There are a number of differences between a Facebook group and a Facebook page that many people do not know about, or that are not very obvious to the uninitiated.

If you are thinking of starting a group or a page on Facebook, here are some things that you should know and consider when deciding which to go for to promote your business/cause/hobby etc:

Pages (i.e. ‘Become a Fan’)

In my opinion, the most important distinction here is that a Facebook Page can be crawled & indexed by Search Engines which means that any content on a Page can be found online through Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo!

• Send updates to fans
• Updates are seen in your fans’ news feed
• ability to add various 3rd party applications to your page such as Twitter which can personalise your page further.
• Great for feeding RSS links into page from your blog
• Restrict access to your page by user age and location
• Pages are not seen as an extension of your personal profile – i.e. great for companies. The page admin is not listed anywhere on the page so a fan would not necessarily know who owns the page
• Can create events
• Stats to monitor page activity such as number of fans, post interactions etc
• No limit as to number of fans

Groups (i.e. ‘Join This Group’)

Groups on Facebook are seen as much more personal and are visibly linked to the person who created the page and the admins.

• Can send messages to all group members (up to a maximum of 5000 members)
• Can setup secret by-invite only groups and moderate much easier than Pages
• Can create events and invite all members of the group to the event
• Not indexed by the Search Engines
• Cannot add 3rd party applications or link blogs/Twitter to groups

There are other differences between the Pages and Groups but the above comparison should get your started when deciding whether to have a Page or a Group.

Groups are great for promoting personal hobbies or interests whereas Pages get my vote when you want to promote a business or a raise brand awareness.

What’s the difference between Groups and Pages on Facebook? is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

So you’ve got a website or a blog…great. You are already one step ahead of millions of others who don’t even get to that stage (i’m not even kidding).

The biggest misconception out there is that by simply putting up a new blog or website that you will suddenly get bucket loads of traffic and visits quickly. I won’t beat around the bush on this point – that’s not how it works.

Having a blog is a great way to improve your online presence for both business and also personal reasons. You can build a blog for free using tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and begin posting content right away. However, if nobody is reading that content that you spent ages creating, then what’s the point of it all?

I hear people saying things like “blogging doesn’t work” all the time. It turns out that they tried blogging for a few weeks, published a few random blog posts and then expected the traffic to pile in. No wonder blogging didn’t work for them! My advice, which is hardly rocket science, is that you must treat your blog/website almost as a business in itself: you need to put the time and effort in and treat it seriously to make a success of it.

Here are ten things you need to be aware of when blogging for business or personal reaons:

1.    Fresh Content

Have you ever been to a website that said ‘last updated 1997′ or ‘last updated 254 days ago’? What impression does that give the reader? Nobody wants to visit a blog to see the same content all the time. Update your website and blog content at an asbolute minimum of twice a week to keep your content very fresh and current. Your content can be things like industry news, tips, advice, warnings, an update on your work/projects, feedback received from clients..etc.
It’s perfectly fine to write content and upload it to your website/blog and set it up to publish every few days. This way, you do all the hard work at the beginning and put your updates on auto-pilot whilst you research more ways of improving your blog.

2.    Article Marketing*

This is where you write articles not only for your blog content but also to distribute to article submission websites. You can usually put a link back to your website or blog within your article (usually in the author’s bio box). Article marketing is a great way of putting yourself “out there” as the authority and go-to person for your expertise area.

There are thousands of article submission websites that you can use to distribute your articles, but to start with i’d recommend Ezinearticles.com

*The same applies for Video Marketing

3.    Social Networking

The buzz word for the past few years. Incase you’ve been living under a rock recently this includes Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. Social networks are great to find like minded people who you know would be interested in your content. It’s very easy to target the demographic of your ideal blog reader using different social networks and by connecting with those people and sharing your thoughts you can easily gather quite a following.

It’s also very easy to link your blog to all your social networking profiles, so that when you update your blog all the other profiles get updated too.

