it can also be very bad for some businesses.
Make sure you know what you are doing
before you click the unchangeable “merge”
button. (UPDATE: 1/6/11 -As of Dec. 2010
Facebook added the option to unmerge.)

Merged Fan Pages and Place Pages

Pros:
1. People who visit  your place page can see
what other friends are their. They can also
see which friends were recently there.
2. A map is provided at the top of the info tab which allows people to
see exactly where the business or event is located.

Cons:
1. The default landing page cannot be changed. The default landing page is
pretty much the same thing as the wall.
2. Custom pages cannot be seen on the place page. FBML<> are an
exception to this. (UPDATE: 12/14/2010 – I can’t speak for every app
that makes custom pages, but Pagemodo.com is now able to
make a page that works. Still, be careful if you use a custom page
that isn’t provided by Pagemodo.) FBML pages will work, but you have
to know how to do Facebook’s version of html. If you have a page using a
custom Facebook application it will not be able to display. This could be
very bad if you paid a lot of money for an expensive custom page that isn’t
in FBML.
3. The tabs that are ordinarily across the top of the fan page (i.e. wall, info,
photos, notes, etc.) are moved to the left side of the Place page and are
much smaller than the fan page tabs.
4. The only people who can view the Place page are people who use smart
phone. Desktops and laptops cannot view the place page.

There has been a growing group of people who are against the merge. You
may want to follow this link to view the Facebook group and see why they
don’t like the merge.

If your business or event relies heavily on having high volumes of
traffic you may want to consider merging your page. This is especially
true if a large number of your visitors use smart phones.

For many businesses it may be a good idea to wait to see how Facebook’s
place page evolves before merging your page and losing the ability to set
the default landing page and possibly lose your custom Facebook tab.

In most cases I would highly recommend that you do not merge your page.
There are several reasons for this. If you would like me to go into more
details as to why I think most businesses should not merge you can read
Don’t Let People See Your Wall! (For Fan Pages) or you can add a comment

to this posting.

Thanks for reading,
~Joshua Lyons

It’s important to create a custom Twitter background for several
reasons. Here are some of them:

1. It shows that you take your tweeting seriously. If you don’t care about
providing quality tweets you probably won’t take the time to create a
custom Twitter background. Here is a link to a post on why you should
take Twitter very seriously for business.
2. It provides additional space in which you can include important
information. Make sure to include your company name, telephone number,
address, website, and any other relevant information you wish display.
3. It gives you the chance to showcase your services or products.

It’s not difficult to create a custom page. Here is an example of a Twitter
background I created for a Chick-fil-A unit in Pensacola, Florida.

I hope you find the website useful.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Go to tinyurl.com and paste the long url into the provided field. After
this is done click on “Make tiny url” and a new [short] link will be
provided. The new link goes to the same web page as the long link, but it
won’t take up your character space.

I hope you get a lot of use out of tinyurl. This post ties in well with my
Twitter category which gives advice on what to tweet, how often to
tweet, and other general Twitter tips.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Since posting this entry I have had about a dozen comments from
people recommending  bit.ly.com. as well. I checked out that site and
I am impressed with it. I would encourage you to check out both sites
and see which one is more comfortable. You’ve got options!

P.S.S. Here is a well written article about the concerns/pitfalls of using
shortlinks from tinyurl, bit.ly, and similar sites. It’s worth a read.
http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/url-shorteners-must-die

The free version of Animoto allows you to create 30 second videos
using templates. Although templates frequently scream ”cheesy!” Animoto has
several template options which are quite good. You’re able to include
pictures, text, music, [from their music library or from yours] or
video clips.

With the free version you can create videos with Animoto and use them to
do any of the following:
1. Add videos to your Google Place page to increase your Google ranking
2. Send videos to your social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
3. Embed videos into your blog or website

I’ve added one of the videos I’m using for my company to this blog. We
created this video to increase our Google Place page ranking. There are
four more videos on our places page that you can look at if you would like to
see some other template examples.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you found this useful.

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. If you liked this post you will probably like my post on where to get free
high resolution photos and edit them for free on the web.

What you want to do is let your friends know about your page and ask
them to like it. Here is how you should do that.

Every Facebook fan page administrator has the ability to “suggest to
friends.” This suggestion option is only available to page administrators
and can be found just under the profile picture on the top left of the
fan page. The customized Facebook message is sent to the inbox of each
friend the administrator selects. The message also has a link to the fan
page you are trying to promote.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends. If you suggest your
fan page to all your friends you could easily have over 100 people
“like” your page in just a few days. This step is so simple, yet extremely
effective.

Also, if you really want to take advantage of this feature you can ask a
few of your closest or most trusted friends to become temporary
administrators for you fan page. Then ask them to suggest the page to
all their friends. If you have seven of your friends do this you could have
over 1000 fans in no time.

