Not only are Facebook Pages a great way to promote your brand or service to your customers, but they also serve as excellent platforms to interact with your fans. But, how do you know what’s eliciting a fan response and what’s not? As most Facebook Page admins know, the Page Insight provided by Facebook is fairly limited in terms of data. If you want to get down and dirty you need something more powerful. Thankfully, you can integrate Google Analytics into your Facebook Page for more robust metrics and tracking and you don’t need to be a whiz-kid coder to get it done.

Here’s how:

Step 1.

If you haven’t already, sign-up for a free Google Analytics account. Next, you’ll create a profile for your Facebook Page by using your Facebook Page URL. You would enter http://www.facebook.com/yourFacebookPagename. Once you’ve successfully created your profile the Analytic’s dashboard shows your URL and an Analytic’s profile ID that looks like this:  UA-12345678-9.

Step 2.

Look for your UA number and visit Webdigi to generate an “image” for each Facebook Page that you want to track. The online application has some helpful hints to help you complete the form. After you’ve got your information entered, select the “Generate Code” button.

Grab the code and copy it.

Step 3.

The “Generate Code” button creates a chunk of HMTL that you’ll need to copy and paste into your Facebook Page. This piece of code is the “image” that we referred to in Step 1. The code, or image HTML, needs to be placed on the Page by using a wonderfully handy Facebook application known as Static FBML. Install Static FMBL to your Facebook Page by clicking on the “Add to my Page” link.

Step 4.

Head back to your Facebook Page, choose “Edit page” and scroll down your list of applications to the Static FBML app that you just installed. All you need to do is paste the code into the FBML box. Save and your done. You can create as many custom FBML boxes with code as you need and place them on each “tab” within your Facebook Page that you want to track.

For your Facebook Page Wall, just make your FBML application a box and post it to your wall. Just remember that for each tab that you want to track within your Facebook Page, you’ll need to create a new “image HTML” as instructed in Step 2.

The benefits of adding Google Analytics to your Facebook Page are tremendous. You’ll be able to track:

• the number of unique visitors on your Page by day, week, month and more
• new visitors vs. returning visitors
• what tabs are most popular within your Page
• what keywords do people use to find your Page
• overall Page growth (or decline) over a period of time
• how long are people staying on your Page

Google Analytics can give you a major leg up on understanding more about your visitors so that you can adjust and improve your Facebook Page. This will help you continue efforts that work and alter those that don’t.

Do you use Google Analytics on your Facebook Page? Have you found alternative ways to implement other that what’s been shared here? Share your thoughts with us.

A giggle for your Friday that takes a swipe at Google Buzz. Video is well designed and humorous too. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend.

Over the past few years local search has been dominating the search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing are seeing droves of people turning toward the internet to conduct searches for brands, products and services within their local areas. Just to give you an idea, published numbers indicate that more than 10 billion local searches are conducted each month. Clearly, local search marketing has enormous potential to attract a large share of customers to your website and business.

Flipping through the Yellow Pages is a thing of the past. Web users are becoming more sophisticated with local search criteria. By including identifiers to make searches more focused to a particular location, the search engines are able to retrieve local information. As a business, if you’re not using local search, you’re losing out.

Use these local search marketing suggestions to promote your business and capture your fair share of customers.

1. List Your Business

If you want to be found you need to go where people can find you. That means including your business listing in the local directories with Google, Yahoo and Bing. In addition to the listing with the big dogs, you’ll need to expand your local listing circle and include your business with other sites too. This increases your online presence by making you more visible. Here’s a list to get things started:  Citysearch.com, Superpages.com, Insiderpages.com, Yellowpages.com, iBegin.com and Brownbook.com.

2. Stake Your Claim

After you’ve published your listing you’ll need to return to each site and claim your listing. This proves that you’re the site owner and helps reduce spam activity and fraudulent posting. It often requires nothing more than a simple email verification or PIN activation via automated phone call. Make sure that you claim each listing so that you can make edits and changes to your listings in the future.

3. Keep It Consistent

Every local listing should feature the exact same business name. For instance, if you own a coffee shop, let’s call it Beverly’s Coffee House, then that’s what each and every listing should reflect in the title. Don’t abbreviate and call it Bev’s Coffee on some and not on others. This is one instance where being exactly the same is a good thing.

4. Optimize-A-Go-Go

The SEO acronym has been tossed around more than a football during Superbowl. SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s a component of internet marketing that utilizes several techniques and strategies to build awareness of a website and elevate its ranking with the search engine. When it comes to your local listings, including keyword optimizing the areas that you can (company description, bio, etc.) can make a difference in the local search results that are returned.

