Dennis Yu's BlitzLocal

Back in the good old days, when the Internet was wild and lawless, it seemed fairly simple to get your content to the top of Google.  Just get your keywords in, beg, borrow or steal as many backlinks as you could and, before you know it, you're riding high in the search results.

Well, Google got smart.  First they began accounting for keyword stuffing, penalizing those who jammed their target words onto the page more than was necessary.  Then they tweaked their algorithm over and over again, developing new rules each time an exploit was discovered.  Overnight the face of the internet changed as the old rules went out the window.  Black hat SEO suddenly wasn't such a cake walk anymore, and the playing field, as far as is possible on the Internet, was a little more level.

Even so, the world of SEO will never truly be a level playing field.  As long as there are sneaky tricks to promote trash over true information the game will always be skewed in favor of the professional cheats.  This is why I'm so fond of Facebook as a way to reach potential customers.

Facebook is a truly level playing field.  Promotion relies on the human factor - creating content that appeals to real people and not just ineffable, opaque and confusing algorithms.  When I recently set up my Facebook fan page to promote my winter clothing review site I used the teachings of Dennis Yu to understand what my readers (and potential readers) are really looking for.  Dennis runs a company called BlitzLocal, a search engine marketing agency that, among other things, helps you optimize your Facebook business page to maximize reader engagement.

In the weeks since I started my page I've used the lessons I've gleaned from BlitzLocal to present my page in such a way that my readers, however small that base may be right now, are all actively engaging with my material.  They don't just click 'like' and never return... they come back time and again.

Anyway, the sermon for today is this: if you want to succeed on Facebook, don't go it alone.