Monthly Archives: February 2012

How to “moderate” comments on Facebook Brand Pages

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How to moderate comments on Facebook Brand Pages

Currently there is no way to moderate comments on Facebook business page’s. This means any comment posted will be visible, there is no way of keeping a comment private until you view it and approve it.

Understandably, this can make some people feel a little uneasy and unsure of whether they should create a Facebook business page incase a negative comment is posted.

This post will explain a few options you have to control comment posting.

Facebook page moderation blocklist.

Facebook page settings give you the option of creating a list of ‘blocked words’, which in theory means you could prevent any negative comments being posted on your walls if you blocked negative words like ‘bad’ or ‘awful’.

Any comments containing any of the blocked words will be flagged as spam and will not be posted to the page wall.

There is also the option the block profanities, which has two settings; medium and strong.

You can do this by;

  1.  Viewing your page and clicking on the ‘Edit page’ icon in the top right hand corner of the page.
  2. This will take you to the ‘Manage permissions’ tab where you will be able to edit your moderation blocklist and profanity blocklist as shown in the image above.

Comment moderation

As mentioned at the beginning of the post, there’s no way to hold a comment for moderation on a Facebook page but there are a couple of commenting settings you can tweak.

You could go all out and block comments entirely by removing the posting ability by unticking the ‘People can write or post content on the wall’ box

You can alter the page people land on when they go to your Facebook page.
Instead of them being taken straight to the page wall, visitors could be taken to a welcome page and then choose the page they want to visit.

These features can be accessed by:

  1. Viewing your Facebook page and clicking on ‘Edit page’ in the top right hand corner.
  2. You will then automatically be taken to the ‘Manage Permissions’ tab where you can alter the ‘Default landing tab’ and the ‘Posting ability’.

If you decide not to disable comments and you’re concerned about negative comments, there are a couple of things you can do to limit damage.

The comment can be removed by hovering over the comment and clicked the world icon and then selecting ‘delete post’.
Alternatively you could just hide the post or report it as abuse if you consider it to be abusive.

The page settings can be altered, so an email will be sent as soon as someone comments on something on the page. The comment can then be read and decision can be made over whether to keep it on the page or delete it.

This can be done by;

  1. Viewing your page and clicking on the ‘Edit page’ button.
  2. Then select ‘Your settings’ from the tab on the left hand side.
  3. When you are taken to this page you will be able to check the box saying ‘Email notifications’.

It’s a shame Facebook don’t allow full comment moderation, it would make people feel much more comfortable and happier about putting their brand out there, knowing a negative comment would never have to be seen by the public.

So many questions pop up when it comes to social media, but don’t get stuck, just head over to our social blogs for all the answers you need.

Remember you can find us on facebook, twitter and pinterest  for all our latest social media updates. Or if you feel you may need a little advice with your own social media, whether that’s getting started, or refreshing your knowledge, give us a call on 01543 495752 for a no obligation chat.

The SEO Advantages of blogging – Part 2

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the seo advantages of blogging part 2

the seo advantages of blogging part 2

Last Thursday we wrote about the direct benefit of a blog from an SEO point of view, so we’re now going to talk about the indirect SEO advantages of blogging.

Indirect benefits – These rely on some form of interaction from a reader.

Good content will keep people coming back to both your blog and the website, which will encourage them to use your company.

Good content will keep people coming back to your website, and encourage them to use your company.

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You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘content is king’ before, while that’s certainly true, putting one good post out every three months probably isn’t going to help you all that much. The amount of new posts you create is also important, no pressure.

Hubspot carried out a study, which found businesses with blogs that posts five times during a seven day period, would receive 6.9 times more organic traffic than a business which didn’t blog at all, so the amount of posts really is important.

Linking to useful content on other websites can also increase your page ranking.
For example, if you decide to link to an article you consider really helpful, a search engine will ‘think’ you’re being helpful and will boost your page rankings.

