Search Engine Optimization

Facebook has over 500 million active users and people now spend more time on Facebook than they do on Google. Therefore, the benefits of integrating Facebook plug-ins with your website cannot be ignored. There’s one particular Facebook plug-in that offers numerous advantages for webmasters and bloggers, and it’s called the Facebook Comments Box. The Facebook Comments Box enables users who have Facebook accounts to leave comments on your site.

Prevents Spam

Using the Facebook Comments Box plug-in prevents spamming because there is no way to comment anonymously. And if you do get spam comments, which are rare, you can report the users to Facebook and have their accounts blocked.

Surfaces the Highest Quality Comments by Evaluating Social Signals

Another interesting benefit of using the Facebook Comments Box on your site is that Facebook has a ranking algorithm that evaluates various social signals to surface the highest quality comments. The comments are ordered to show users the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and most “liked” and active discussions.

Easily Shareable

Whenever a user leaves a comment on your site with the Facebook Comments Box, they can easily share the comment with their Facebook friends or people who “like” their Facebook page. To do so, users simply need to check the “Post to Facebook” box when commenting so that the comment appears in their Facebook friends’ news feeds. The comment display will include a link back to your website, which will help to drive more traffic to your site via Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook users can “like” their friends’ comments and respond to them directly in their newsfeeds, which will continue to circulate your website link on Facebook.

Threaded Comments

The Facebook Comments Box plug-in allows you to give your readers individual attention and boost the community spirit because you can reply to each reader under their comments. Without threaded comments, you would have to reply to everyone’s comments at once, which could get confusing and make it more difficult to continue the conversation.

Links Are No-Follow

All of the links in the Facebook Comments Box are no-follow by default. This prevents spammers from leaving links to their sites in the comments section for the sake of getting link juice. Furthermore, the quality of your content in the eyes of the search engine bots will increase since they will only crawl your site’s content and not the comments, which aren’t always valuable or on-topic.

How to Make Comments in the Facebook Comments Box Crawlable and Indexable

Comments in the Facebook Comments Box are housed in an iframe, so they are not crawable and have no effect on your site’s ranking. If you want Facebook comments on your site to be crawled and indexed, you can export them with a simple script that requires no authentication. The script extracts the comments and displays them for the search engines. The only downside of using this script is that it does not display all of the comments for URLs that receive hundreds or thousands of comments. For more information about the script (and to get the script itself), check out the top answer on this Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Are-Facebook-comments-crawlable

If you are a business owner with a website and you don’t have a blog already, what are you waiting for? Blogging is an essential piece of the online marketing puzzle and the results of your marketing campaigns will be limited without it. Here are 7 reasons why you need to start a business blog now.

1. Websites with blogs get 55% more visitors

Studies have shown that websites with blogs get more visitors because they are constantly updated with fresh content (which the search engines love) and give users a reason to return to a site on a regular basis. On the other hand, if you have a static website, people won’t have a reason to keep coming back and the search engines won’t have any new content to crawl and index.

2. You can target more keyword phrases if you have a blog

If you have a static website with just a few pages, your ability to target keyword phrases will be limited. With a blog, you’ll be able to target a much larger quantity of keyword phrases on your website and therefore attract more targeted search engine traffic.

3. Helps you get more backlinks

Link-building is one of the most important aspects of SEO. If you want to improve your website’s search engine ranking, you need to get more backlinks. When you post useful blog content and promote it, it helps you attract backlinks from webmasters, bloggers, forum moderators, and other influential members of the online community. These backlinks will not only drive more traffic to your site, they’ll also give your site more link juice and thus improve its rankings.

4. Positions you as an expert

Want to increase your online authority? Then start a blog. Business owners who post compelling, informative content on their blogs are often considered experts in their industry and thus get more attention, links, and business. Remember: people want to buy from professional companies with demonstrated expertise in their field more so than businesses with websites that only feature a sales pitch and nothing more.

5. Fuels your social media marketing efforts

If you’re using social media for business purposes, you absolutely need to have a blog. In order to succeed in social media, you need to create and promote content that gets shared. By building a business blog with helpful content and sharing it to social media users, you can drive more targeted traffic to your site and build trust in your business.

6. Improves communication with customers

If you want your customers to become repeat customers, you need to build a community around your website. Having a blog helps you build a stronger sense of community because your customers feel like they are getting to know you through your writing and can comment on your posts to express their thoughts. These opportunities for interaction improve communication between you and your customers, so they are more inclined to do business with you again.

7. Increases word-of-mouth advertising

A business blog increases word-of-mouth advertising for your business because your prospects and customers are more likely to talk about you and share your website with their friends, family, and professional network if you provide a steady flow of useful content on your blog. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for business owners to stand out in this crowded world, and an expertly written blog may be just what you need to attract your target audience’s attention and set your business apart from the competition.

Are you doing everything in your power to improve your website’s on-page SEO? Many webmasters focus so much on link-building and other off-page SEO strategies that they fail to use basic tactics to their advantage. Needless to say, they’re leaving money on the table.

On-page SEO is far easier to manage than off-page SEO because you don’t have to rely on anybody else to give you links in order to improve your site’s rankings. Here are 8 lesser known on-page SEO ranking factors that are worth paying attention to.

1. The positioning of keywords in your title tags matters

Almost everybody knows that title tags matter in SEO, but merely creating unique title tags for each page of your site and adding your target keywords to them is not sufficient; the position of the keywords in your title tags is crucial! Target keywords should be placed at or towards the beginning of your title tags.

2. Identify your properties across the web

Want to strengthen your online brand and consolidate your identity on the web? When interlinking to sites or social media profiles that belong to you, use the rel=“me” attribute. For example, if you link to your Facebook business page from your website, do this:

<a rel=“me” href=“http://www.facebook.com/JohnDoePlumbingCompany”>Our Facebook Page</a>

By adding this attribute to your links, you are essentially telling the search engines which online properties belong to you. While it’s still not clear what this does for your rankings, it certainly won’t hurt to consolidate your web identity, especially considering how important social media has become in SEO.

3. Contextual internal links are more valuable

A contextual internal link to another page of your site is more valuable than a standalone link. So, when you link to other pages within your site, include the link in a related paragraph.

4. Placement of the <h1> tag

You’ve probably heard that using <h1> tags that include your target keywords is valuable, but to maximize their value, you need to place them in a prominent position on the page. For the best results, use <h1> tags as headings on each page.

5. Position of links on a site

Links that appear in a website’s sidebar or footer have less value than links that appear in the body of a site. When you place important links on your site, make sure they are positioned high in the body of the page.

6. Bolding keywords

Want to give keywords in your web copy more weight? Bold them. When search engine spiders crawl a page of your site, they will try to determine what it is about. If you bold target keywords, search engine spiders will think the page is related to those keywords, which is what you want.

7. Get rid of unnecessary HTML code

When search engine bots crawl your website, what they’re crawling is its HTML code. Get rid of extraneous HTML code on each page of your site because it could negatively impact your rankings.

8. Mix up keyword usage

Rather than using the same keyword phrase over and over in your content, mix it up by incorporating semantically related phrases. For example, if the title of your page is, “Lemon Lawyer Los Angeles,” make the heading tag say something like, “Los Angeles Lemon Attorney” instead. Some effective ways to mix up keyword usage include using synonyms, changing the order of keyword phrases, using singular and plural forms of the same keyword, and adding relevant modifiers.