So I was down in Vegas for a 3-day conference, staying at the Hilton Hotel. I am pretty big into fitness, so I woke up early the first morning and headed over to the spa/workout room. Lo and behold, there was a $20 charge to use the facility!? I was incensed, and also pretty out of sorts since I didn’t get to take my rage out on a treadmill that morning. It so happens that the Hilton Hotel Casino’s CEO, Petere Arceo, was speaking at the conference I was attending.

He had a great presentation about social media, twitter, Facebook, etc., that gave me an idea. I tweeted to the world a short message: @PeterArceo, How can I bypass the $20 cover charge in the workout room at the Hilton?’ Peter responded within a 1/2 hour, “DM me your room and name and I will see what I can do.” Wow! What service! I went and used the spa, for free, and got to keep my great figure. I also was super impressed that Peter had that much involvement in his social media strategy.

This should be a great lesson to everyone who reads this. If the CEO of the Hilton hotel has the time to twitter to one little guy about saving some money, then anyone else in the world has the time to twitter with their customers as well! The Moral of The Story: Make sure you monitor what people write about you or your brand (that’s how Peter knew I had twittered about him.) TweetDeck is a great tool to help you speed up this process. Respond to the people who do mention you or your brand, positive or negative.

Quick Update: Just to be clear, Hilton did not pay me to write this, and also, I can’t guarantee anyone who reads this will also get comped for their spa usage, so don’t expect it every time.

How Twitter Helped Me Save Money and Stay In Shape is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Have you received the Census Bureau Questionnaire? If not, you have a treat in store. At least 5 pages of detailed personal information must be completed for at least 6 of the people living in your home, if you have that many. And don’t think you can get away with skipping it or throwing it away. The government will call your home, and if that doesn’t work, they’ll send someone to your house. This is a big deal.

Have you had the Google Spider visit your site yet? If not, you have a treat in store. Google has to gather data from every page of your site, with detailed information on the Title, H1, keywords and links, and don’t think you can skip the Google Spider, or that they won’t find your site. If they even sense that you’ve registered a domain, there’s a strong possibility that the Google Spiders have been to your site.

How Google and the Government are Different

On the Census Questionnaire, you are given the exact fields to fill in and there’s not much room for error. You know your name, your birthday, and how much money you make.

When you build a site, Google Webmaster guidelines have given you the exact fields to fill in: Title, Description, H1, readable text. However, there is room for error in this process. Did you know that you can name your site whatever you want? Based on your keyword research, your most important keywords should be found in the Title, H1, Meta Description and the content of the home page. You can’t fake the age of your site, and this does play into how important Google Spiders think your site is. How much revenue and traffic your site makes is fairly easy to know, but Google Spiders couldn’t care less.

The Moral

Here’s how President Obama describes how the U.S. Government uses our data,

“Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.”

Here’s how Google uses your data: Google’s creation of sites’ titles and descriptions (or “snippets”) is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn’t available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content.

Both the government and Google Spiders consider some things extremely important:

• Your name (Title of your page)
• Your address (Domain name and URL structure)
• Your race, job and family information (H1, Meta Description and page content)
• Your birthday (Domain age)

For more information on search engine optimization and how it can help you business, subscribe to our blog.

How the US Census Bureau and Google Are the Same is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you can guess what the following terms all have in common, I’ll give you $25 via Paypal, no questions asked. Just leave your comment at the end of this post. This is not open to current employees of SEO.com. Here they go:

SEO, Jobs, Careers, Linkbuilding (I’ll tell you the answer in my next blog post, which will be a humdinger)

My post is actually about DMOZ, and the things I wished that they did differently.

First of all, I wish DMOZ was a paid listing site. Why? For the mere fact that if they required payment, then in return, they would be required to at least have a little bit of customer service. I would either get a ‘Yes, your site is accepted’ or a ‘No, your site sucks and sells Viagra’. Right now, you get nothing from these guys in terms of a response.

