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Why Facebook is so important like SEO for a website or brand?

Leave a Comment / Facebook, SEO, Tech tips / By

There isn’t any doubt that today Facebook plays a very important role in overall social media and marketing strategy for promoting a brand, website or an Android/ iPhone app.  Facebook with its unique and developer friendly APIs and  easy access beats Twitter and other social media networks  in creating that viral effect for your website.

Facebook with more than 800 million active users is not less important than SEO. If you plan strategically, Facebook can be a huge source of user acquisition and engagement for your website, blog or mobile app.

Use Facebook comment box and Like button

As per Facebook an average Facebook user has 130 friends. This means that any activity, status update done by a Facebook user on his /her wall reaches at least 130 Facebook users and a single comment, like of such wall post will make it reach another 130 Facebook users.

Since around 400 million users  logs in to Facebook everyday, it make sense that you use  Facebook Like and Facebook comment box on your website or blog. Each like or comment posted using Facebook comment box is gonna increase your reach by 130 times.

Do remember that Facebook comment box is Java Script based hence your comments might not get indexed. However, you can do some smart work here by fetching comments using Facebook API and keeping them in page source  so that s search bots are able to see them. That way you would be able to leverage the viral  impact of Facebook comments and meanwhile will not loose on SEO.

Create an Facebook APP 

Think of an engaging Facebook app which can generate that viral effect (think of another “FarmVille” or Takethislollipop). Whatever is the concept or use case of your app, make sure to prompt app users  to share their app activities, comments and status on their wall. Be bit innovative to make app users seek help, opinion of their friends.

Do get offline access permission from app users. Offline access to user’s wall will let you post text, videos, images on their walls. You can use this permission to occasionally post  some interesting stuff on app user’s wall so that people in their friend circle get curios about your app.

Accelerate user acquisition  with Facebook login

Who loves to create accounts on dozen websites and remember all those user-names and passwords. It’s a well known fact that most of internet users avoid filling up registration forms to get access to a website. Sometimes websites loose potential customers just because of this cumbersome registration process.

Use Facebook login or “registration via Facebook’ to let people get access to your website and that too without filling up  any sign-up form.  You just need to create a Facebook app to provide login with Facebook or register with Facebook on your website.

There is no point of not using Facebook login on your website when Facebook lets you save user’s profile information (name, image) including user’s email address (probably that’s the main reason websites have their own sign-up forms).

Let your mobile phone app go viral with Facebook

More than  350 million users access Facebook from a mobile device every month. If you have a  iPhone or Android app, you must check out Mobile section of Facebook developers.  Facebook developer’s mobile section has lot of  things in its kitty which can help you spread the word about your app, increase user base, enhance user experience and engagement.

If you haven’t  done all these things yet, it’s high time that you get started with Facebook.

SEO checklist for beginners: post panda update

Leave a Comment / Google, SEO, Tech tips / By

For any website/blog, search engine optimization(SEO)is one of the key factors. Today Google search has become de facto search engine with more than 3 billion searches(approximately) per day. Since 80-90% of search engine traffic of any website comes from Google alone, SEO targeted towards Google search engine is of utmost importance.

For any website or blog SEO can make or mar the traffic and thus the revenue and user acquisition. There are mainly two type of SEO practices namely black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Though black hat SEO was being practiced by many and few websites even reaped the benefit too yet with Google strengthening it’s algorithm and adding more and more human factors like Google +1, it’s better to stick to white hat SEO to reap long term benefits of SEO.

Numerous websites have suffered because of Google’s Panda or farmers update to its search algorithm. These websites were either not having good quality content or were having content duplication or some other issues.

Here we’re sharing a basic checklist of things you should follow to get better indexing and avoid such issues in future because of any future algorithmic change to search. No matter whatever algorithm Google applies following things will only help you survive.

Basic SEO checklist

  1. Add H1,H2, title, meta description tags to your web pages keeping following conditions in mind:
    • Write H1 and H2 having keywords relevant to the page content and of search engine importance
    • A meta description of around 160 characters having content related to web page and covering keywords you want to rank your website for
    • A Page title not more than of 70 characters and having keywords of SEO importance
  2.  All URLs should be in small case
  3.  Make sure that all images have alt or title tags
  4. Avoid content duplication and use canonical tags wherever necessary to specify preferred version of URL in case content duplication is there and can’t be avoided
  5. Use rel=nofollow for external links for which you don’t want to pass on page rank juice
  6. No single web page should be accessible from two different URLs. For Google example.com/index.html and example.com/Index.html can two different URLs having same content
  7. Always define your preferred domain name. If you prefer www.example.com, always redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com
  8. Indexable content should be out of Java script tags so that search bot can access the content
  9. All dead URLs or pages which do not currently exist on your webiste should return 404 status
  10. Do take care of page speed. Google’s latest algorithm do take page load time into account
  11. Use Google plus one button to let people recommend your webpages

There are lot of free SEO resources available online which can help you accomplish this SEO checklist.

Google has also published quite informative and illustrative SEO starter guide which every beginner should follow:

In a nutshell key is to write original quality content, avoid duplication and pasting content from other websites or blogs, take care of page speed and user experience, help search bots easily find and index your content to get better indexing and more and more search traffic.