Website Design Blog | Graticle.com » Google

How To Sign Up For A Facebook Fan Page

Shawn — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:39:54 +0000

In this video I explain what a Facebook page is, and how to sign up. The video is quick (under 4 minutes) and straight to the point. Enjoy!

The transcription of the video is below.

Hey everyone, it’s Shawn from Graticle Design. Today, I wanted to go over with you how to sign up for a Facebook page. In case you don’t already know how to. It’s actually different than what you’d see here where it says sign up its free, anyone can join. That’s actually a personal page. You want to click the Create a page for a celebrity, banner, or business — reason being it’s against Facebook guidelines otherwise, and they don’t want you to sign up for a business through a personal account because they don’t want you spamming everyone. So they give you the option to get a Facebook Page which is actually beneficial to you. This is because with a personal page you have a cap on a your friend’s list of five thousand people. On the other hand, for business having a personal page, you can have as many friends you’d like. And if you do go ahead and use a personal account for your business and Facebook finds out about it later, all of the work and reputation you built up during that time period is all gone. You will have to start completely over.

So let’s go ahead and create a page for your business. You have a couple options, we’re to go to local businesses, in particular, automotive. Go ahead and pick your category here. And enter the business name here, I am going to type in Bob’s Automotive. I don’t know in this business and I’m going to delete this right after I’m finished. Enter in the captcha and if you are authorized to do so, type your name there. So click Create A Page. If you do not already have a Facebook account this is where they are going to want you to create one. You can create one and if you don’t want a personal account created, you can go to Settings or Google it to learn how to make your profile completely private so no one can ever find it. I do recommend just creating one and networking with your friends and you’d be surprised that a lot of friends are already on there.

You are now going to be faced with a blank page, and this is where you get to edit everything. It’s really self explanatory as the entire Facebook website is. You can edit things such as your website, company overview, mission statement, when you opened, and features.

Thank you.

Do you have any comments or suggestions? If so, leave a comment below!

Three Firefox Plugins for Web Developers

Shawn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:50:50 +0000

Using plug-in’s for Firefox is a necessity and a gift that the Mozilla team has given us the freedom of having. There are a lot out there, and we want to share with you our top three.

1. SEO Fox

SEO Fox is a great tool for search engine optimization specialists. It gives you quick information on a websites Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and even the age of the website you are currently viewing. The entire feature list is listed below.

Features:

PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
.edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
.edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
.gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

2. Google Global

Google Global Plugin

This plugin is a great feature for an SEO expert. It allows you to view search results on Google from other countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. This tool can open your eyes on your search results — allowing you to see how well you are optimizing your website globally.

3. Firebug

Firebug-Firefox

Firebug is a great all around tool for web programming allowing you to view code on the fly. If you would like to see a specific DIV on the style sheet and HTML, it’s as simple as clicking a button.

Google Local Business Center Tips

Shawn — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:52:04 +0000

When optimizing your website for the search engines, sometimes details get ignored — one being the Google LBC (Local Business Center). Some businesses either don’t know how to post their business on the LBC (www.google.com/local/add), or have already seen their business listed when searching (sometimes Google does this automatically when it finds a business through online listings) and they don’t think much of it. Well we are here to let you know that you need to put more energy than you think into your business listing, as there are tricks (just like anything else) to get you higher on the list.

1. Pay Attention To Your Name

Rather than just posting your company name, try to insert a keyword(s) into your name as well. For instance, if you sell computers, rather than listing your company name as Johnny’s, list it as Johnny’s Computers. This not only lets Google know that you are relevant (besides your tags), but also lets the person browsing know that you at least have something to do with computers. This will help you stand out from your competition, while still being ethical.

2. Domain Name

When you list your domain name, rather than listing as http://www.graticle.com or www.graticle.com — list your website as Graticle.com. This will help you maintain your “brand,” while becoming more clear for someone looking at your domain name. You can find some great information for listings on Adwords (which is very similar) in Perry Marshall’s book Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords.

3. Phone Number

Your phone number should be local as people browsing your website tend to gravitate towards local businesses — depending on your industry. Sometimes when Google automatically enters your business on it’s LBC, it might find your information from an old listing in YellowPages.com that you forgot to update. So your company might not have a phone number listed, or even worse, your previous phone number.

4. City Center

Although no one (besides Google’s engineers) knows the excact procedure how the LBC or any Google listing system works — but this tip has a lot of weight. If your company’s site is optimized to a certain location, your address to that city center is crucial. Now we won’t give you a way around this, but just know that this factor is crucial — so keep it in mind if you have an opportunity to move to another location, or even if you are just starting out. Again, remember it’s more than one factor that plays into their equations — so if you can’t get any closer, don’t sweat it.

5. Forms of Payment

This is another factor that Google will not automatically insert for you — if they have entered your company into the LBC. Hopefully your company already accepts payments for any medium used, so listing these on the LBC will help give your customers confidence in your company. If you only accept checks, it would also be a good idea to let your customers know this up front.

6. Hours of Operation

Again not something Google will automate. Regardless of the hours that you list your company open, make sure you stick to them.

That sums up the tips for the LBC for now. Also, don’t forget to add to the rest of your listing including Tags, Description, Coupon, Picture, and Video — anything to set yourself apart from your competition and you will do great.

*Enter your business into the Google Local Business Center here:

www.google.com/local/add

Validating Your Website

Shawn — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:02:23 +0000

I know this is an old concept to some out there, but many are still not validating their websites. Validation doesn’t exactly lend towards helping finish your client’s website in time, but it has many benefits that can help in the long run.

1. Cross Browser Compatibility

By validating your website, it gives you the confidence that it will look the same in all browsers. It’s actually simple compared to going to Browser Shots every time to see how your website looks, just to dial it in. Or even downloading a ton of browsers, and then testing them individually. My point, by validating you don’t have to do this – saving you time.

2. Search Engine Optimization

With search engine robots becoming increasingly smarter every day, it is very important to create complaint code throughout your website. Reason being, if your website confuses a robot while it’s crawling, it will see this as a beginner level website, and will lower your ranking on Google. Since the validation service will make sure you have certain attributes such as an alt tag with an image, this will also double as making your website search engine friendly, user friendly, and also able to be used by the visually impaired.

3. A Validating Conclusion

Although it might take you more time to validate than not- once you understand the validation systems, you will have taught yourself the right way to code, and therefore giving you a better understanding of back-end web design in general. It will not only help the website that you are working on become more accessible, but will also act as a benefit to the programmer in the long run.

1. Cross Browser Compatibility

2. Search Engine Optimization

3. A Validating Conclusion

Validate your HTML / XHTML

Validate your CSS stylesheet