Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, flickr… if you haven’t heard of any of those, you’ve been living under a rock. Welcome to 2009.

Social networking is a way to get your name, and your business’ name, out into the world. More than free advertising, if you spend just a few minutes a day networking, it gives potential customers a look at who you are. Like the “good old days” when the butcher would gab at his customers about their families and town business, but with a wider audience. People like to know who they are buying from or getting services from, but in the days of Made in China and Wal-Mart, it’s not a common occurrence to know anything real about the company or people who run it. Social networking websites let you give a real face to your business, and customers will respond.

It’s best if you have a website where you can link your networking profiles to and from, but even if you don’t, they will help bring people, and sales, in.

Where to start?
First, a valid email address. You’ll have activation emails to attend to, and potential customers who may contact you, so use an email when networking that you check often (and can rely on to deliver your email, I’m seeing many people with crappy ISP emails that never see any mail in their inbox).

Start with just a couple websites. Everyone is on Facebook. Chances are, when you sign up, you’ll be shown a list of people in your email contact list who are already there. You can also search for people by name or email address. Twitter about happenings with yourself and your business. Just made a batch of product, updated your blog, opened your store, are running a sale? Tell people about it! Once you’re comfortable with those, add on LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Make sure all your profiles contain a link to your website and/or blog, and link your website back to your profiles. In previous posts about SEO(1)(2)(3), I mentioned link backs – the links to your site from Facebook, LinkedIn, all of them, count as link backs! It will help your rankings.

If you have a blog, update it regularly so people finding your site have current news to look at – it makes your site, and your business, look more “cared for”.

A word of caution, stay professional unless you know the people you’re talking with online. The potential to get a bad name online is high and one bad review can come up high in search results for your business.

Basic website information
Photos and other images should be high quality, high resolution. Images can be resized to 72 dpi but otherwise left full size and I will modify them as needed for the pages they go on. Images need to be marked/labeled so I know what page they go on. Renaming the image file “homepage1.jpg” for example, or providing a list (image1.jpg goes on main page, etc) is a big time saver. Text can be written into the email itself, or in a Word or pdf file.

• Home page text and images
• About us page text and images
• Content page text
  • Address, phone numbers, alternate emails, do you want a map to your location? What form fields do you want in your contact form? Common ones include Name, Email, Phone, and a Comments/Questions section, but you can request any other information you want.
• Other page text and images
• Hosting information – account/ftp information

eCommerce site information

• I typically add your initial products to your website, so unless you prefer to do it youself after it goes live, I need product photos, description, options (like if it comes in different sizes, colors, etc), price, and weight if you ship by weight. Product photos can be resized to 72dpi.
• I need to do the initial set up of Mals-e to hook it up with my system
  • I will need your PayPal, merchant account or other payment processor information. Depending on how you accept payments, this will differ.
  • I will also set up the shipping and tax information, so I need to know your shipping rates and how much sales tax to charge, and to who (if applicable).

Search engine optimization
I will need your title, description and keyword information. I can help you with this, but read on to learn more about them…

First, how do you want to be found through search engines? “Florida candles”, “homemade soda”, “Nevada seamstress”, etc.

Now consider search engine results. When you type in a search, the results are given like this, which are hidden meta tags in your website’s code:

Your title is very important. It has to be relevant to what your business/website is about. If you cater to a specific group, like brides, and sell a specific product, like custom shoes, and have a retail store in a specific area, you’ll want your website title to look something like: Custom bridal shoes :: Serving brides in the City, State area.

The description is more helpful for the user doing the search, but the search engines do look at it for relevant information. If you leave your description meta tag out, the first text on your website will be displayed and it might not reflect your site as good as it could to the user.

Last for meta tags (but not least for SEO), is keywords. A list of words or short phrases, relevent to your website. For the bridal shoe example above, a list like: bride, bridal, wedding, pumps, high heels, flats, city, surrounding cities, state, retail store street, etc.

All of that though is second place to your website content and link backs. Search engines look into your code and place your site in the results based on the amount of high quality content and coding, and how many good standing websites are linking to yours. My job is to make sure your website’s code is up to standards, and your website’s content is the best it can be, but you will need to list, or have listed, your site by other websites. D

DO NOT let services that promise “top google placement” touch your website or place links. Bad linking and bad coding (using link farms or hidden text/links, among other tricks) can and does cause your website to become banned from Google and other search engines. It takes time to get good results. 2-8 weeks just to show up on Google and months to get placed higher in the results. It is worth it to be patient!

Getting your website seen in the manner you want it to takes a little more work then just putting it on the web. The very first, biggest, rule is to write good, and relevant content. The more information you can put on each page, the better. But it has to be good content. Wording that tells what you do, how you do, why you do it. But it’s a delicate balance to being wordy without annoying visitors with a lot of text to go through.

Starting with the Site Settings in the admin panel is where your part of the SEO for your website comes from. I’ve already done my part – starting with making a search engine friendly design with valid coding – now it’s yours – making your page’s content climb your website up the search engine’s ladders.

Here you’ll enter your default Title, Description, and Keywords. What is the title? This is often your business name or other 2-4 word descriptive text that shows up on the first line in search engine results. The description meta tag is for the descriptive text underneath your name/title in some search engines. Also keep this short and to the point. Enter 10-15 meaningful keywords (gasoline would have no use on a bakery website).

For each website page, you need to repeat the process. The more important the page, the more important it is to use quality meaningful descriptions in your meta tags. Each page should have much text content as is reasonable to use. (2.62 and above does not have a character limit)

And the same for each category and product, except the product description is enough (again 2.62 and above doesn’t have character limits)

In the very least, fill out the meta fields in Site Settings. The descriptions listed there will apply to any page that does not have it’s own filled out.

Just go to the Analytics page and either sign in with your Google account, or create a new account. Make sure to check your email to verify if you create a new account.

On the Getting Started page, click the Sign Up button. On the next page, enter your website’s URL, what account name you want to use and other information requested, click Continue, then fill out your name, etc, click Continue again. Accept the User Agreement and click Create New Account.

The final page has the code to add to each page you want tracked (don’t add it to just the index page!). If I or another designer has created your website for you, just copy and paste the code into an email and your designer can add the code for you.