4.    Viral Marketing

Ever seen one of those videos that everyone is talking about? Viral marketing is when your content (article/video/audio etc) is passed on from one person to their friends & contacts to see. Then those people will tell their friends about it, and so on. Before you know it, hundreds or thousands (sometimes millions!) of people have seen your content.

A good way of making your content viral is by discussing topical issues or adding some controversy into your message – it’s sneaky, but so what!

5.    Use RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The visitors and readers of your blog can ‘subscribe’ to your RSS feed and get an email update whenever new content is posted on your blog. It is an easy way for your readers to keep up with your blog without having to actually go to your blog. RSS feeds can also be used to update other sites and social networks.

6.    Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

By manually submitting your blog to search engines helps your website/blog to be indexed and get ranked. Google and Yahoo! are the most popular search engines you want to ‘crawl’ your blog pages. Manually submitted your URL does not guarantee top ranking or indexing…there’s much more you can do to get your blog indexed quickly.

7.    Joining Forums

Relevant forums are full of your target readers. You are marketing yourself to find traffic to your website because people are interested in what you have to say. Become a member of a relevant forum for your industry connect with new people and share ideas. You can add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can click on it and read & subscribe to your blog.

8.    Visit other blogs

If someone comments on any of your blogposts, show your appreciation by also posting comments on their blogs. This helps form relationships with other bloggers. Also, you can add a link back to your own blog when commenting on someone elses!

9.    SEO Marketing

SEO is an entire industry in itself but a quick word on it here. Do ensure you use your relevant keywords in your content to attract the search engines. Getting a keyword density (ratio of keyword text to all text) between three and ten percent is recommended by most schools of thought (although this can totally depend based on what your competitors are doing on their sites). Don’t forget to do your keyword research first though – it’s pointless doing SEO for a keyword that nobody is searching for!

10.    Social Bookmarking

Not to be confused with social networking. Social bookmarking is when you submit your posts to sites which allows others who are members of those sites to track you back to your blog. For example, sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are social bookmarking sites.

10 Quick Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Blog is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

My very good friend Lee Rickler of Point and Stare who specialises in web development, in particular WordPress development wrote the “A-to-Z of Web Development” which really demonstrates his expertise of all things web dev. Everything listed is a technique and/or tool that Lee and his web development company employ when working for their clients.

Some of Lee’s clients include Apple, Microsoft, Canon & Nokia – i’m not just name-dropping but that tells you how good this guy is at what he does. Lee has kindly allowed me to re-publish his article here for the Internet Marketing Highway readers and will be providing more articles for us as a guest author.

Point and Stare specialise in WordPress development in London and I highly recommend visiting their website to have a look at the rest of Lee’s work.

A – Accessibility
This needs to be built in from the off, giving functionality and benefit to as wide an audience as possible.

B – Brand guidelines
Adherence to these promotes good front-end structure and balance throughout.

C – CSS
A Cascading Style Sheet is used to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

D – Doctype
A declaration at the start of an XML document that identifies the root element and DTD of a document. Essentially this tells the browser how to render the page content.

E – Elastic interface
An elastic interface scales with browser text size (default is usually 16px) by using em values for all elements.

F – Formats
Ensure all files are produced and named correctly. Best practice is to use all lower case and no spaces.

G – GIF
Extensively used format best used for displaying images primarily comprised of solid areas of colour.

H – HTML
HTML elements are the basic components for HTML markup. Validating HTML is produced by Point and Stare on all projects.

I – Internet Explorer
The browser from Microsoft. The devil. The one that gives most development companies the shivers. On every project we test across all major browsers and OS.

J – JavaScript
JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages on the web and can be used, as an element of AJAX, to add motion, dynamics and depth to a website.

K – Keywords
Keywords are essential within the main content to define the message as well as meta information used by some search engines.

L – Layout
Proportional, liquid and hybrid layout are also referred to as dynamic design. Many units of measure exist with the most popular being pixel, em and percentage.

