Using offline media is an important way to attract visitors to your site – placing your URL on business cards, leaflets, menus, receipts, invoices and other collateral is a proven and effective way to create direct traffic. But with the growth of smartphone usage, 2D barcodes provide a more immediate way to copy the details of a business directly to their phone. So how does it work?

Creating a 2D Barcode

A 2D barcode differs from a traditional UPC barcode in that it contains substantially more data, and has a recognizable square shape with three calibration markers in the corners. You can create these easily using ZXing’s QR Code Generator, which produces codes for several different types of content:

• Contact information: your name, contact details, website and description.
• Email address/phone number/URL/text: a smaller 2D code containing only a specific piece of information.
• Geolocation: this is similar to an address but more specific. You only need the latitude and longitude of a destination to use the barcode to show a point on a map.
• SMS: takes the phone number and 160-character message, and translates into a barcode ready for sending.
• WiFi network: encodes the SSID, password and security type.

Select the code type you want to use, enter the details and click ‘Generate’ – at this point you have created a usable 2D bar code.

What can you use these for?

This concept may seem somewhat alien if you haven’t used an iPhone, Android or similar smartphone. The visitor uses a barcode capture application to photograph the barcode, which the phone then interprets to take the next action. Since these barcodes can be printed on anything from point-of-sale receipts to window signs and billboards, there are a wide range of uses. For example:

• Business cards: place your human-readable details on the front and 2D code on the back. This enables other people to immediately transfer all your contact details directly into their phone book, without needing to keep the card.
• Text message campaigns: instead of asking users to text a word to a shortcode number, they can snap the barcode to complete the same task in a fraction of the time.
• Window displays: placing a QR code in your shop window allows passers-by to copy your place of business directly into their map application for future use.
• Billboards: for out-of-home advertising, such as the sides of buses or train stops, the QR can be snapped immediately with the details of your campaign stored in the phone.
• Applications: if you provide smartphone applications, the barcode acts as a shortcut to bring users straight to the download page.
• Coffee shops and airports: rather than giving customers confusing SSID and password information, a customer can connect directly to your network by using the barcode.

There are hundreds of uses, but essentially the power of the QR code is the speed with which your business information can be copied. Not only that, but the QR indicates which application is needed to process the data.

From an SEO point of view, 2D barcodes provides another channel to draw visitors to your URL – which is also presented in a fun and easy way to use. As 2D codes start to appear everywhere, the novelty will eventually wear off, but right now many avid smartphone users find this a simple way to storing information about businesses they want to connect with.

In my next posting, I’ll discuss how you can track where visitors are coming from to discover your URLs.

UPDATE: DC bus-stops are now implementing QR codes – see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/qr_codes_coming_to_bus_stops_in_dc_photo.php.

Because of the value that Search Engine Optimization can have for a website, and the secrecy surrounding search engine algorithms, the process attracts its fair share of fraudsters and scams. Although the exact nature of each scam tends to vary over time, the central message of each one is always the same, promising to attract enormous amounts of web traffic with minimal effort.

Developing web traffic and an online reputation takes a significant commitment of time of effort, and there are no shortcuts for businesses that want to appear on the hallowed first page of Google, nor are there are any “secrets” to creating organic traffic to your site. Just because a video goes viral or occasionally a new website about cat pictures or Britney Spears becomes a hit, this doesn’t impact the day-to-day process of crafting your own site and nurturing your audience – though congratulations if you do reach page one of Digg.

Anyway, although I’ve said this repeatedly on this site and in the book, marketing on the Internet is still the Wild West, and if you hear anybody promising to make you number one in Google overnight, or bringing large amounts of traffic for $20, you should immediately be suspicious and ask yourself:

• If it’s so easy to appear number one, why doesn’t everyone do it? And then who could appear number one?
• If I can get thousands of visits for some nominal amount, why do major brands still invest in paid search?
• Does the methodology reflect how I use the Internet? For example, as an Internet user, I know how to recognize spam in email and Twitter, so is this a valid way to attract quality traffic? (No.)

The Google News Scam

In the latest iteration of the “get traffic quick” scam, certain companies promise to make your webpage appear on page one of Google for any search phrase within minutes. There are several attractive points here worth repeating:

• Page one: the Holy Grail of Google, page one is where high-quality, authoritative content aspires to live. It’s the 90210 zip code for content, and the definition of success for search engine optimizers.
• Any search phrase: keyword selection is qualitative and quantitative, time-consuming to develop and basically difficult – skipping this primary SEO step would make everyone happier.
• Within minutes: search engine optimization is slow and arduous, and the frequency with which Google revisits and reevaluates your site is non-deterministic. If they would simply index your pages on your schedule, that would be great.

