Facebook has over 500 Million active users and at least one of this is one of your customers. By adding a Facebook page for your business you are giving yourself an opportunity to reach out to these customers and also find new customers. Social Media is a large part of SEO and Facebook is just one part of it, so think of it as a billboard on the super highway.

If you already have an account you want to use, skip to step 3, otherwise let’s get started!

1. Create an Account on Facebook: If you do not already have a personal account, or wish to use a separate login from your personal account create a new account on Facebook. Note: having multiple accounts on Facebook is a violation of their policy.
2. Skip all the profile setup pages: You will want to come back and adjust your security settings, but for now skip all these steps.
3. Create a Page: At the bottom of your Facebook page there is a menu item, “Create a Page”, click on it.
4. Page Type: Facebook currently presents you with 6 types of pages. For most businesses one of the 1st 3 will work best.
    

   Facebook Pages for Businesses

   	Local Business or Place	Company Organization  or Institution	Brand or Product
   Basic Info	Business Category  Name; Address	Business Category  Name; Address; Founded	Business Category  Name; Address; Founded
   Detailed Info	Hours; About; Description; Prices Range; Parking	About; Description; Mission; Awards; Products;	About; Company Overview; Description; Mission; Awards; Products
   Contact Info	Email; Phone; Website	Email; Phone; Website	Email; Phone; Website

    

   Facebook Pages for Individuals, Groups or Causes

   	Artist, Band or Public Figure	Entertainment	Cause or Community
   Basic Info	Personal Info	Name; Address	About
   Detailed Info	Biography; Awards; Interests; Gender	Personal Information; Birthday; Biography;Awards; Affiliation; Interests; Gender	Description
   Contact Info	Email; Phone; Website	Email; Phone; Website	Website

    

5. Use Facebook as a page: Once you have created you page you can “use” Facebook as a page.

   This will allow you to edit your information or the page.

6. Tell ALL your friends and customers.

Additional to do items:

1. Promote your Facebook page with a “like” link on your website.
2. Promote your Facebook page on your emails, letters, invoices, etc.
3. Using facebook aps to promote your business.
4. Advertising on Facebook.

References:

1. Facebook active users – press room statistics
2. Facebook for Websites
3. Facebook Samples and How-Tos

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Sitting on a Fence

Overview – Many web designers are looking at or currently using WordPress as a Content Management system for their clients. As with any technology there are trade-offs that must be considered. In order to explore this more fully we decided to implement a new site devoted to our Linux Virtual Servers in WordPress. This gave us an opportunity to look at this technology from a different point of view and evaluate it with regards to the following areas:

• Investigating using WordPress as both a CMS and blog.
• WordPress Setup.
• Ease of initial website design and implementation.
• User generated content.
• SEO
• Site performance.
• Daily Maintenance
• Security

In part 1 I’ll cover using our investigations into using WordPress as a CMS and what is required to use WordPress and our design constraints.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 1)
2. WordPress as a CMS (Part 3)
3. Word Press as a CMS (Part 2)

SEO Optimizations
The ZenCart storefront with a two SEO related modifications:

We installed the Ultimate SEO URLs plugin to convert non-search engine friendly URLS like:

http://www.spicymama.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=24

to search engine friendly URLS like this:

http://www.spicymama.com/arizona-gunslinger-smokin-hot-jalapeno-pepper-sauce-p-117.html

We created an xml sitemap of products which could be read by Google and let Google know about it.

Product information and images were entered into ZenCart giving as much information as was felt necessary about each item.

The final step we took was to add the site to Google Base and Google Product Search. Google Base is a free Google service that allows you to publish your information for inclusion in Google search results. Google Product Search uses Google Base to get listings of products, making it easy to get listed there as well.

Tracking Visitors
In order to see how effective your marketing is you need to have a baseline to measure things by. We used Google Analytics to track the visitors to the site and came up with a baseline of zero hits which is just like a new website.

Tracking Sales
Just getting visitors who don’t buy anything does nothing more than eat up bandwidth. One needs to also be able to track conversions or sales. In order to do this we selected the page which is displayed when the sale is completed as our Goal. We then added this into Google Analytics as the last step in the order process.

Don’t Expect Instant Results
Once a site is added into Google it takes time for Google to actually index the site and to display the site as one of many possibilities when someone searches Google. We don’t expect instantaneous results and the actual results will vary based on key words searched for and where the site is positioned in the Google search results list. By doing the above we set the very basic foundation for marketing our site on the Internet. The following graph shows relative sales over a 6 month period after we did just the simple changes outlined above.

As you can see the site went from zero sales to a lot more than zero sales after 4 months.

Related posts:

1. Marketing your site for fun and profit

We are going to use a real live customer site, Spicy Mama, as an example to let you know how it works in the real world for a real site.

As we market Spicy Mama we will post followups here to let others know how it works and about how much time it takes to do this. We have already done some of the work and will fill in the details a little later. Our next step is to setup wordpress and to get the theme match the main site. Once that is done we will be adding in adding in necessary plugins, the first ones being Akismet, the feedburner plugin and the All in one SEO plugin.

Related posts:

1. Marketing your site for fun and profit – getting started