The experts at each side of the ring debate whether PPC or SEO is better for ranking your business to the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine. The way I see it, if you combine both methods then your business stands a fighting chance of standing out from your competitors. A PPC agency will bid on keywords that you will pay for, it will generate almost automatic rankings that will allow your business to flourish but if it is a detailed campaign it will turn out to be expensive. An SEO agency on the other hand will place added value to your website with long lasting keywords, this process take much longer than PPC though it is known as the ‘organic process’ as it lasts much longer.

SEO is a process of natural search results versus man made search results, Google is not a natural process anymore and expert marketers often tailor results to the needs of businesses. The main question you need to ask yourself when signing up to either a PPC agency or an SEO consultancy is where do you want your website to be a year from now? Can you afford to pay your way to the top of the search results? Not many people could, or is this a quick fix method that you can use whilst an SEO agency takes care of search engine optimisation for you? The careful and patient process is more creative and involves the process of blogging, link building and social media; it is a lot of work and takes time though the end results are often cheaper and more generous than PPC.

It all depends on your business and what results you want, if you are patient and want to save money then an SEO agency is who you are looking for, but if you are a new business who is looking for fast custom then consider getting in touch with a PPC agency as they will get you instant attention. You need to carefully devise a strategy and set a budget; expense is the main drawback of PPC advertising so make sure you know exactly how much you can afford to spend.

I too was worried about keeping my business and personal accounts separate. So much so that at one point in time, I created two personal profiles. My personal one to keep in touch with family and friends, and a business profile that I could use for creating fanpages for Baldydog and our clients.

However, having multiple personal profiles goes against Facebook’s rules, so if you invest a ton of time in one or both of your profiles, you could possibly loose not only your Facebook profiles, but your Fanpages as well.

Keeping Fanpages and Personal Profiles Separate

1. When you set up your Fanpage, you can adjust your settings so when you post or comment on your Fanpage, you do it as the Fanpage.  For example, when I am on the Baldydog Fanpage, and I leave a comment, it will appear as if Baldydog left the comment not Adam Donkus.

2. When you want to use Facebook as your Fanpage, go to the top right corner of your profile page, next to “HOME” is a little triangle that is pointing down..(see pic) click that and then from the drop down menu click on “Use Facebook  as Page” and then select the desired fanpage.

Using Facebook as a Fanpage instead of a person,  is a great way of getting your Fanpage out their.

Correcting Mistakes

If you make the mistake of liking a page, while you are using as a fanpage but meant to only do like as your profile, and the page then will show up under the “Likes” section on the sidebar. You and your visit

ors can both see the pages you have liked, and visit them. If  you did not mean to like a page as your fanpage, you can visit the page, and click unlike towards the bottom of the sidebar of the liked fanpage.

Delete Comments and Posts

If you or someone you know makes a comment or a post that you want to delete, how can you delete it?

Hover your cursor to the top right corner of the box the comment is in and an X will appear. If a guest makes a post and you don’t want it to be visible,

you can hover your cursor over the top right of the post box and a menu will appear. You can either delete the post or hide it.

I was also asked about hiding the administrators box in the left sidebar. This box is only visible to administrators, so fear not. The general public will not be able to tell who the administrators are unless you tell them.

Why have my Fanpage associated with My personal profile?

A Fanpage must be associated(administrator) with someone, and I personally think it is a good idea to have multiple administrators, because if one personal profile gets deleted by the person or by Facebook, the Fanpage will still have at least one administrator, so it will not also disappear.

Fanpage Administrators have the ability to import contacts for easy sharing. Most businesses/organizations have a client list or email list which can be shared. A person rather than a Fanpage needs to do the  sharing, as Fanpages are much more limited as to who sharing can be done. When sharing info as when logged in and using Facebook with a Personal profile, you have the ability to determine who and who you don’t want to share.

Additionally, if you still want to insure your privacy even more, be sure to edit the privacy settings on your personal account so that your updates are only visible to friends and family. Check out Kikolani’s post for more Facebook Profile Privacy tips.

How do you keep your Fanpage separate from your Facebook profile?