In the subsequent presentation, you will be shown how certain highly-competitive phrases like “homeowner modification” or “mortgage refinancing” have been gamed to prove the point. The presenter creates a blog post with these phrases in the headline, and then several minutes later their content is shown on page one of Google search results. Even though the presentation is not live, how is this possible?

It’s pretty simple – having a site indexed in Google News means that Google will pick up new content much more quickly than in their regular index. But there are several important differences between Google News and the regular Google index:

• Google News must approve sites they index. The vast majority of sites would not be eligible, since they do not have multiple authors or produce the amount of content needed to qualify for a listing.
• Google News results only appear in two places: (1) on common, news-related broad-search phrases in a ‘News’ subsection of the regular results and (2) on http://news.google.com itself. This means that phrases such as “fixing my headphones” will not show news results in search.
• Google News results age very, very quickly. Unlike regular search, where a webpage may rank number one for months, time decay is a much greater factor in news. This makes sense, of course, since news by definition is, well, new. But it means a page one news ranking is achieved quickly – and lost equally as fast – so there is a little long-term SEO benefit to this approach.

Add to this that Google is aware of how certain websites have masqueraded as news sites to get indexed, and these are slowly being weeded out. So it looks like we’re back to the drawing board on gaming Google’s algorithm! If you stumble across any other Google scams that sound too good to be true, contact me at james (at) ranking-number1.com and I’ll be happy to take a look. In the meantime, keep building great content and developing your inbound links.

Facebook is rapidly becoming an essential part of many businesses’ online strategy, and employing an effective optimization plan is an important step in ensuring your content reaches the largest targeted audience possible. Facebook is making a serious attempt to compete with the primary search engines in becoming the visitors’ place of choice for finding the content they need.

Tradition search engine optimization consists of on-page and off-page tactics, together with a significant amount of keyword targeting and link-building. But unlike traditional SEO, Facebook optimization adds a more complex layer of social interaction that has a fundamentally bigger effect on the popularity of your page and its contents.

Facebook has 500 million active users, with 50% logging in every day, and each user has an average of 130 friends. The impact of this is staggering, not just in the depth of the social graph created, and the number of new high quality targeted visitors you can reach, but also how many existing customers and employees are already extremely active on their platform. And since search will emerge anywhere there’s a significant amount of data, Facebook is a critical new channel for anyone who takes their online presence seriously.

Here are some important steps in Facebook optimization that you should consider before starting your Facebook page.

Selecting your page name

Whereas titles in web pages have latitude to contain keywords to attract engines, the same approach in Facebook can appear spammy, causing visitors to have less trust in its content, and become less likely to ‘like’ the page. Facebook has also removed pages that are too broad or generic, so your title should represent your business name and area of expertise rather than focusing on keywords or general topics.

Choosing your Facebook URL

Facebook allows sites with a minimum number of ‘likes’ to establish their own URL, which is shown as www.facebook.com/my-chosen-url. Facebook has a long list of generic terms and trademarks that you’re not allowed to use, so it’s best to choose the shortest name that reflects your business or brand without appearing to target broad terms. Also note that once you’ve selected the name, it can never be changed – so choose wisely.

Use ‘About’ and ‘Info’ Effectively

In these areas, you can add keyword-rich descriptions of your page, together with outbound links to your website, and local information about where your business is physically located. These areas are frequently overlooked on business pages, but represent almost all of what you can do from an on-page SEO perspective.

Using FBML

It’s relatively easy to add a static FBML box to your page – which is the Facebook equivalent of HTML, a stripped-down and modified version of the real thing. While there are all sorts of things you can’t do with FBML, it’s easy to render graphics and text as you would in a basic web page, and all of the regular on-page SEO techniques can be used here.

Build your fan base

Although ‘fans’ have been replaced with ‘likes’, the principle is the same though the fan terminology is more logical. Put simply, more popular pages rank better than less popular ones. You can build fans by driving customers to your Facebook page and placing your Facebook widget on any external sites you have.

Employ Facebook ads

Facebook ads are often cheaper and more effective than search engine PPC equivalents, and can help bring demographically-targeted fans to your page. This is singly one of the best ways to develop page growth – and don’t forget that once someone clicks your ad, they’ve effectively added your page to their news stream for a long time (unlike PPC, where the visitor either converts or leaves).