Secondly, I wish DMOZ wasn’t so hyped up by everyone and their dog. Yes, DMOZ would be the bees knees and the cat’s meow in anyone’s review of free directories. But as a source of authority and link value, there are hundreds of other free sites that provide the same, or more, authority and link value. Also, Google really shouldn’t use your DMOZ listing title as the title of your site in search results pages. That’s just plain wrong.

Thirdly, if DMOZ stays in their ‘free directory’ model, then they should really either accept more editors, or kick their current editors in the face. I mean honestly, I don’t know how many legitimate sites I’ve submitted to DMOZ, only to sit and twiddle my thumbs and 6 months later, still no listing. I don’t know what the review process is for sites to be accepted, but I’ve got to imagine they get tons of submissions every day, and the editors have to really stay on top of those sites. I currently run a few directories that get multiple submissions every day, and it takes about 5 seconds to tell if a site is relevant to the category it was submitted to, and if it’s spammy or not.

Fourthly, I wish DMOZ would come out with the definitive guide to getting listed in their directory. Specific things such as ‘When submitting, record yourself licking your nose while singing the National anthem, and upload to Youtube, then you’re guaranteed to get in (oh, and no Viagra)’. It would probably save the editors time if they just wrote down all the guidelines, and then went through the checklist, and deleted all the sites that didn’t meet the criteria. For you Naysayers claiming, ‘The current guidelines of DMOZ are fine’. Well I disagree. If they’re just fine, then why don’t all my sites get accepted? They all meet the current criteria.

Fifthly, if you’re actually looking for SEO, Jobs, Careers, or Linkbuilding, just click on the respective links I just used.

Lastly, if you would like to join in the effort to help DMOZ become better, you can send me an email at dmoz-could-get-better@seo.com, and I won’t respond to you, or even let you know that you matter at all, because I’m an editor at SEO.com, the greatest site in the world.

Honestly, if this blog post does happen to elicit a response from anyone at DMOZ, then I think the world would be a better place. We’ll see what happens. And I will continue to submit my clients’ sites to DMOZ because hey, why not?

What I Wish DMOZ Was Like is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I know all of you SEO.com fans out there are wondering “what are the most important plugins that I can use on my WordPress blog for SEO”? Well, I’ve decided to unveil our secret stash of the best WordPress plugins for SEO because this is the year of sharing. And also I’d like to see if anyone else can think of any better ones. These are not listed in order of importance, Platinum SEO Pack is the best for overall search engine optimization though, so start there.

Plugin #1: FeedBurner FeedSmith

This probably won’t directly affect your seo on site, but the better reach your blog posts have, the more chance someone has to read it, and link to it if they were inspired by what you say. So you have to write good content first, and then this plugin becomes 100% more effective at building links.

Plugin #2: Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

A must have for every website, XML sitemaps should be generated on the fly and updated whenever you add a new page or write a new post. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Plugin #3: Friend Connect Commenting Plugin

You can now allow visitors to log in with their FriendConnect ID, and leave a comment with that same ID. This means that your visitors can log in with their Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID account, by just clicking a button

Plugin #4: Google Analytics

The interfaces are fancy, and the fine grained stats and AdSense integration make it a particularly powerful tool when you’re seeking to push a product online using AdSense.

Plugin #5: Platinum SEO Pack

If you are already using All In One SEO Pack, this plugin will automatically import all the settings, that you have defined using All in one SEO plugin. You just need to verify the options, through Setting->Platinum SEO page of your wordpress blog. Platinum SEO Pack is also compatible with earlier versions of wordpress, though I recommend you to upgrade to the latest version of wordpress.

Plugin #6: Search Excerpt

It extracts out the search keywords, scans the content of matched post entries, and displays document snippets around the keyword, with that specific keyword highlighted. It adds a filter in get_the_excerpt() function so no modification needs to be done to WordPress’ 1.5/2.x theme. For other themes, make sure during “the loop” in search.php, it calls the_excerpt() to display the post entries.

Plugin #7: SRG Clean Archives

This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s search engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.

