Last month Facebook announced a new service called ‘Offers’ to a limited amount of beta-test Admins, but this is expected to roll out to a wider amount of Facebook Page Admins over the coming few months.

Facebook have said that they are delivering ‘Offers’ to be a simple new feature that will allow Admins of Pages to create discounts and coupons to share specifically with the people who currently like your pages. We think it’s a great new feature and can see many aspects of how this will be of benefit to many Local Businesses as well as Non Profits and Charitable Organisations. If you want to get a head start on other businesses in your area and this hasn’t been made available to you yet you can actually fill in an application form and request being involved in the service.

As well as being simple to create Facebook have said that they want to keep ‘Offers’ as a free service, although in a move seen by many as a way of them protecting their revenue stream from its Facebook Ads campaigns they have also said they will only reach a limited number of people.

So how exactly will they work?

Admins that have the ability to use them will see a sharing tool at the top of their Facebook Timeline from where than can choose to create an offer.  From there you are taken to a form to fill in the usual sort of standard details, so you will add a headline, upload a photo, set a limit on the number of offers available and choose the dates the offer will run for with its terms and conditions.

Once you have entered all the details you can preview what you have created and then tweak and change the offer until you are happy with what you are seeing as the result.  The fan then clicks the ‘get offer’ link and the details are forwarded by email to their primary email address.

As with all things Facebook there are certain guidelines that you must follow and as always its worthwhile checking these through, but you can’t for example use ‘offers’ for gift cards or certificates and similar such items.

In their article about the announcement ‘Facebook Offers: Yet Another Social Deals Attempt’ PC Mag author Mark Hachman said “Unfortunately, Facebook’s history of social deals reads like a bit like a “Who’s on First” skit”. So will we just see this follow all their other attempts at a Groupon style platform we will let you know as more news about this latest ‘Offer’ing excuse the pun as it emerges.

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But it was while we were in discussions with the other potential client that something came up that I wish to discuss in this blog post. We are always going on about how important content is, as its one of the things we feel very strongly about, we keep advising that it’s all well and good having the content optimised for the search engines but the search engines won’t buy your product or service. Users read content and they are your customers and it’s them that have already looked for your services or need to buy your products.

So we are always saying that your content needs to be unique, well written and relevant to the subject of your site or the pages it is being written for. Imagine my surprise when one of the clients in our meeting said that they understood the need for well written unique content and I thought for once we wouldn’t have to emphasise how important this was. Well that was right before they dropped the bombshell by saying that they could get well written content for just a few dollars.

So I asked a few questions:

Have you tried posting the article into Copyscape to see if it passes as authentic and not plagiarised content?

Have you posted a paragraph into the search engines to see if they recognise the content as being from another source?

‘Oh yes’ came the answer we have done both those things and it comes back as 100% unique content. Being ever the sceptic I asked them if I could see the articles and they were more than happy to show me them, and on first inspection they looked great, well written, good grammar, good mix of keywords, everything you would expect from content written for a much higher cost.

But when you looked closer there appeared to be a great many spelling mistakes within the content highlighted by the usual red squiggle under the words, but the words were not actually misspelt and it was then I realised that I had seen something similar before so I asked another question.

Have you actually typed a sentence or more of the content into a search engine manually?

‘Well No, we just cut and paste the content, why would we type it manually?’ was the response.

Do you mind if we try and see what the result is?

‘Feel free’.

So I did and lo and behold not only did Google return something from the search but it returned the exact same article, written by a completely different author.

What had actually happened was this, the copywriter (and I use the term loosely here) had advertised his services as many of them do, the client thought they were getting a great service at a great cost. What they actually got was a copied article that was then encoded using a technique known as stop words, I won’t actually go into the technical details but what it effectively does is render any words that are so encoded invisible to the search engines, so not only was the content not unique but it would actually read as gobbledegook to the search engines as well.

Of course with all the latest updates from Google being designed to target scraped content and duplicate content from such things as article farms and the like, it doesn’t take much to realise that there would be no benefit to the business if they had used this content, despite the advertiser saying it would have SEO Value, in fact if anything it could well have been detrimental.

The moral of this story of course is if it’s too good to be true, it usually is.