The same goes for a website linking back to your website, a search engine will perceive your website as useful because people want to share it, again boosting your page rankings.

The person whose website you link to may decide to return the favour and link back to you, sending some of their readers your way.

We hope our two part post on the SEO advantages has been useful.
If you have any questions or queries, don’t hesitate to drop us a comment.

Do you or your company blog? Do you blog solely for SEO purposes? Let us know.

If you’re wondering what on earth SEO is, check out our SEO Jargon Buster.

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.

SEO Jargon Buster

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seo jargon buster

seo jargon buster

The acronyms and words used when talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can sometimes be confusing. We put a list together, which is in no way exhaustive, which contains the words we feel are most important to understand.

Since this post, we have completed a more up to date version of our SEO jargon buster, which includes far more terms, which you can find here.

 

301 redirect: This is a page which appears when the website at the URL searched for, has permanently moved to another URL. It will usually contain information about where the website has moved to.

Algorithms: The formula or procedure a search engine goes through to determine where a page should rank in the search results.

Alt text: Alternative text – Used to describe an image. If the image cannot be viewed, the alt text will show up instead. It can also help with search engine optimisation as search engines can ‘see’ the alt text, whereas they cannot differentiate from one image to the next.

Analytics: A collection of data containing information about the way the website is used, such as hits or total time spent on the website.

Black hat: These are search engine optimisation techniques which go against best practice guidelines and attempt to trick a search engine into giving your page a higher page rank.

CAPTCHA: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart – This is a ‘test’ to tell humans and computers apart, mostly used for stopping bots or automated programs from spamming a website.
You will often see this when you try to create an account on a website, a box containing random letters, numbers or words will appear. It’s easy for a human to read them and type them out again, but it’s much harder for a program to do.

CMS: Content Management System – A program such as WordPress or Tumblr, which allows the creation of content without needing to do any of the coding side of content creation.

CPC: Cost Per Click – Each time a banner or advertisement is clicked on, the advertiser will be charged.

Grey hat: Search engine optimisation techniques which bend best practice rules as opposed to breaking them completely.

Hits: A request for something on a web page to load, such as the page or a graphic.
Hits are not a good indication of website traffic as things like images count for a ‘hit’. For example, if your page has six images and it’s loaded once, that would class as seven hits.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language – A language made up of a variety of tags which will determine how a website will look, such as the layout and the text colour.

Long tail: A phrase made up of keywords as opposed to search one or two keywords.
It’s much easier to have a higher ranking for long tail phrases; however this is because they’re searched for less often.

META tag: A HTML tag which contains information about what platform the website was built on and keywords which relate to the website. This information will not be displayed on the website itself.

On site SEO: This is any work carried out on a website that will help search engines find your website, such as using keywords throughout and using alt text.

Off site SEO: Links back to your website are considered recommendations by search engines, so if your page has been linked back to a search engine will think the content you have produced is high quality and useful and will therefore give you a higher page ranking.

Pagerank or PR: This is how relevant a search engine considers your page to be in relation to the keywords searched.
If you have a high page rank, then the search engine considers the page to be very relevant to the words searched. If you have a low page rank then a search engine doesn’t consider your page relevant to what has been searched.
This is why using keywords is vital for search engine optimisation.

Pageview: Quite simply, the amount of times a page has been loaded.

PPC: Pay Per Click – An advertiser will pay each time an advert or banner is clicked on which takes someone back to their website.

RSS feed: Really Simple Syndication – If an RSS Feed is set up on your blog any new posts will be sent to anyone who subscribes to your RSS Feed. New posts will show up in their RSS Reader or content aggregator.
You can send the entire post to the RSS Reader or just part of the text or a description to encourage the reader want to click through to your website to read the full post.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing – A type of internet marketing which relies on search engines to promote a company.
Search Engine Marketing is usually paid for, via things like Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation – This is improving your search engine rankings by using things such as keywords and long tail phrases throughout your website.
The better your search engine optmisation is, the higher your rankings will be, meaning more people will be visiting your website.