Plugin Features: It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month (enabled by default), the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article (permalink to article) and the number of comments (enabled by default) that have been made on each article.

Plugin #8: WordPress Database Backup

WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Top 8 WordPress Plugins Used by SEO.com is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

My SEO skills would be the song, “Eye of The Tiger.” It’s by Survivor, and the main chorus says: ‘rising up straight to the top, had the guts got the glory, went the distance, now I’m not gonna stop, just a man and his will to survive. It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the cream of the fight, risin’ up to the challenge of our rivals, and the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night, and he’s watching us all with the eyeeeeeeee… of the tiger.’

Not only does it have very inspiring melody and rhythm (which are appealing qualities of any song, in my book) but the lyrics almost 100% accurately describe my whole day. So, I’m going to take each refrain and relate it to a part of my SEO skills.

‘Rising up straight to the top’ refers to my efforts to get all of my client’s keywords to the top of the search engines.

‘Had the guts got the glory, went the distance now I’m not gonna stop’ refers to the fact that I have to be constantly working on improving my own seo skills while implementing tried and true methods of link building, blogging, social media, and on-page SEO.

‘Just a man and his will to survive’ refers to the fact that at the end of the day, I’m only one person who has either used his skills or hasn’t. Now just as a caveat, any fighting, learning, and improving on my part really boils down to understanding how to make a site relevant for a particular search term, and then improving site conversions by making the site useful for visitors.

And then the main chorus: ‘It’s the eye of the tiger (referring to Google and their constant algorithm changing and monitoring of their index), ‘rising up to the challenge of our rivals’ refers to the fact that there are always other SEOs out there working on getting their sites to the top of the search engines for any one of my keywords. ‘The last known survivor stalks his prey in the night, and he’s watching us all with the eyeeeeee of the tiger’ (Matt Cutts).

If Your SEO Skills Were a Song, What Would The Song Be? is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The question I would like to answer today is: ‘How valuable is it to build links to your sites deep pages?’

The whole issue could be summed up with 1 one sentence: It is VERY valuable to build links to deep pages on your site. Let’s explore why.

Think of your site as a large dam with many tributaries feeding water into it constantly. The tributaries represent all the links pointing to your home page, whether from internal or external links. Your home page is the dam. It is the largest and most popular place for people to link to your site, and therefore usually holds the most weight in the search engines. For the purposes of this analogy, let’s say that when the dam releases some water each month, that water then filters out into the surrounding country, eventually making its way back into the tributaries that feed the dam itself (internal links). It’s a big circle. That is how page rank gets distributed on your site. Your home page has a lot of ‘link juice’ pointing at it. That link juice eventually finds it’s way to some of the inner pages on your site, but probably won’t get to all the pages on your site unless you’ve only got just a few pages one level from the home page.

So again, why is it valuable to build links to your inner pages (a part of the system of tributaries pointing to the dam) if the home page (dam) of your site will always be the biggest source of traffic and links? Because with larger tributaries feeding it, the dam (your home page) will grow at a faster rate, which will then release more water (page rank/organic ranking) to the surrounding country on a faster schedule, which will, in turn, feed more water into all the tributaries of the dam, not just the one tributary being built up at the time.

If all that is too confusing, here’s a real world example:

I have 10 deep pages on my site each targeting a specific keyword. I build 10 links to each of those pages. Since these pages are created in my site template, they all include links back to the home page of my site. So I just got 10 links to my home page, from inner pages on my site that are each getting links themselves. So the inner pages benefit from the links I’m building externally, and if I link to them from the home page as well, they get the added benefit of the strength of my home page too. This creates one big circle of links to deep pages, which link to the home page, and the home page, in turn, links to these deep pages.

One thing to note is that most of the time, you don’t get a choice of getting a deep link vs. a home page link and most sites will only link to your home page anyway. So if you have to choose between building links to your home page, or to your inner/deep pages, link to your deep pages. For tips on how to get more links to your deep pages naturally, read my post about link bait.