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Analytics and Conversion

I would imagine that most of us have heard of Google Analytics and some of us may have even used it but one thing that people tend to overlook, especially when it comes to ecommerce SEO is that SEO shouldn’t stop at being a tool for driving massive amounts of traffic to your website. It’s more important to understand conversion and what keywords and traffic are driving this conversion, after all what’s the point of having 5000 visitors a month if none of them are buying or asking about your services and products.

Use an analytics package to see which words are bringing in the traffic, if you are doing ecommerce SEO make sure that you have ecommerce tracking and conversions enabled. Check your key phrases and compare them against others to see what is producing the results as knowing this information will help you to optimise your site and know what to focus on.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

These are still a very powerful thing when it comes to your on-page SEO, and it never ceases to amaze us how many companies out there still have the title tag of their homepage set to ‘Home’ or have the companies name as the title of every page.

Every page of your website should be unique and the title tag of these pages should be unique also, they should be descriptive and indicative of the content on the page and have the keywords that you are using to target your pages in them as well.

Best case scenario for your title tag is between 60 and 70 characters long (70 being the limit that Google displays in search results) with the optimal format being:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

The closer to the front of the title tag a keyword you want to rank for is the better.

The Title Tag is the single most important SEO element on the page next to content and getting this wrong can be a damaging mistake and it’s not just for SEO purposes, they invariably get used in tweets and when people bookmark pages hence why they need to be descriptive and another reason they are highly important.

Although meta descriptions are not as important for your on-page SEO as they used to be (they don’t carry as much weight anymore as the algorithms have changed), they are still an important factor when it comes to the end user, and as we have discussed many times before it is them that will ultimately purchaser your product or service.

Meta Descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters and should also make use of the keywords you are using to target the page. As with the title tag they need to be unique to each page and as descriptive as you can make them, remember that your title tag will help the search engines to rank your site, your meta description is what will help to make people want to click and visit your page from the search engine listings.

We will cover some more common and simple SEO mistakes in a later post, in the meantime I hope you enjoy this one, if you are looking for some tips and tricks for your eCommerce business then why not take a look at our post on the top 35 tips for ecommerce seo. Please feel free to share and comment.

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Social Media and powerful SEO techniques

Whatever your personal feelings about social media networks may be you may be missing out to the competition if you do not already have your business social media profiles up and running. SEO is about optimising your website, and your entire online presence needs to be managed in order to help you achieve all that is possible.

Social Media may have started out for personal enjoyment, but it has quickly developed into a powerful marketing tool which should not be ignored. The behaviour of consumers is constantly changing, and social media has become one of the most important factors which are affecting your potential customers in the modern digital age.

Know Where to Advertise

There are many different social media platforms which are available for businesses. Some of the most powerful tools for SEO purposes include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. Setting up a basic profile is free on all of these sites, and free advertising and customer research should never be scoffed at.

These sites have proven that they are not just a craze which will die out. The way people shop and spread their likes and dislikes has been permanently changed. The Internet and mobile Internet now mean that consumers are able to instantly react to businesses, products and services in a matter of seconds. You can reach out to millions of people and have an instant response which can be used to drive sales, perform customer research or simply to send a simple message to attract people to your brand.

Search Engines and Social Media

When it comes to SEO it is hard to avoid the discussion of search engine results pages. Hitting the top spot is the ideal of all businesses who are actively working on improving their SEO methods and marketing techniques. One of the largest search engines is Bing who has quickly made themselves a huge competition for Google. This means that you should be looking at ways to optimise your website for Bing and not just Google.

Bing has recognised the consumers’ desires to share their ‘likes’ on social networks. And in a direct response to this they have decided that ‘likes’ on pages such as fan pages and posts on Facebook will be used to help determine search engine results. The more likes your posts receive, the higher you will be regarded on the SERPs. And this is very interesting news indeed for SEO departments.

Have you Been Working on Your Social Media?

Opening an account on each of these social media websites does not really take too much time. Managing all the sites however does quickly eat into time, and in order to make the most out of your media networking it is essential that you spend time and energy on creating an efficient online presence. Your hard work is rewarded by growing a large fan base, having your own consumers helping you grow and stay in touch with their needs and desires for your brands, and the huge potential of creating more revenue.

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