SE: Search Engine – Examples; Google, Yahoo, Bing.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page – The list of pages a search engine produces which are relevant to the words searched, starting with the most relevant at the top.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator – This is the address of a web page.

White hat: Search engine optimisation techniques which stick to best practice rules and don’t trick or cheat a search engine into awarding it a page ranking higher than it should be.

 

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.

Why should my business be using social media?

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Why should my business be using social media

Why should my business be using social media

As Social Media week draws to a close, it only seemed natural to talk about why you and your company should be using social media.

The idea of using social media to help promote a business may seem like an alien idea to some, Facebook’s for telling people about what you did at the weekend not promoting your products, right? Wrong, here’s why.

To put things into perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country on the planet, behind China and India. With over 483 million daily users at the end of 2011, you have a huge audience at your fingertips.

It’s not just Facebook you need to consider, there are other social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Google+, all of which allow you to reach a much wider audience.

As well as keeping in touch with your customers, it allows people to gather information about your company quickly and easily.
The widths of phone directories are getting smaller and smaller each year and people are turning to social media and the internet to get the information they need about businesses and their products and services.

Social media is great for showing off your products, services and any recommendations your company has received, giving you the ability to entice potential customers and keep current customers coming back for more.

Whether you like the smell of it or not, Old Spice is an example of a brand who really knows how to make the best of social media, many of their videos have gone viral as a result of social media.

You can use social media to increase the traffic to your website or blog, by providing your readers with a call to action. An increase in traffic to your website or blog can lead to an increase in sales.

For example, we published a blog post on the SEO advantages of blogging the other day. We used Twitter and Facebook to encourage people to read it by giving them a call to action by asking if they wanted to know what the advantages were and then providing a link to the blog.
With people of all ages on social media, the chances are your target audience is already using social networks.

Remember that social media success doesn’t just happen over night, like everything else you need to put hard work in to get results.

 

So many questions pop up when it comes to social media, but don’t get stuck, just head over to our social blogs for all the answers you need.

Remember you can find us on facebook, twitter, pinterest and google+ for all our latest social media updates. Or if you feel you may need a little advice with your own social media, whether that’s getting started, or refreshing your knowledge, give us a call on 01543 495752 for a no obligation chat.

The SEO advantages of blogging – Part 1

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the seo advantages of blogging part 1

the seo advantages of blogging part 1

 
There are many SEO advantages of blogging, (Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short).

The list of advantages is extensive and putting them all in one post wouldn’t make for light reading. This post will concentrate on the direct SEO benefits of having a company blog.

This post relies upon the blog being held on the main URL, e.g. www.domain.com/blog. If your blog isn’t part of your websites domain your blog and website will be competing against each other in search rankings and your website won’t receive any of the SEO benefits a blog can bring.

 

Direct benefits – Immediate once cached by search engines.

Keyphrases are key (no pun intended) in SEO.

Using the correct key phrases in your blog post, title and tagging it correctly will help you to rank higher in search engines.

Using correct key phrases in your blog title and tagging it correctly will help you to rank higher.

Click To Tweet

Take note and remember that stuffing your post with keywords will have a negative effect on your page ranking as search engines will see the post as spam.

Remember to use long tail phrases, as long tail searches will return fewer searches than a shorter one. There is less competition for a long tail search, which means your page will rank higher.

Posting new content regularly can increase the ranking of the website a blog is attached to. This is because a search engine sees that blogs URL is indexed the same as the main website and ‘links’ the two together.
Search engines like website’s which are updated regularly as it in theory means that your website contains up to date and relevant information, rather than information which is two years old and may be out of date by now.

You can read part two here.

 

You can find more useful advice on how to maintain the best SEO in our blogs. Or if you need a helping hand to get you started, or run it for you, we can help. Call us today on 01543 495752 to see what we could do for your SEO.