We get a lot of questions about how or why you should use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace to promote your website or business. And some people just don’t recognize yet the potential there is in using sites like these as a marketing tool. Here are some quick tips on what you should be doing, and why.

The first thing to realize is that having an account on these sites isn’t just for getting in touch with old or current friends. Having personal accounts is fine, but set up accounts on the various sites that are strictly for your business.

This is an opportunity for you to set up a free profile in multiple directories that are searched and navigated by thousands upon thousands of people a day. And each social networking site has its own search features and ways of finding or suggesting things or pages of interest to the user. By setting up pages on these sites, you are exposing your business to potentially millions of people that may not otherwise ever find you.

Setting up profiles on social networking sites also provides you with ever important backlinks to your website, from sites with typically very high PRs (Facebook currently has PR of 9 and MySpace has a PR of 8). This can help both your search engine rankings, and your PR.  Things that don’t go hand in hand, contrary to what many people believe.

So, the answer to the question, “why should I use social networking sites to promote my business?” is simple: Free advertising in directories with potential exposure to millions of people around the world, better search engine rankings, and higher PR.  Make sense?  Let us know if you have any questions.

Never Stop Improving!

Lately I have noticed that many people/businesses still don’t understand meta tags, and how to use them effectively to improve their search engine rankings. So I thought I’d post a quick review of the three main tags and their importance.

The Title tag is the first, and most important in the eyes of the search engine spiders.  This is the first thing the spiders see when they get to your site, and is your best opportunity to tell the search engines what the page is about.   The title tag should be brief and contain the main keywords that the specific page contains or is about. And yes, your meta tags should be different for every page

The next meta tag is the Description tag.  This tag isn’t used by the search engines to get keyword or phrase info, but rather it is what is displayed on the search engine results page under the title of the listing (which is your title tag).  So the description tag is important for conversions.  It is what will grab the user and entice them to click on your link.  If you don’t have a description tag, the search engine will grab a chunk of content on its own.  Sometimes this works out ok, but wouldn’t you rather have a say in what is shown?

The third meta tag I will mention here is the Keyword tag, which has become the least important of the meta tags due to a combination of abuse and common sense.  Google and MSN claim to completely ignore the keyword tag, but there is some evidence that Yahoo still uses it as long as the keywords used in it also appear in the content of the page that the tag is found.  So in general it is still a good idea to have the keyword meta tag.  Just make sure you limit the keywords you use for it to the ones that can be found on the page you’re working on.

Some don’ts:
-If you have a newly live site that was built by a company for you, make sure your site doesn’t have that company’s meta tags in.  I have seen sites that have dummy meta tags in the system when it first goes live until the owner replaces them, which isn’t so bad.  On the other hand, I have seen newly live sites with the meta tags of the company that built the site, as if the company would somehow benefit from that.  Aside from being shady, this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how meta tags work.  And not only will the company that built the site not get credit for the meta tags, but the customer’s site that they are on will be dinged for having completely irrelevant info in their meta tags.

-For the keyword meta tag, don’t use a string of keywords a mile long that includes every keyword on your site and every keyword you’d like to be found under even if it doesn’t appear on your site.  Remember, keep it to a list of the keywords found on the page you are working on.

To get some more info on meta tags, check out one of our earlier posts here: Meta Tags and How They’ve Changed Through the Years. Let us know what you think and if you have any questions.

Never Stop Improving!