Take advantage of the “suggest” option and watch the fan number sky-
rocket!

I hope this helps.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Please leave some feedback on this if you have a second.

Google recently reconfigured the way they rank pages. If they
think the person doing the search is trying to find a local business they
will automatically put the Google Places results at the top of the
search page. If your business isn’t listed in Google Places you will not
show up in that list. Therefore, make sure you have your Google
Places page set up.

Once you have created your page you should do as much as possible to
make  your page rank higher than your competition’s Google Places
rankings.

Here are a few things you can do to help create a positive Google Places ranking.

1. Have a 100% complete profile. If you took enough time to fill out all
the information you should get much further along than those who
don’t fill out the profile. That’s common since.

2. Upload photos and videos [If you have them] to your places page. Make
sure your favorite photo is the first one you upload. This picture will be
used as a profile photo that people can actually see when your place
shows up in a Google search. Here is an example of what the
places search results will look like when it displays your photos.

3. Get reviews! This is extremely important! First of all, don’t write your
own reviews. Most of the time it is obvious that they aren’t genuine. Take a
look sometime at someone who has a lot of reviews and look at the
dates they are posted. Some businesses will suddenly have a boost of
reviews all on the same day or within a period of a few days. Then the
reviews stop coming in. Those almost always turn out to be the
company writing reviews on itself.

If you have a quality business it shouldn’t be hard to ask a few of your
top customers or clients to write a short review for you. Asking 10
people to write a review for you will significantly improve your
ranking and credibility. You could even offer an incentive to get your
favorite customers to write for you.

4. Use Google Posts. Using Google Posts is like using the status
update for Facebook. You are able to enter as many as 160 characters of
text and publish it with your places page. If you have something going
on make sure to use the Google Posts option to let people know about
it. Also, consider using keywords to add to your industry relevance.

5. Have a well designed website. If your website is built well for search
engine optimization purposes you will seem important to Google. This will
of course be helpful for your places ranking when someone is
searching for a local business.

6. Add a description for your company. This is a short description but it
is an excellent place to add the most relevant keywords for your
industry.

7. Properly categorize your places page. There is a section that allows
you to categorize your business. If you own an ice cream business and
don’t categorize it as ice cream it may be difficult to get your page to
show up in an ice cream business search. Make sure to categorize your
business properly.

There are some more strategies and aspects to successfully using Google
Places but I think the seven points listed above are perhaps the most
important things to be taken advantage of.

I hope this helps and please feel free to leave comments and suggestions
to this post!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

I’ve noticed that a lot of websites are built to appear attractive to
visitors but ignore hidden aspects that make search engines happy.

Here are some steps my company took to increase our page rankings
on some various search terms. We now rank number one in almost
every search that people use to find us.

Go to your website and right-click on the background. In the tab that
appears you will see an option to click on “View Source (V).” Click that
option.

There are three things in that crazy maze of letters, numbers, and
symbols that you need to find.

Meta Descriptions

1. Look for where it says
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT= towards
the top of the window. This is the description of
the website that Google displays in the Google
search. This is the first thing people will read
about who you are and what you offer. This is
very important because the keywords people
are using to find you should be in that
description. That will help google give your page a
higher ranking. If you leave this section blank
Google will make up a meta description for
you. It’s better to make your own description using the keywords you
want. The meta description should be no more than about 160
characters long and should be written in readable sentences and not just
a list of keywords. People will read your meta so be careful as you
craft it.

Meta Keywords

2. Look for <META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=. This should be very
close to where it has the description. This is the place where you want to
add the keywords that are most relevant to your site. You don’t have
to list them in sentence form like you do for the description. Just
add some keywords or phrases which are separated by commas. Most
people recommend that you have somewhere from four to nine keywords
or phrases. Choose your keywords well. I would recommend using
Google AdWords to find the best keywords for your site. One good idea I
read was to include your city as a keyword. Don’t just include the products or
services you offer.

Meta Alts & Titles

3. The last place to look for is a little more tricky than the first
two. You will need to find the part of the page that says “<body….” If you
have a picture in the body of your website you will also see some text that
says “<img….” After are the last two places you want to pay some
attention to. Each time you have an image in your website there will be alt
and title names available to the image. You could think of alts and titles as
very brief descriptions you can give to your photos. Again, you
want to use keywords that are associated with the page. By adding
alts and titles to each image you can give Google and other search
engines more opportunities to see what your page is about. The more
you can describe your page to the search engines the better.

These three steps are focused on making keywords for the search engines
to see.

I would strongly suggest looking at your website to see if you
have individual descriptions for each page, individual keywords for
each page, and unique alts and titles for each image in your site.

If your site isn’t taking advantage of these SEO methods you should
come up with descriptions, keywords, alts, and titles and ask your
webmaster to include them in your site.