M – Metadata
Metadata is included in the page header allowing for the inclusion of elements such as simple descriptive text, dates or keywords.

N – Naming conventions
Name files with relevance and consistency. latest_news_button.gif is more screen reader and SEO friendly than Untitled 24.gif

O – Open source
We strongly believe in both producing and using open source code allowing others to share our knowledge and saving clients time and money.

P – Pixels v Points
A Pixel is a single dot on the computer screen offering significant design control whereas a Point corresponded to a physical size of printed text on paper.

Q – Query String
A query string is the part of a URL that contains data to be passed to the web applications. Where possible we use URL encoding to turn these strings into English.

R – RSS
An RSS feed can benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically and also benefit readers who want to subscribe to up-to-the-minute information.

S – Socialising
Using social tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc are paramount to achieving maximum reach for your information or content.

T – Tips and Tricks
Learning new tips and tricks helps keep our minds active and your projects fresh. Learn something new everyday.

U – Usability
The elegance and clarity with which users interact with a website. For obvious reasons, high on our list of priorities.

V – Validation
All Point and Stare projects go through stringent tests to ensure W3C validation specification compliance.

W – W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in October, 1994 to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards.

X – XHTML
XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a family of XML markup languages that extend HTML, the language in which web pages are written. The essential difference between XHTML and HTML is that XHTML must be well-formed, while HTML need not be.

Y – Yahoo! Site Explorer
A service provided by Yahoo! which allows viewing of information on websites in Yahoo!’s search index. Yahoo! validation keys are just one standard SEO element included in all projects.

Z – z-index
z-index is a CSS property that sets the stack order of specific elements. This allows elements to be overlaid on top of each other giving a faux 3d effect.

The A-to-Z of Web Development is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

I know that business owners in today’s environment are always looking to self-implement and do things themselves in order to save on costs and fees of getting things done professionally. Whilst I don’t agree with that model of business (I believe you should do what you love/know and get somebody else doing the rest) I like to see people learning more about things like SEO so that they can try to do it themselves.

I’ve written a quick elements guide here which shows basically how a website is structured, from an SEO point of view. It is intended for those who are new to SEO or who are trying to learn more about it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the biggest ‘grey areas’ in online marketing. It is full of jargon, confusion and misinterpretation – a common excuse for SEO consultants to charge a big amount of money to small businesses.

I like making things easy, SEO included. So what I am going to do in this elements guide is to go through some of the core basics of SEO that you, as a non-Internet marketer business owner, can implement into your website. This article is not intended for experienced SEO gurus and experts who always seem to comment on ‘basic SEO’ blogs that the content is too simplified. To them, the clue is in the title my friends. This guide is for people who know nothing about SEO or have been told a whole bunch of jargon about it and want to understand it slightly better to get a general jist of it.

SEO is not a quick fix, however, and using the easy methods below will not suddenly catapult you to the top of Google. Successful SEO is made up of many (hundreds, even) factors and contributors and requires patience. To achieve good results, not all factors and contributors need to be met – doing a few of them very well can be enough.

Ok, so obviously you need some good keywords/keyphrases that you want to be found for in the search engines (different search engines like different things in terms of SEO, but that is another article in itself!).
For the purposes of this article, I will use the old favourite, ‘Blue Widgets’, as our keyphrase.

Website Optimisation (also known as on-page optimisation)

Depending on how your website is made, it will have the following basic options for you to edit (not in any particular order):

1. Meta Keywords
2. Meta Descriptions
3. Page Title
4. ALT Text for images
5. Body Text
6. H1 Headings
7. Bold Text
8. Anchor Text

Within the above, you will want to have a good density of your keywords/keyphrases (“Blue Widgets”). A basic way of looking at the above for our keyphrase would be like this:

Meta Keywords:

Meta keywords are made for search engines only – so that they easily grasp your page’s most important topics. There is a special meta keywords tag, which is supposed to briefly list the topics of your webpage. And it is wise to put your most valuable keywords into it.
A meta keywords tag is not obligatory, and some sites do not make it at all. Still it takes so little time to make that if you are serious about optimizing your page, there is simply no reason why you shouldn’t have a good meta keywords tag.

practical example of a Meta Keyword tag:

Blue, widgets, blue widgets

Meta Description:

This is just a short sentence/paragraph to describe the website/business – must make sense to read in continuous prose! Search engines look at a page’s meta description to find out what your page is about. You also see meta descriptions quite often – if you make a search in Google and look at the results, you will see some text under each link in the results page. Most often, these texts are pages’ meta descriptions. Meta description may not be extremely important for optimization, but still you have to make sure it looks attractive to search engines and to people.

practical example of a Meta Description tag:

Blue widgets supplier based in London can supply all types of blue widgets and can deliver in the UK.

Page Title:

Search engines pay certain attention to titles, and show them in their results pages. this is also the text at the top of your Internet browser’s window

practical example of page title tag:

Blue Widgets – London based Blue Widget Supplier

ALT (Alternative) Text for images:

The image alt text is used to display text when an image cannot be seen, for example in the case someone visits your page with a browser that has image loading turned off to let pages load faster.. Obviously, using alt text makes sense for humans: many users prefer to work with images disabled or some users of the Internet are visually impaired. What is more important for you now, alt image attributes also have value for search engine optimisation.

Search engines don’t see images. They only read normal text. Your keywords may look fantastic and eye-catching on an image – but the only guarantee that Google will see them is the alt text. Therefore making alt text attributes and including your keywords into them is another efficient & good practice SEO technique.

practical example of a Alt text tag:

Blue widgets, blue widgets London

This method used to attract lots of abuse by people ’stuffing’ lots of keywords ‘behind’ the image. Don’t do it!

Body Text:

You want to strike a good balance between keyword density (how many times you mention your keyword) and keyword prominence (how early on the page your keywords appear). You must write your body text (and much of the website, for that matter) with a human visitor in mind and not for the search engines. If the site has good, fresh content and is regularly updated the search engines will come and find you anyway. Your body text needs to make sense to human readers whilst having your keyphrase mentioned within the text.

H1 Headings (and H2, H3…):

In HTML code, headings are marked with h1 to h6 tags. These tags simply define the size of your headings, as they appear to the user. Among these six levels of headings, h1 is the biggest one and h6 the smallest. This is an example of an h1 tag:

Blue Widgets

As we want our headlines, titles and other important things to look prominent, we normally put them into h-tags. And just like people think that the most prominent text or headline on a page is more important than the rest, search engines pay more attention to what is written within h-tags. It is important to them how you use your keywords in headings. The biggest heading, h1, is most important to search engines. So to get a better ranking, use your major keywords correctly in h1 tags.

Bold Text:

When a website is ‘read’ by Google, bold text stands out. Simple as! If you can put your keyphrases in bold through your body text whilst still maintaining the theme of the website, go for it!

Anchor Text:

Anchor text is when a keyword/keyphrase is linked to another webpage. Commonly known as a hyperlink. For example, instead of having a link to Google’s domain (www.google.com) an anchor is the word ‘ Search Engine ‘ which is clickable and takes you to whatever website it is linked to.
A good practice to consider is to find relevant websites to yours that have a good reputation and are legitimate (i.e. not ‘link farms’) and asking the owner of the website to link back to your site, using an anchor link. So instead of them linking to a domain you would ask them to link to that site, but using the words ‘Blue Widgets’.

Remember, each link pointing back to your website is seen as a vote of confidence in your website. You just have to be careful what sort of sites you put your link on.

There is much more to talk about, especially anchor texts and building links pointing back to your website (which is more off-page SEO than on-page) but by looking at the above sections of your website, you will have started some basic SEO.

Remember this – having a website is like a shop. If nobody can find your shop, you won’t do much business through it!

Do It Yourself SEO – a quick guide is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway