One great way to improve your search engine rankings is to get lots of backlinks.  These are links from other websites, preferably in your industry.  This has led many sites to buy links on “link farms” or pay SEO companies to set up dozens or hundreds of low quality links to their site.  However, the search engines, notably google, are starting to strike back.

Google recently implemented some search algorithm changes that caused a lot of sites to drop off significantly in the rankings.   Here’s a article that explains some of the changes, and shows you how to recognize a good link from a bad one:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641987

-Jim

One of the challenges faces businesses today is how to use social media.  If you are updating your website regularly, then it’s redundant to post the same content to your Facebook page.  Varying the content means that some users will miss what you are posting on your website or fan page, or vice versa.

Enter the rss feed.  This is a device commonly used by blogs, or CMS systems to “syndicate” your website updates.   People can subscribe to your feed using an RSS reader, for example.  Did you know that Facebook can also update your fan page by reading your RSS feed, and posting new items there?  Various Facebook “apps” can do this, and one I’ve used is called RSS  graphitti.

You can see a working example here:

http://www.woodweb.com/

and the fan page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WoodWeb-Woodworking-Industry-Information/252494980537

Selected content from the home page gets automatically posted to the fan page wall.  So fans of the company can keep up with the latest updates.