Give it a few days for the search engines to take a look (crawl) your
page. Once this is done I suspect your page ranking will improve.

I hope this helps and if you have any questions or anything to add
feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading!

~Joshua Lyons

We frequently need photos to add a look of professionalism to
blog posts, articles, websites, or other sites. Where can we
get high-resolution photos and how can we edit them for
free?

Photoxpress is the best place I’ve found to get free photos.
The free version limits you to ten photos a day, but the
resolution is very high and it’s not common that a person will
need more than 10 photos a day.

Photoshop is an excellent software program for photo editing; but
what if you don’t have Photoshop and you’re not willing to pay
the money to get it?

Picnik is a great site that allows you to upload photos and
edit them. The service is free, easy to use, and provides
a number of editing options ranging from adding text, to
cropping, to adding special effects and features.

By using photoxpress and picnik together you can create high
quality customized photos.

There is also a picnik application that can be added to your
Facebook fan page. This makes it easier to edit your photos without
having to leave your fan page.

I hope this helps and thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

(12/28/2010) Photoxpress has changed their pricing plans
since I created this post. Now, if you already
have an account you will continue to get the 10 free
photos a day. If you do not have an account you will
need purchase a paid version. If you don’t want to pay |
for the photos I would recommend going to stock.xchng
instead. They seem to be an excellent alternative.

Search engines evaluate the quality of the site that is linking to you. If
the other site has a higher PR than your site does you will get brownie
points from Google and other search engines. If the site linking to you
has a lower PR than your site your PR could be lowered.

The more good backlinks you have the better your page ranking will
be. You could also say that the more good backlinks you have, the
more customers you will have.

There are several ways to get backlinks. Here are some of the
options available to you:

1. Write articles for EzineArticles and GoArticles. You will be able to
leave a link to your site in the author bio section.

2. Go to Yahoo Answers and Google Groups and find people asking
questions related to your industry. Once you find a good question
you can answer it and leave a link to your site. Make sure the link
is appropriate for the question being asked.

3. Make sure your website link is included in the yellowpages.com.

4. Make sure your website link is included in the website for your
local chamber of commerce.

5. Write a high quality blog. With time people who read your blog
will include links on their sites to your blog because they value your
opinions.

6. Use social bookmarking tools to make sure your blog is seen. You
can use StumbledUpon, Technorati, Digg, and a host of other sites.
Google “bookmarking sites” and see what else there is for you to use.

7. Let everyone you know hear about your sites. Add the URLs on
your business cards, stationary, e-mail signatures and on anything
else people see. This will build awareness for you sites. If the
people you know are aware of your site there is a good chance
they will also eventually add links to you from their sites.

I recently heard of a company that annually charges $15,000 for
SEO purposes. The biggest thing they do for SEO is creating
backlinks for their customers. I did a search on one of their clients
that they have had for over a year. The search showed that their
customer has a total of one backlink!

That is pathetic! My blog currently has 33 backlinks and I’ve only
been writing for about three months! If you have someone “building
backlinks” for you consider doing a check to see if they are doing
their job.

You can check the number of backlinks to your site by using Site
Explorer by Yahoo. “Explore” your URL and then click the “inlinks”
button. This will tell you how many backlinks you have to your site.
It will also tell you who is linking to your site.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps,

~Joshua Lyons

Here are three of the best minions I have ever had working for me. I have
given each one some orders. They are as follow:

Minion #1: Twitter – Twitter, when someone runs a Google search there will
be 10 results on the first page. Your job is to make my name, my
reputation, and what I have to offer appear as all ten of those top search
results. By doing this we can knock all opposition off the first page of the
search results.

Minion #2: Blogs – Blogs, your objective is to continually give the world great
information. Tell them what they want to hear and give them a longing to
come back to see what you have to say next time. Then, create interest and
desire within the reader. Persuade the reader that we are awesome and that
they will do anything for us. Convince them that they need us!

Minion #3: Facebook – Facebook, your mission is to direct our fans. If we are
needing to push them to our blog and feed them information you will give
them incentives to go there. If we need people to go to Twitter, to help
increase page rankings, you will convince the fans that they need to go to
Twitter. Do whatever is necessary to guide the world in the direction we
desire.

By having my minions work together I can create an effective plan for world
domination. If they do not work together I will be left with a team of
minions who are aimlessly trying to do something but will not be able to do
so effectively.

1. Use Twitter to get your company, products, and services all over the first
page of Google.

2. Use your blog to inform your target market and to create a desire for
what you have to offer.

3. Use Facebook as a way to guide your fans to do whatever it is that needs to
be done. This could be retweeting your tweets, posting comments on your
blog, giving feedback about a product, or something else. Facebook should
be used to direct your fans.

By making your social media platforms work together you will find your
social media campaigns to be much more successful than if they are not
working together.

Use your minions and rule the world!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons