and time. This is something most people don’t want to hear. That’s why so many people are willing to fling thousands of dollars at web SEO companies who promise instant results. The sad fact is that they won’t deliver. You may see some results eventually but I guarantee that no company can get your site organic search rankings overnight (without cheating, and cheaters do get caught and punished by google). Give them a week and they can probably help a bit, months you might start seeing some good results but when it comes down to it, this will probably take a year or more.

Now the flip side to this unfairness is that if a large company with an already well ranking site like Dunkin Doughnuts launches a new site for their Wasilla shop, it will rank great right off the bat. All they have to do is put the word bakery in the title or meta tags and whalla! search for wasila bakery and behold Dunkin Doughnuts Wasilla Bakery will show up.
Here’s why: Large websites have tons of traffic everyday. Search engines like google see all this traffic and think “wow a lot of people are visiting this website, it must be important”. Which is true.  So when that website makes another site associated with it about a Wasilla Bakery google decides that it is probably pretty important too. This is unfortunate because it gives large companies a serious advantage over the little guys. Unfortunately there is good reasoning behind it.

There are thousands and thousands of websites made everyday. Most of these sites will disappear within a couple years. Most of these sites are either spam or don’t really matter to anyone. So google doesn’t want to rank these sites well, which is good but unfortunately google treats your new site just like those new sites. Skeptically.

So what to do? Just keep at it. Eventually you will prove to google that your site matters and your website rankings will start to improve. Once you have more visitors google will continue to bump you up.

So although it may seem unfair, all of the major websites had to start up at one time too and if they can do it, you can do it!

Good luck and keep working at it. More about helping develop your business and website using Facebook coming up next.

 

Check out this web seo blog for more great info. http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Google monster

Google monster

Getting Links

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I left my last post with the question, “can I make people link to me?”
The short answer is no. Thankfully there is a long answer!

The long answer is there is a way to make other websites link to your site. You can’t legally make someone link to your site; however, there are websites that allow user editable content in which you can post links. This in turn links the site to your site.

I mentioned in my last post that an easy way to do this is by posting a link to your website on a thread in a forum. This is a great way to start building links but it leaves more to be desired. A great way to increase your google rankings is to be linked to by top level sites. These are the sites that come up first in google already. Big, trusted, websites. Wesites like: http://ezinearticles.com/. This site is a great way to get linked in. Just create an account and start submitting informative articles regarding what you do. This is just one example of sites that you can get your link on.

Another great way to build your websites traffic is to have online news publications link to your site. A great example is a website I made for a client, Big Bear Halibut Charters. A couple years ago the business had a small girl catch a 130 pound halibut; she said she was fishing for a mermaid. For whatever reason it became a nation wide story and was featured on the front page of Yahoo! as well as the Los Angeles Times website and the Tonight show. This gave the business’s rankings a big boost. When you have large sites like that sending traffic from all over the world to your site it is a dream come true!
Now, not everyone can get the news to pick up a story on them but submitting a story or public bulletin to your local newspaper is a good place to start. Keep the public informed about interesting things happening with your business. Even if it’s on a Facebook page, this gives people a way to easily get to your site.

Speaking of facebook, facebook is a great tool to get your business noticed and keep a presence in your local community. I’ll talk more about this in the future.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Keeping your website “connected”

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In my last blog post I mentioned having a “well connected website” and in this post I will try and explain and expand on what I mean by “connected”.

The world wide web is exactly as it sounds, a web. It consists of billions of webpages that are linked together through a web of… links. Generally when I say “connected” I am referring to links. When search engines like google scan all of the websites out there, the search engine has one main concern and that is ranking important websites first. Google is trying to make sure that the websites that come up first in its rankings are reliable, informative, and in demand. One way that google decides what websites are important is by how many links are going to and from that website. In other words a website that has thousands of other websites linking to it, is probably more important then a website that has no links.  For example, websites like ebay or the mayo clinic are linked to by thousands of other websites. When google sees this it thinks wow a lot of people are interested in this ebay thing, so it must be important. Please keep in mind this is grossly oversimplified example and this is only one of a lot of reasons websites are ranked the way they are but it is a very important reason. If I made a website today that was suddenly being linked to by 5 million websites this week, I guarantee it would be ranking very well in google even if the rest of the content was awful. The problem is that I can’t make other people link to me… or can I?

I’ll continue this in my next post!

For more information on google rankings check out googles webmaster tools page here. 

Finding a balance between Form and Function

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Form and function is the never ending battle faced by many industries, from automobiles to web design. There are millions of website owners who are either unhappy with the look of their website or they are unhappy with the results of their website, or both! Fortunately it doesn’t have to be that way.

Good web design should be able to have both good form and function. There doesn’t need to be a compromise. Although many people do compromise by taking only one or the other, it doesn’t have to be that way. An example of sites that take form over function are sites that are riddled with Flash®, video, and too many large images. Search engines like google can’t tell what you’re video is about and could care less about a sites animations. Search engines care more about content, having a “well connected” website and sound web site coding.

Even though search engines don’t really care about how nice you site looks, that doesn’t mean it has to look bad though! Some web designers completely ignore good design because they either don’t have any design talent or they just don’t care. A website can be designed beautifully while still being an easy to use and easy to find site.

I’ll continue more on this topic in my next blog posts. Thanks for reading!

Hello, and welcome!

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This is the just the beginning of an exciting adventure which is Glacier Graphics & Web Design’s new blog! This blog will be used to keep everyone up to date on the latest happenings here at Glacier Graphics. Some of the things you might see here include tips and tricks to maintaining your website and helping improve your websites search engine ranking (SEO). We will also be posting updates on clients projects and some exciting new finished works! Stay tuned theres more to come!

-Bryce Hyslip
Owner