5. Build Links & Include Citations

Links are pretty much just that – links to your website that are featured or placed with other sites. Citations are nothing more than mentions of your business or site. Through the search engine’s eyes, links and citations are extremely valuable and heavily determine your ranking.

Two sites that every business should take advantage of are Yelp and Merchant Circle. These user review websites are highly in the top 100 ranked websites (not bad considering there are more than 233 million active websites and counting) and that means that the search engines have determined them to be credible. You can use these sites to fill-up your citation satchel and having yourself listed with them helps with linking.

6. Request Reviews & Get Rated

As often as you can, as your customers to leave reviews and share feedback regarding their experiences. Of course we’d all love glowing, five-star reviews, but that’s not always the case. There will be times when a disgruntled person will pop-up and express themselves. This is absolutely not a bad thing. Remember that while you can’t control what someone thinks or has to say about your business, product or service, you can engage in a conversation and ask them how you can make things better. This goes along way in showing other potential clients how you respond and remedy situations.

7. Picture Perfect

You don’t have to turn you local listing into a gallery at the Louvre, but including a few images and videos will spruce up your listings appearance. Although photos aren’t necessarily what drives search engine ranking, people tend to click on local listings with imagery much more often than those without. Share your logo, a snapshot of your storefront or any thing else that might help you stand out.

8. Categorically Speaking

Most local listing sites allow you to describe what you do be choosing two to five categories. Some sites have extensive category lists that feature every occupation and industry under the sun, and others have only a handful. Limitations can make it difficult to choose what category you should be in. If this happens, try not to drill down to a sub-category and stick with the primary. For example, if you’re a boutique shoe store, but you can’t find shoe category, post yourself under retail.

9. Local PPC

Good ol’ online advertising can supplement your local listing by featuring geo-targeted keywords. Pay per click (PPC) has incredible tracking and measurability that makes it easy to see what’s working and what’s not. The concept of PPC appears to be simple and straightforward, but it can be tricky to execute a good campaign. Do a bit of homework or consider seeking out the services of a professional to ensure that you’re maximizing your dollars and ad listing locations.

10. Stay Positive

Local search marketing is the place to be for any business. Unlike SEO which can take a considerable amount of time to generate high-ranking results, local search does it differently. There’s not nearly as much competition and result are based on your map location. Not impressed? Well, this might change your mind. Local map results are always at the top of the search result pages and that gives you the opportunity to be at the top of the pack and the page.

Do you have other helpful local search marketing techniques that you’re trying? Share with us. We want to hear from you.

I receive a tremendous amount of requests from clients for creative writing services. The most popular items on the writing wish list are blogs, articles and  press releases. Sounds simple, easy to accommodate, and I’m always ready to pitch in and get constructive with words when needed. The tricky part is when they decide to include SEO in their writing projects, but have very little understanding on either how SEO works or how to use it.

Words Count

Of course writing with keywords is important, but identifying keywords that rank well in terms of appropriateness for a topic is essential. All the density and frequency of keywords and phrases in a written piece won’t mean a thing if they aren’t relevant or specific to the subject matter. Researching what’s best, what works and focusing on how these keywords will benefit your audience will make a big difference in rankings and searches.

Link to Promote

True, having optimized writing is better than having none, but equally as important is promotion. Integrating your social networking sites to your keywords and vice versa creates your own personal backlink campaign. Bringing your friends, colleagues, customers and social connections into the promotion fold will exponentially increase links and awareness of your written message. Social media is exactly what it is – social, so use it to your advantage.

More than 60% of all search engine traffic is conducted using Google. Because Google is a search engine dominator, using it as a reference point seems logical. One of the great mysteries of the universe is the classified algorithm that Google utilizes to rank indexed material on the Internet. Some aspects are open to speculation and others are a bit more obvious based on currently available data and information. Yes, Google likes keywords; and repetition demonstrates that the source may be considered an expert when key phrases are used with consistency.

What Google likes even more are links. When someone links to your article, press release or blog, it shows that you’re a credible resource. Plus, Google considers the other sites that are linking back to your content to determine their relevance to the subject matter. For instance, if you’ve written an article on argyle socks and several prominent fashion bloggers and department stores are linking your article to their site, Google recognizes you as a trusted and relevant resource.

So when you’re trying to determine how to make SEO copywriting work for you, think about studying the best words and phrases to use, as well as advertising and promoting your copywriting with backlinks. We hope to expand on this topic in the future so stay tuned for details.