Custom FanPage

I have also been working on the Baldydog Fanpage to make it a little more interactive. This includes regular updates of useful content such as info about SEO, Social Media Marketing tips, and the like as well as general info about developments with Baldydog as a company.  Just to be clear, I never claimed to be a designer, so the custom fanpage I created may be changing if we ever get time. Suggestions for others on creating custom fanpages:

1. Create a custom welcome page..Google “free custom fanpages” to find a ton of free services using Facebooks iframe technology which essentially embeds another website within Facebook to give you a custom page.(more on this later)
2. Add a Facebook picture that takes up the full space instead of  a small little square icon.
3. Add pictures to your home page that add a bit of style not just random pictures. In this I am referring to  the right of the main profile at the top of the wall page.
4. Add more pages or tabs to include specials, free giveaways(contests), coupons and the like. If your Fanpage is for a restaurant, you could make one tab a menu tab.
5. I also read somewhere that you should include a link to your website at the beginning of the ” About” section for your pages info.

This is by no way a complete custom fanpage tutorial. What fanpage resources can you recommend?

As part of the Baldydog.com online marketing program, I am attempting to rank for the keyword phrase “Travel SEO“, and I thought I would start to do weekly blog posts where I do an SEO site analysis of a featured travel site.

Why GlobalBasecamps.com

When I first came to their site, I instantly loved it. Being somewhat pro-environmentalist( see numerous environmental posts on Pixelheadonline), I love the idea of sustainable travel, which is what GlobalBasecamps.com is all about…or greatly about.

So I asked them if they would like to be featured in an SEO Travel review post..

First impressions of GlobalBasecamps.com SEO

The site is really clean, it looks like there is a lot of potential for SEO for this site. At first glance it seems that there could be a lot of great niche keywords that this site could be ranking. Our fist thoughts about the SEO for the site include:

• How much traffic do they get from “Global Basecamps” keyword phrase?
• Needs more keyword research.
• Title tags can be optimized far better, poor use of this highly important SEO real estate is very common.
• Navigation code takes up too much room in the code and should be in an external file.
• Overuse of the H tag instead of paragraph tags.

The above initial thoughts were the combined thoughts of my wife, Lizzie and myself. When Lizzie heard that GlobalBasecamps.com has trips to India, and many other exotic locations, she asked me if they would consider bartering for SEO services..lol..bartering for travel…hmm..

GlobalBasecamps.com SEO Site Assessment

Below is a basic SEO site evaluation, however,  a much more detailed site evaluation is done for websites that become clients.

url:GlobalBasecamps.com

domain age: 2yrs 11months at this writing.

Industry: sustainable travel

Page Saturation

How many pages of the site are in the Google index?

142 pages in Google for GlobalBasecamps.com

Link Popularity

131 external links pointing to GlobalBasecamps.com

Sample Keywords:

Used Google Adsense Keyword tool for Searches/month.

Travel SEO Suggestions

It would benefit Globalbasecamps.com greatly to undergo an SEO campaign that has two parts.  The first would be and on page optimization, which would entail optimizing for target keywords. The second part of the Travel SEO plan would be on-going traffic and authority building. Both of these components as done by Baldydog.com, entail a great deal of proprietary knowledge.

It is suggested that the home page have a tighter keyword focus, which would also require continual keyword research to find both long tail(keywords that have little competition but steady flow of traffic) and short tail keywords.

Final SEO Travel Thoughts for Globalbasecamps.com

SEO in general, is now considered to be mainstream advertising. As a business, you should consider implementing an SEO campaign that will see a huge ROI(Return on Investment).  SEO goes hand in hand with all other marketing..from traditional to Social Media marketing, SEO is an essential component to any marketing plan.

Well that’s it for this Travel SEO Post. If you would like to be featured in a Travel SEO Review post, or if you would like to inquire about SEO services for your travel company,  please contact me via the SEO Travel contact form.

Globalbasecamps Links:

GlobalBasecamps.com

GlobalBasecamps Twitter

GlobalBasecamps Facebook

GlobalBasecamps Blog

Who Needs Travel SEO?