Build your content

Facebook loves pictures, events and discussions – make sure you add media and start conversations with your fans. Facebook, by the way, now hosts more pictures and media than Picasa, FlickR and all the other photo sharing websites combined. The more interaction that occurs between Facebook members and your page, the more popular the page becomes – and in the Facebook world, popularity is everything.

Be Fresh

Content ages quickly in social media and Facebook is no different – make sure you add new status updates and media regularly, since anything over 30 days old disappears from member newsfeeds and becomes irrelevant in page promotion. You must develop a disciplined routine for constantly keeping your page fresh, and giving members a reason to visit and like your content.

Facebook optimization is different to traditional SEO, but still requires careful planning and maintenance to maximize its effect. For more information, take a look at the new edition of The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko.

Most businesses are quite aware of the importance of local awareness in their offline advertising, and wouldn’t advertise their pizza restaurant in Dallas in a local newspaper in Seattle, or a law firm in Boston on a billboard in Los Angeles.

But when it comes their online presence, because there’s no concept of geography for a website, they waste site engine optimization time and pay-per-click dollars in targeting people who are too far away to ever become customers.

There’s a growing localization effect that has two major drivers:

• Search engines are providing higher quality local results than ever before by using the IP address of the requester (see the box at the end of the article to see how much geographic information you provided by visiting this page). Optimization is significantly easier if you focus on location, and you’re likely to receive more targeted traffic.
• Search is happening everywhere: with the prolific growth of smart phones, and the growing tendency of users to search for everything all the time, users are expecting higher quality results that target their needs in their current location.

This has a substantial impact on where you should place your efforts in promoting your business website. Where global SEO used to be mainly a combination of using authoritative inbound links and strong anchor text, local search brings in other factors that have an influence on your rankings.

The good news is that while global search has become highly competitive for placement, there are still major opportunities in local search, since so few business websites take advantage of all the signals that can boost their local results.

Local Search Signals

1. Claim your local listing pages in Google Places, Yahoo! and Bing, and provide comprehensive listings beyond the basic contact details.
2. Advertise your local phone number in preference to a toll-free number (the area code determines your geographic location, whereas a 1-800 number provides no information).
3. Ensure you have a physical location in the city of search, and make sure you include the address using the <address> HTML tag in your page footers. Currently, there is greater weight given to listings that are closer to the center in major cities.
4. Develop listings in local directories (such as Local.com) and encourage citations – these are third-party statements about your business.
5. Encourage customer reviews on websites such as Yelp – the number and quality of these has a major impact on your Google Maps listing placement.
6. Include your location in the meta title and descriptions of your pages (e.g. end with “| Brooklyn, NY”).
7. Start adding geo-tagged photos to services such as Flickr and Picasa – these can be highly effective in boosting local search results.
8. Include location in the anchor text for inbound links.
9. Ensure your domain name’s contact details are located in the same city.

Taking action on these signals is not particularly difficult or time consuming, but can yield considerably more traffic from local searchers.

While it’s contentious, it’s no secret that one major element of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) is “competitive intelligence”, which somewhat euphemistically refers to seeing what competitors are doing and copying it.

I’m not an advocate of the direct copy approach that’s so prevalent in the industry, mainly because I think it’s hard to rank higher than something that’s already established by slavishly copying their strategy. There are also ethical and legal issues to consider, and the fact that many PPC companies have a dim few of tactics such as trademark bidding.

But when it comes to Facebook, not only is the ethical line blurred, but the practice is actively encouraged in the way that ads are set up. Whereas competitors can complain about aggressive or abusive PPC ad campaigns, stealing competitors fans is well within Facebook’s  guidelines.

Shortcuts to Demographic Targeting

The usual way to approach a Facebook ad campaign is to create a broad, untargeted series of ads and then analyze the demographics of who clicks them once the statistics start to build. It’s a simple but effective technique, avoiding any presumptions about the expected demographic for a given business.

But if you have competitors who already have a fan following on Facebook (by the way, fans are called ‘likes’ now), it’s actually significantly easier to create ads that target only users who have ‘liked’ the competitor. You can still overlay geographic information if you so choose, but the competitor has effectively completed the demographic testing for you.

Is it unfair? I would argue that it’s absolutely unfair, but given the rising cost of PPC campaigns and growing popularity of Facebook, I would predict that targeting competitors’ fans directly will soon become the number one strategy in Facebook advertising.