There are a lot of different methods out there for driving down your costs of advertising on Facebook and to increase the efficiency of your page and your overall marketing campaign. From beginner guides to expert expositions, there’s information out there for all stripes. For the marketer on Facebook already privy to ad formats and how the system works, you can skip the rookie camp and look for something with more meat on the bones.

For instance, you can skip over the tips dealing with how to draw people to your page and instead focus on how to get more of those visitors to actually engage with your brand.

If you’re looking to increase your sales, it’s all about increasing your engagement. The tips listed below should help you to post more engaging material. Read more…

Social Search can be approached from two angles; both equally important for businesses. There’s micro-searching — this includes using social media to connect and engage with people based on keyword, location, and niche. And then there’s macro social search… essentially, how it’s affecting search engines like Google. In this article I will give you three areas of mirco social searching to focus on, how best ot use them, and give an overview of where I think social search optimization is going.

Micro Searching

Micro searching is a great way of connecting and reaching out across social media to increase your audience. These searches include different twists on the classic search and each of which will be explained individually.

Geo- Targeting: Being able to locate people and updates which have been sent within an “X mile radius” really does mean you can restrict your searches to only the most relevant distances and topics for you. Fantastic if you are holding an event in a town and want to get locals involved or if you have a product that you need local people to buy or use. MarketMeSuite is social media dashboard which lets you have all of your social network accounts in one place. And, most importantly, lets you target your tweet searches to location and using specific words using a feature called “Reply Campaigns”. You can target within 1000 miles of a specific location. All you have to do is type in either the city, county, zip code, postal code to get location of your choice. The keyword selection also means you can target the words that you feel will be most used in your niche topic. Read more…

The top web browser at this moment, otherwise known as the browser with the most market share online, is easily found using some really handy and freely available tools which I have listed starting a few lines below. That said, why bother?

What is the use of knowing what browsers are the most popular?

Browser compatibility is usually the reason. You see every website created by a developer worth his/her salt will be cross browser compatible at the time it is launched; meaning it will look great on all of the top browsers at that time. The key point here is “it will look great at that time“; as a site gets older Internet technology does not stay the same and browsers are often upgraded which can leave once decent web sites looking lackluster or possibly broken when viewed in the latest browsers. In addition to enhancements in browsers causing problems, you could also be faced with an entirely new browser in the marketplace gaining massive traction (i.e. Google’s Chrome browser) which happens to render your website in ways you never intended.

TIP: If you are creating a business plan and trying to find out what web browser your  target market will be using then try viewing the browser data on Quantcast.com for a few websites which closely resemble your anticipated website; you may find other information in the reports helpful as well! Quantcast offers this information free but often times the data is estimated and not the most reliable – in those cases either keep looking for a site that is “Quantified” (logo on footer of page) at which point the data will be highly accurate or settle with the data you have.  There are other ways to get this data but I will leave that for another article; contact me if you wish for more details.

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Learn how to create a list of links that are benefiting your competitors so you can obtain them as well. This competitor analysis tutorial focuses on the incoming links portion of offsite SEO competitor analysis. Taught by search engine optimization (SEO) industry veteran Ross Dunn (of WebmasterRadio.FM’s SEO 101 Radio Show) this tutorial will provide you with the tools and tactics you need to improve your competitiveness in search engine rankings.

Elements of this analysis include: how to find your competitors backlinks, how to determine why your competitor is succeeding online (from an offsite perspective), how to check if your competitor is spamming Google, how to beat whois privacy protection (legally), how to conduct a link popularity analysis, and much more.
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The Google URL shortener was originally launched back in December as a tool primarily for use by Google itself. Well, today Google announced in their blog that the tool has been launched and made available to everyone!

You do not need a Google account to use goo.gl. That said, if you want to know the analytics and history of your shortened URL, you will need to log into Google account to hang onto that statistical data. Read more…

Tune in to Monday the 16th of August’s episode of SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.FM where I (Ross Dunn) and my co-host John Carcutt interview Jon Henshaw and Taylor Pratt of Raven Internet Marketing Tools (affiliate link – this article is, however, a legit preliminary review).

In short, Raven Tools can help you with the following:

Website analytics, managing link building campaigns and tracking their success, search engine optimization, social media reputation and campaign tracking, keyword research, and… see more farther on as I outlined the list of features.

The August 16th show will delve into some of the unique (and very cool) reporting options and tracking functionality that Raven has integrated over the years. From discussing how Raven IM Tools has uniquely layered link building reports and ranking reports over top of your overall site analytics (powerful combination!) to learning more about their integration of bit.ly, social mention and other popular metrics providers, this show is well worth a listen. That said, here is a little more about the show and my experience with Raven Tools since we recorded the program. Read more…

The last time I posted I revealed that there would be a big surprise revealed by Bing the next day… in fact just hours later when the conference commenced once more. Well, I took eons to get back to you but the deal is this, Bing has rewritten their Webmaster Tools Center from the ground up and will be releasing it this Summer (around then).

There is a lot to report which I promise I will get to soon (including some video from the reveal) but for now, here are some links to assuage your thirst for information: Read more…

I am at SMX Advanced in Seattle and today it came to my attention that Bing will be revealing some big news in just a few hours from now. So, if you are at SMX Advanced, be sure to visit the Bing sponsored presentation after this morning’s (June 9, 2010) Bing keynote (where the main announcement is likely to take place) and then don’t miss the Bing sponsored seminar that follows the keynote (hint). Read more…

If you have a blog or a website with a RSS (real simple syndication) feed and you haven’t heard of the new PuSH protocol then I have a treat for you. A little while back, Google announced a new open source protocol quirkily called PubSubHubbub, or PuSH for short. In Google’s own words PuSH is “a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.”

And now, without further adieu, here it is in English:
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The Internet is a-buzz with the latest offering from Firefox – the best browser available in my opinion – and the upgrades look absolutely tantalizing:

• It is twice as fast as Firefox 3: an impressive feat!
• You can save movies as easily as saving an image,
• It will download fonts from websites if your computer does not have the necessary font – this is very new and very very cool. Why? Because now sites can include their very own custom fonts that can add a lot of pizazz to a site and create a very unique look. Now you will be able to see the site as the designer intended.
• It offers location-aware browsing: an option that will enable the browser to tell websites where you are located so that they can tailor their content for your area. Again this is an OPTION do not fret over your privacy.
• You can surf the net anonymously using private browsing options just like Google Chrome offered when it released.

BUT! Read more…