As discussed in the blog post about Niche SEO, I believe one of the best SEO niches is travel SEO, because there is such a huge potential for finding clients who could potentially benefit from your SEO services. Potential Travel SEO clients include:

• Travel Agents, especially travel agents that are located in larger towns, such as New York or Los Angeles.
• Casinos – with the deregulation of the gambling industry, Casinos are going to need to compete for all venues for driving potential gamblers. Can you tell me how many Casinos in Las Vegas would like to be on page one of Google for “Las Vegas Casino”?
• Hotels – many top destinations such as New York City, have multiple hotels that again could seriously benefit for being on page one and also for having their local SEO optimized.
• Restaurants- Restaurant SEO is a niche that I think could be focused on entirely or be a subset of travel seo. Restaurants really need to be on top their local seo as well. I know I have gone to places that show up on page one more times than not. Its a shame, but many quality restaurants are just no where to be found in the SERPs.
• Attractions – Many vacation spots have multiple attractions that are competing for tourist dollars.
• Resorts – How many travel destinations have multiple resorts? I know when we were on our Puerto Rico Honeymoon, there were multiple resorts competing for the keyword phrase “Puerto Rico Honeymoon”. How much does an average honeymoon package run?
• Real Estate Rental agents – I know we have used a few of these, and I am sure there were others that we could have used had we found them online.
• Airlines – I actually have worked on several airlines sites..they like to come up before their affiliates.
• Car Rental Agents

Travel SEO, what is involved with Travel SEO?

First, we recommend doing a bit of keyword research. But for each one of the above categories of Travel SEO, there are certain to be many keywords that are the same, but would require location modifiers.For example,  restaurants in Sarasota would not want to rank for the keyword “Restaurant”, but would want to rank for “Sarasota restaurant” or “Italian Sarasota Restaurant” .

Now more than ever, with Travel SEO, local seo practices are of the utmost importance. Showing up in the local listings is so important, as more and more people are using their smart phones while traveling instead of using the Yellow Pages.  The local listings are often times the results that show up on smart phone screens.

Local SEO is in itself a whole new ball game that I will focus on in another blog post.

In addition to local seo, venues such as restaurants and hotels, will need to monitor and adjust their online reputations..reputation management is a huge field as well.

Natural SEO is so important for travel seo, because a site that uses good seo practices, will show up well in the local serps. Natural SEO has two main components on-page and off-page optimization. Both are very important for the Travel SEO.

Do You Need Travel SEO?

If the above blog post has you dizzy, and you would like an Travel SEO proposal, please feel free to contact us for a free quote and/or  website analysis.

To find words and phrases related to your site that have a good amount of traffic but very little competition.

In this video:

 
Adam recommends using the Google Adsense Keyword Tool to do this research.

What is your site about?  Choose keywords that describe your site or your product (example: MyBareBags site sells cloth bags, so “cloth bags” is one keyword).  Preferably, look for 1,000 hits or more.

It might be helpful to put all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

The goal when doing keyword research for a site is to find about 20 solid keyword phrases.

Calculate the RS ratio: Results/Search for each keyword. Results means what are the number of pages the SERP’s(search engine results pages) when you search for a word. Using a keyword tool such as the free Google Adsense Keyword tool(not the best, but it is free) you see how many searches per month are made for the word. You then devide the first number by the second and that gives you the R/S ratio.

Your site’s title tag is important: use keywords, not your site’s name. The Title Tag is one of the most important parts of your site for the search engines..use it wisely.

In this SEO Training Video:

-started a Google group for the SEO training series, and how you can get involved
-submitted site called Mybarebags to 33 free directories
-add a Google analytical code on your site
-Site key words and title tags should correspond

Today I’m going to list and give a brief description of the sessions that I attended. Later this week/month, I will go into more detail about each of these subjects.

The first session I attended was How to Calculate Social Media ROI - this was lead by Christopher S. Penn. He was an excellent presenter – very dynamic, interesting and funny (always important). The session basically showed a high level approach to calculating ROI from Social Media.

Next session I attended was All About PPC – presented by Greg Meyers of iGesso. This session went over the basics of PPC – which I believe is always good to get back to the basics and hear from an expert in the field.

The next session was also lead by Greg Meyers and this was on keyword research. I chose this class because, as of late I’ve been struggling with all the different tools used for keyword research. The data I get from each tool, some paid, some free, cannot be compared. I don’t believe any of the results from these tools are accurate. This class, however seemed to be sponsored by Trellian.

The last session on Saturday was Measuring with Analytics taught by Brian Cosgrove, a former colleague of mine. This session was great; it was a high level look at analytics, Google Analytics in particular, but I still picked up a lot of new and interesting information.

All-in-all it was a great and informative day. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what sessions I attended on Sunday of PodCamp Philly.