The Value of Deep Linking is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Based off of my last blog post, this is an extension and expansion of the amazingly under appreciated and little-known world of the ‘mommy blogger’. Having literally stumbled upon a group of women who have blog followers in the millions, I was astounded to find that they are not at all the stereotypical mommies that I had previously assumed. My preconceived notion was essentially thus: a mommy blogger is a mommy blogger is a mommy blogger (translated roughly: all moms who write blogs are only good for reviewing my latest baby/kid product, and do it happily because they have all the time in the world).

How wrong I was! Not only is there a world of difference between the terms ‘mommy blogger’ and ‘mom who blogs’ the cultures of these two groups of women can only be explained with the use of a video:

Whether you were able to finish the video or not, the main message is R-E-S-P-E-C-T. You show respect to any blogger and you will live a long and prosperous life online. The peculiar thing about showing respect to the mom is that it is so easy (and so worth it) to make the right approach on first contact. And I’m going to show you just what to do, to win them over the first time.

Step 1: Research their blog posts, their bio, their followers, their Twitter feed, their StumbleUpon activity, and any other social networking efforts they are part of. This will give really good direction on whether a particular mom blogger will even be relevant to your product. Do this before you even think of getting in touch with them.

Step 2: Choose your target mom blogger. Basically, there are three groups of mom bloggers. Group 1 includes the moms who’ve got a blog hosted on Blogger or WordPress, post pictures of their kids and family, and update their blog every month or so. They probably don’t have a lot of followers, and probably aren’t too picky about what they post about, but also don’t have much time to spend writing blog posts. Group 2 may host their own domain, but also could be hosted on Blogger or WordPress. The main difference is the frequency and content of posts. If these women post a lot about different products they’ve used, and are posting more than twice a week, these women will have a pretty decent list of followers, and you will have to either pay them cash to review your product, or give them an equivalent value of product for them to review. Usually they’ll mention somewhere what their rates are for reviews. If they don’t, ask them right out of the gate, before you even pitch your product. This lets them know you mean business and will compensate them for spending time writing about your kid proof diaper pail. Group 3 are the serious moms who consider themselves (and rightly so) bloggers/techies first and foremost. Their blogs probably bring them enough revenue per year to allow them to be selective about whose product they review, and how much time they want to spend being courted by Huggies, Walmart, Kraft, etc. If you don’t have a killer product, enough compensation, and the proper connections with other mom bloggers, don’t contact these women. They are super busy, and they might even tweet about how dumb you were when you pitched them on your baby proof diaper pail by sending them one in the mail.

Step 3: The approach. After you’ve chosen your mom blog audience, and know what they like to blog about, either email or tweet them and start a conversation. There are a couple really good mom blogs I’d like to mention to get you started on the right path. They haven’t paid me to mention them, but I’ve worked with them on some projects, and they’ve made invaluable suggestions for this blog post and some of my social media campaigns, so that’s why I’m mentioning them here. Barb from Chaotic Communications has a ton of great tips and is very well networked. She is really good at getting back to you quickly and with honest feedback. Lucretia from GeekMommy is especially good at insightful comments about using social media and online media campaigns of any sort.

Step 4: After you’ve made contact with the mom blogger, give her as much support as you can to help her write about your product. She will be extremely busy, but a quick product description and some talking points will go a long way in getting you ahead of the list of people also wanting their product reviewed.

Step 5: Now that you’ve had success in working with mom bloggers, don’t forget about them. Continue to reach out to them with a newsletter or occasional tweet, and this will raise your stock in the whole mom blogger community, making your next project even more successful.

What Aretha Franklin Teaches About Mommy Bloggers: Part 1 is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This post is about how to leverage social media to get tons of links and buzz about your product or service. As an example of one of the best ways to do this, let’s talk about Mac & Cheese, you know, from Kraft. I recently saw a contest where Kraft was giving away a years supply of Mac & Cheese, and they were promoting this contest through a couple of different blogs. One blog in particular, used one of the best tactics I’ve ever seen to spread the word about the contest. What was the tactic, you ask? The blogger made the requirements for entering the contest one big link building request. The owner of the blog laid down the following rules (this is a direct quote from her blog):

Follow me on Twitter! @Toni_GPB (1 entry per submission)
Tweet about this giveaway! (1 entry per submission)
Follow my blog with Google Friend Connect. (1 entry per submission)
Add this Giveaway to a CURRENT WEEKS Mr. Linky, Blog Carnival, Sweepstakes site, forum, your giveaway list etc. (Leave the link) (1 entry per submission)
Blog about this giveaway (1 entry per submission)
Subscribe to my RSS Feed via EMAIL (1 entry)
Fave me on Technorati (Must leave your Technorati ID) (2 entries)
Stumble this post. (You must leave your Stumble ID) (1 entry)
Fave my site on Mom Faves (You must leave your registration ID) (2 entries)
Vote for me as the Best Shopping Blog (You must leave your registration ID) (2 entries)

I checked the blog today, and it has almost 500 entries (comments) since May 18, 2009, the date the contest began. Although Yahoo site Explorer is only showing 11 links to this individual page, there are probably a lot more that haven’t been indexed yet, as the post is less than a month old. What good does this do for Kraft? There is a principle that applies here: the more your brand is talked about in a special way online (buzz) the better your sales will be, and the more links you can get to your ‘money’ page.

The BlendTec “Will It Blend” videos are a prime example of this principle. BlendTec got people talking about their brand because they used their blender to blend up anything they could lay their hands on (like ipods, skis, glowsticks), and put the videos on YouTube. The videos demonstrated the quality of the product, provided entertainment value, and inspired others to copy the videos. The videos “went viral” and resulted in a 500 percent increase in revenue for their consumer model of blender.

The same goes for Kraft’s contest. The more people who enter the contest, the more the word spreads (because to enter, you have to share the contest with your friends on social sites). Eventually it takes on a life of its own, and you get people like me (who happened to enter the contest as well) blogging about it naturally because, hey; it’s a pretty cool giveaway, and I like Kraft Mac & Cheese, especially since I have kids.

So, the moral of the story: start with something of value (whether it has shock value, entertainment value, or intrinsic value, like free food food or electronics). Incentivize the right people into talking about it on social sites, and the rest will fall into place. The real trick is finding the right group of people who can help you spread the word. You’re not going to get a group of mommy bloggers to buzz about the latest trend in ringtones. You won’t see many techy bloggers writing about the cool new baby clothes that just came out from Baby Gap. If you know your audience and what they want to talk about, by giving them the idea, and letting them run with it, you’ll see an explosion in links, buzz, and sales.

How To Give Away Stuff And Make Money Doing It is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I get asked the question “What type of traffic converts the best” often enough that I thought I would write about my response, and answer the question once and for all. Over the years, there have been multiple studies on traffic and conversions. Some have been comparing ppc vs. organic, some have been comparing social media, press releases, ppc, direct and organic traffic. The one thing these tests and research studies have in common is that they are usually only performed on one site, or in one industry. This tends to skew data in favor of a particular source of traffic. There has only been one broad study done across 27 different sites over 2 years, on the conversion rate of direct traffic sources to your site. The study found that direct traffic for these sites had the highest conversion rates over all other traffic sources.

Direct traffic can be simply defined as visits from people who type in your URL directly, or have your site bookmarked. This type of traffic converts very well most of the time, although direct traffic typically originates from other online marketing efforts like your ppc, seo, email, or offline marketing efforts.

From my own tests I have noticed some conversion trends amongst my clients sites: For a client in the travel industry, organic traffic over the course of 1 year (from Google, Yahoo and MSN) converted at an average of 19.23%. Google Adwords PPC traffic converted at around 8%. Social and press release traffic didn’t convert at all. Traffic from referring sites converted at about 22.55%. Direct traffic converted at 13.59%. So what conclusions can I draw from this data? None really. There are too many variables to definitively claim, “For all sites, organic traffic will convert this percent higher than this type of traffic, and direct traffic will always be 10% more than that”.

For a client in the software industry, while running PPC ads at the same time as having strong organic rankings on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN, the Google Adwords ads converted at almost the exact rate as Google organic. Direct traffic converted lower than both of the previous sources. Organic traffic from MSN and Live converted at almost double the rate of Adwords and Google organic. Conclusions? Sadly, again this is dependent on the industry, the type of visitor, and economic factors.

I hope I’ve made you more aware of the fact that depending on your industry and demographic of site visitors, different types of traffic will convert at a higher or lower rate. There is no one definitive source of traffic from which you can always expect higher conversions (although direct traffic seems to be the winner for a lot of sites). However, there are some things you can do to increase the conversion rates of all your traffic sources.

You’ll notice that direct traffic tends to have the highest conversion rate. But how do people learn about your site in the first place so they know what your URL is? They must research your industry, company, or product online or through a friend. So the better you show up for terms that are relevant to your audience, whether in ppc or organic listings, the more likely your site visitors will be to return to your site if they didn’t happen to convert through one of your online marketing efforts. Also note that when you are tracking conversions and traffic, keep in mind the fact that there are phases in how people search for things to buy, or services to use. It’s called the Web Conversion Cycle. Essentially, people search, shop, then buy. During each phase of searching, people will use different keywords based on what phase of the Web Conversion Cycle they are in. And here is a great little tool to help you determine what phase of the Web Conversion Cycle people are in when they perform a search.

Now that you know that all types of traffic convert at different rates based on many variables (such as industry and demographics) it should come as no surprise that all your online marketing efforts have a direct impact on your conversion rates. You should now also understand the value of testing your site structure and wording constantly to help improve conversions for each type of site visitor.

What Type Of Online Traffic Converts the Best? is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with a friend who was very confused as to how he could get any meaningful profit from using Facebook.

Let’s first talk about what Facebook is, and what it isn’t. Facebook is an easy way to stay connected with friends, family, business associates, and even famous people or companies that you consider important. There is literally something for everyone on Facebook.

Facebook is not a way to advertise to a certain demographic of users and convince them to buy what you’ve got. Sorry, all you Facebook advertisers, but not many people are going to buy a car or sign up for a credit card offer through any type of advertising on Facebook. People aren’t there to buy. They are there to get away from life’s little stresses and connect with friends.

So after having said all that, how can it be possible to make money from Facebook? (unless you’re a widget developer and have a wide user base, this next part is for you)

Remember how I talked about the fact that people on Facebook want to connect with other people (what we will call networking) and relax a little bit? Well we are going to use that to our advantage. There is no secret widget or App that you’re going to install. All this will take is your time. And if you can’t spend the time, pay someone else to do what I’m about to tell you. Ready? Here we go.

Step 1. Add all the people you know and have ever met as your friend on Facebook.

Step 2. Update your profile with real photos of yourself (nothing from your last drinking party or late night criminal activity).

Step 3. Search for at least 10 groups to join that are relevant to your business (I don’t care how niche your business is, there is at least 1 group for it) If you have to choose between groups, go after the ones that are active, and have at least 50 members.

Step 4. Contribute useful information to these groups. Answer and ask questions. Get into conversations with people.

Step 5. Add as many of the people in the group as your friend as you’ve had at least a tiny conversation with through the group.

Step 6. Find out which of your friends that you’ve just gotten from these groups have a website or blog about your industry. They usually put a link to their blog or site in their ‘Info’ tab on their profile.

Step 7. Ask your new friends if they would allow you to contribute some content to their site or blog, in return for a link back to your site.

Step 8. Write this content, and send one unique article to each person that accepts your offer.

Those are the eight steps to get you started down the path to success with Facebook. Like all the best things in life, it will take time to really develop Facebook into a useful and profitable channel for building links, but the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it.

8 Step Guide to Using Facebook to Generate Links & Business is a post by SEO expert Adam Torkildson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.