Likely not.

Facebook has already become the 800 million pound gorilla (it has 800 active million users worldwide). It will likely grow and the money it collects from its IPO will likely help it reach some strategic goals, but the core aspect of its product will likely not change much if at all.

Maybe it will get better and maybe it will get worse, but change? Let’s see …

• Facebook offers personal profiles to anyone willing to sign up for an account and provide certain specific private information to the company based on its user’s term of service.
• Companies can set up a brand page and promote themselves to users through that page.
• Developers can build apps that interact with Facebook and allow users to engage with marketers, businesses, and savvy development agents.
• Facebook also offers paid advertising models for businesses wanting to reach new prospects.
• You can interact with Facebook through you desktop computer, laptop, smart phone, or tablet.

What else could Facebook offer? What else likely to be offered as a result of the private company becoming public?

Of course, new technologies could lead to Facebook expanding its offerings to its consumer base, but that would happen anyways. The company already has made billions of dollars so the money it collects from the IPO will not likely give it much more financial clout that it already has. So why go public?

It is likely that investors and shareholders realize that certain information is going to end up public anyway so why not be the first to make the disclosure? It’s a good political move for Facebook to go public, but don’t count on the IPO changing the service in any drastic way. Social networking will continue as it has for the last five years.

So what happens when your website has broken links?

If allowed to linger for too long, broken links can be a ding against your website’s SEO ranking. In other words, they can count against you. One or two might not hurt, but hundreds will. And many webmasters will allow their broken links to continue because they don’t monitor them.

A simple diagnostic tool will tell you if you have broken links on your website. Google Webmaster Tools is free and does the job for you. Google will tell you if your site has broken links.

After you have determined that you have broken links, go to the pages where those links exist and analyze your content. Can you find another source to link to? If so, then replace the broken link with a link to a resource that is just as helpful, or more, to your website visitors. If you can’t find one, then consider revising your content so that the link isn’t necessary.

When you revise your content you invite the search engines back to re-crawl your pages. They will then re-index your pages based on the latest crawl and re-rank them. Some webmasters have seen increased page rankings based on fixing broken links.

If you are looking for more opportunities to increase your website’s search engine optimization, find and fix your broken outbound links. It’s a small thing, but it can matter.

1. Descriptive URLs – Let’s start with the URL. Instead of using dynamic URLs, use descriptive URLs that utilize your best keyword phrase for each content page. Your product name, a product description, or a phrase that best identifies each individual product is best for your product description pages.
2. Create Unique Content For Every Product – Every product page should have unique content, and I’ll add that each should have at least 250 words of content. If necessary, combine several like products on one page and give each one a unique description. Is there really that much of a difference between a blue widget and a yellow widget? Do they need separate pages? If so, make sure you provide enough content on each page that you give them maximum SEO value, and that means no duplicate content.
3. Use Category Pages – People don’t just shop for individual products. They also search for categories of product. If you sell cameras, have a section for digital cameras. Have another for camcorders. Make sure each category page has unique content.
4. Link Your Pages Together With Anchor Text – Link your pages together with appropriate anchor text. This alone can give your website a huge boost. Figure out the best internal linking strategy based on consumer buying habits, keyword phrase associations, and complimentary products.
5. Allow User Reviews – Every time you add new content to a page, the search engines return to crawl that page. When they do, they also re-index and re-rank it. Allowing user reviews, even negative reviews, can give your product pages a huge boost in the search engines.
6. Allow Social Media Sharing – Social media sharing can encourage your content to travel far and wide. That means more potential traffic, more potential product reviews, and better SEO overall.

Each of these specific on-page content solutions has at least one associated SEO benefit. If you want to improve your online shop’s SEO, try these on-page content tricks.

First, I’d like to know how you can buy a hashtag, but that’s an aside. The real issue is what happened after McDonald’s changed its hashtag from #MeetTheFarmers to #McDStories.

The original hashtag was meant to introduce McDonald’s Twitter followers to the company’s promotion of fresh produce. It worked well. Then, in a flash of brilliance that turned out to be not so brilliant, the company’s social media manager decided to open the door to the universe by expanding its Twitter promotion. Enter #McDStories.

Who doesn’t have a positive McDonald’s story, right? Indeed. And who doesn’t have a negative one. Duh.

You can probably guess what happened next. Followers started using the new hashtag to relate their own McDonald’s stories – chipped molars, regurgitation, food poisoning …. The list goes on.

I think the big lesson here is not how to respond to negative reactions on Twitter or some other social media site. Rather, the real lesson is how to prevent it from happening in the first place. This all could have been prevented had McDonald’s not insisted on opening the door to the universe. All they had to do was keep running the promotion that was working.

When things are going well, don’t change them. Rule #1. Rule #2 is, always ask what might go wrong.

Had McDonald’s social media manager lived by those two rules we wouldn’t be talking about them right now. That second question is particularly important. In social media – and on the World Wide Web in general – once something starts spiraling out of control, it’s hard to get a handle on it. If it’s out there, it’s out there. So put some thought into your moves before you make them. Ask, what can go wrong with this? If the answer is something too big to control or too embarrassing to let go on, don’t make your move. Do something else, or nothing at all.

Online competitive intelligence is a rather tricky subject. Collecting information on your competition’s marketing tactics online is fairly easy, though it is getting more difficult now that Yahoo! Site Explorer is no longer live. You can still do back link analysis, but you’ll have to pay for it. The question is, is it worth it?

In many cases, I’d say it is worth it to study your competition and see what they are up to. But bear in mind that just because your competition is engaged in a particular marketing strategy doesn’t mean that it is working for them. And that means you could spend hours and hours analyzing your competition and coming up with nothing but wasted time. That is true particularly if you intend to mirror their actions.

If your competition is still engaged in five-year-old link building tactics that don’t work, then you could be killing yourself trying to follow them. My recommendation is, don’t.

It’s good to keep tabs on the competition, don’t get me wrong. But if your only intent in doing so is so that you can figure out what they are doing online and following that, you should rethink your competitive intelligence strategy. Monitoring the competition is not the same as analyzing them. And analyzing your competition’s moves is only useful if your analysis leads you to actionable steps that benefit your marketing strategy.

Competitive intelligence is one of those areas where it pays to be cautious. Collect, measure, and monitor, but don’t take action until you’ve engaged in effective analysis.

Like old-fashioned coupons, you can use online coupons to drive new business to your storefront or website. And it works.

One of the things that makes it work is social media. If your offer is so good that your prospects want to share it with their friends, then they will share it will their friends. They’ll share it on Facebook, Twitter, and through e-mail. They’ll share it on any social network where they have a presence, and they’ll use it too.

Online, you can offer the types of coupons that you can off line. You can offer 2-for-1 deals, minimum purchase discounts, coupons that are good only for certain days, perpetual coupons that are good any time of the year, and you can be as creative as you can be with your traditional off line coupons. Your customers can print the coupon and bring it to your business, download it to their mobile phones, tell you the coupon code when they call in their order, or enter the coupon code into a field on your website form.

If you think it through all the way, you’ll see that online coupons are another opportunity for you to reach new customers and increase your business. And they’re as social as other online tool.

Twitter had originally accepted a minimum of $2 million from 20 large companies on the scale of Coca-Cola and Disney for the privilege of being the first companies to have brand pages on the microblogging platform. The pages look quite nice.

The big question is, when will the rest of us gain access to Twitter brand pages and how much will it cost us?

It’s obvious that Twitter is using this opportunity as a way to raise operating funds. But the problem, as I see it, is that the companies spending the most amount of money and getting in earlier will have an advantage over companies with smaller pocketbooks. They’ll effectively be the Twitter users that set the policy for the rest of us. They could use Twitter to shut the door on their competition, and may already have.

Has Twitter sold out to the highest bidder? Has it become a haven for big brands? Will it go by the way of eBay and alienate its smaller, less wealthy users?

Only time will tell or provide any answers to these questions. Meanwhile, if you’ve got $25,000 in your pocket, then you can buy yourself a Twitter brand page. Someday, you might be allowed to establish a Twitter brand page for your company for a monthly or yearly fee. Average that over a lifetime and you could very well spend $25,000, or more, for the privilege of tweeting 140 characters at a time.

Let’s hope that Twitter doesn’t become the social media website of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich.

That’s right, Google+ has improved its +1 button.

The new options include:

• Choosing a width for your Google+ button that works for your website’s design
• Finding a badge that works with the dark background of your website
• Using a badge that also shows your Google+ profile’s circle count

Google+ pages can also display a Google+ badge, which makes them a lot more attractive as well.

It’s already been proven that websites with social media badges get more shares, Likes, tweets, and +1s. Social media sharing is a great way to connect with new followers and potential customers. Google+ is a new social media site that also carries search engine marketing benefits so you can no longer discount it. I highly recommend using it.

Another thing you can do through your website that you should do is encourage your website visitors to add you to their circles on Google+. It’s easy to do and it carries a ton of benefits. I think those benefits are going to get better.

If you’ve been wondering about using social media badges on your website, start with a Google+ badge. Work your way up from there.

Pinterest is an interesting social media experiment. And it looks like it could become one of the powerhouse websites, especially for women, its largest set of users.

The cool thing about Pinterest is that it is highly graphic. Take a look at its home page and you’ll see all the photos and images, and it isn’t cluttered.

The way it works is you set up your own pinboard. You can have one for your company just like Mashable has. And just like Mashable’s, it can be branded.

Notice how Mashable’s pinboard has the Mashable name in it. That’s great for reputation management and branding. Then, on the left, you can see the big Mashable logo with the website URL underneat. Again, that’s great for branding, but the URL back to the website provides a useful inbound link for SEO purposes.

If you look at the pins that Mashable includes on its pinboard, they’re not all self-promotional. They spend a great deal of time promoting other items around the Web. That’s great stuff. It’s the way that it should be done.

You don’t have to be a rabid self-promoter to be successful in social media generally or at Pinterest in particular. You just have to have a solid strategy for your online content, a strategy that includes promoting others while branding yourself. That’s the best social media strategy in the world, and your company can make that happen.

The key to this SEO philosophy is in the use of keywords and links. Keywords are the fuel in every search engine optimization strategy. You don’t want to overdo it, but you must do it.

What does that mean, exactly?

Keywords are a matter of targeting the right phrases for the right audience. If you are trying to reach people who purchase automobiles, then you have to target the right key phrases that attract automobile buyers. If you sell Ford vehicles specifically, then target your phrases to people who buy Ford vehicles. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

It is, but you’d be surprised at how many SEOs target the wrong keywords for their audiences.

When it comes to links, you want your links to compliment your keyword phrases. They shouldn’t dominate. Anything in moderation is better than the same thing in overdose. Use links that compliment your keywords by incorporating the keywords into the link anchor text and pointing them to relevant pages on your website. Title attributes can also compliment your anchor text.

By complimentary title attributes, I don’t necessarily mean repeating your anchor text key phrase. I mean use a phrase that compliments it and is a more nuanced way of using your important keywords.

SEO is not a science. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Your first concern should be in creating great content. Make the SEO compliment the content.

The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.

First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.

Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.

While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.

Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.

Here are 5 timeless Internet marketing tactics. They worked ten years ago (or five) and still work today.

• Pay Per Click Advertising – PPC advertising is the paid advertising part of online marketing. Google was the first company to champion PPC and it’s still going strong. As long as PPC ads continue to work, savvy Internet marketers will continue to use them.
• Search Engine Optimization – Despite rumors that Google+ has killed SEO, search engine optimization is still going strong. It changes every day, of course. But it still works today.
• Social Media Marketing – Social media is still young. It’s good and it’s only going to get better. With the rise of Facebook and now the introduction of Google+, you can’t ignore it any longer.
• Video Marketing – Video marketing just keeps getting better. Don’t give up on this new tactic just yet. Now should be when you start adopting it.
• Mobile Marketing – I know, I know. A lot of people still haven’t started doing it yet, but are you going to wait until they start. Now is the time to hop onto the mobile marketing bandwagon – before your clientele jumps on and starts looking for you.

When it comes to Internet marketing, stick to what you know works.

It has its fans, to be sure. Among them are some of the Internet’s biggest voices.

On the other hand, there are some pretty big voices that have criticized it sharply. And they make some good points.

One of the things that has people concerned about Google+ is Google’s policy of favoring Google+ results in its search engine index over its competition. Until now, there has been no real solid proof that is happening. But a new bookmarklet titled Don’t Be Evil is showing the proof in a very uncanny way. You can preview and drag and drop the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet to your web browser by visiting the Focus On The User website.

The interesting thing about this bookmarklet is its development team. The Focus On The User website says it was built by engineers at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, “in consultation with several other social networking companies.”

John Battelle, one of those sharply critical voices who is also an Internet journalist, writes about it on his blog.

So here’s the million dollar question: What does this new information in this social media war mean to Google’s, and the Web’s, future? Will the U.S. Department of Justice see Google’s ranking practices as a violation of antitrust laws?

It would be interesting if they did. The result would likely be, at the very least, a forced change in Google’s ranking policies that cause it to rank websites without a preference for Google+. The question is, would that be better for searchers or worse? Google already claims to be doing what is best for the user, but their competition disagrees. What do you say?

Still, when you look at how search engine marketing has changed over the years, it’s easy to see why video marketing is becoming more and more important. And that’s includes YouTube.

More and more online marketing are using videos every day. But not just videos in the sense that they throw together a two-minute gig and throw it up online. Many of these videos are very professional.

YouTube has several advantages for video marketers. One advantage is that you can start up a video channel on YouTube and post regular video updates that are entertaining as well as informational and that market your website.

Another advantage to YouTube is that it is a very popular social media website. You can meet people on YouTube that you might not meet anywhere else. By developing a relationship with people on YouTube you can send them to your website to buy your products and services.

Finally, YouTube is the second largest search engine online – right behind Google. That is perhaps the biggest advantage. If you have a presence there, then people will likely find your videos.

Video marketing is getting to be more and more attractive every day. YouTube is one good reason why.

There are several Internet marketing strategies a search engine marketing company can perform for you. Let’s start with web design.

A good search engine marketing company doesn’t just design your website. They help you plan it. What language does it need to be coded in? Would ASP best suit your website? How about PHP? What kind of server should it be on? Windows or Linux? What is the best way to incorporate the social media experience into your website? These are some of the questions a good web development firm can help you answer as you make your mark on the web.

Beyond web design, your search engine marketing company should help you determine the best promotional strategies for driving traffic to your new website. Some of those methods include:

• Pay per click advertising
• Article marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Display advertising
• Link building
• Social media marketing
• Directory submissions
• Blog marketing
• Video marketing
• Forum marketing

And that’s just to name a few. The methods for driving traffic to your website could be quite different than the methods used for another website. Since every web business is different, every online marketing strategy should be different. A search engine marketing firm knows that.

So what is a Quora Board?

The concept is really simple. You set up a board around a specific topic that is associated with your business. Then you post links to that board and promote it to your followers.

It’s important to note that you can go through your Quora account followers and add as many of them as you want as followers of your Quora board when you set it up. Your followers then have to opt out if they don’t want to follow your board. That’s makes it a really easy marketing tool.

But keep your board focused. Don’t post spurious links are off-topic posts. If you blog often, post your blog links. You can also post other relevant and interesting third-party content (and you should) relevant to your board. Make your board a place where people interested in your topic will want to hang out and get the latest information from.

Quora boards are yet another social media tool that you can use for your business benefit.

I’m talking about your videos.

High quality shorter videos seem to attract a great response from viewers and have the best potential for going viral.

The reason shorter videos work best is because people in today’s fast-paced global marketplace are crunched for time. A thirty second video will go much further than a one hour documentary. Especially if your goal is to attract attention and drive traffic for marketing purposes.

If you want to provide in-depth videos on a given topic, you are better off using short videos to attract attention to your business and website and using them to drive traffic to your longer pages. You might even put those long educational videos behind a paywall and charging admission. Then you know that someone interested in that kind of time commitment is willing to pay for it. When people put their wallets on the line, that’s a commitment.

Put your marketing budget into your short videos. They don’t provide any more SEO benefit than longer videos, but they are also don’t provide any less SEO benefit. But they do work for driving traffic.

Online video marketing isn’t rocket science. You can be effective with just a little forethought and some respect for your prospect’s time. Draw them in with short videos and close them with your on-page content.

The truth is, No. 1 positions are the most clicked-on positions. That’s true for PPC and organic search listings. But those are not the most profitable positions.

The most profitable positions are the ones just below the No. 1 position. Why is that?

What most people don’t realize is that most searchers will click on that No. 1 position, but if it isn’t what they were looking for, then they hit the Back button and click on another search result. SEOs know this. Clients don’t necessarily know this. So everyone is scrambling to get that No. 1 position.

There’s nothing wrong with being No. 1. But you should be seeking to be No. 1 for the right search queries. What questions does your website answer? Those are the key terms you should seek No. 1 rankings for.

SEO results fluctuate. But they are also much more personal. Google now provides videos, images, and personalized results based on who your Google+ friends are your past search history. Your search results are not my search results. That makes the No. 1 position just about unattainable. Trying to get there is an exercise in absurdity.

The job for search engine marketers in today’s search climate is to produce the best content and promote it in the best places. Rankings won’t cure all your ills.

So what does it do?

In a word, it looks at a web page on your website, or any website you want to test, and tells you whether or not that web page is using microformats to present your authorship of the page in the best light. Specifically, it will:

• Tell you whether the page is linked adequately to your Google profile.
• Let you know if the page is linked to your social media profiles at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Quora, and other social networks.
• Show you a preview of your Google snippet for that page should it be returned in a search results page for your author name.
• Give you the extracted rich snippet data from the page.
• And show you what a custom search engine would see if it were to look at your rich snippet data.

That’s a lot of information. More importantly, it’s a lot of useful information.

Rich snippets are very important for authors and other creatives who spend a lot of time creating content in their own names. Even if you employ a ghostwriter to create your content, you are its author. You should test your rich snippet data on a semi-regular basis to ensure that you are making the most of your microformatting opportunities. It not only has reputation management consequences, but it can affect your SEO as well.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t submit press releases. Submit them. You’ll get your inbound links and if you optimize them well you’ll likely see some inbound traffic when searchers find your press release in the search engines. You may even get a call from a reporter or see your press release re-printed somewhere – maybe even off line. But don’t expect your press releases to do all the work. Public relations goes beyond a mere press release.

Good public relations involves some level of relationship building. You need to find out what publications cover your industry. Make a list. Then find out who the person is in those publications who reports on topics that are important to you. Again, make a list.

When you’re ready to start your public relations campaign, contact those people on your list and make a personal pitch. The personal pitch is a lot more effective than a press release. It shows that you have the ambition and the incentive to go an extra step. Most of your competitors are submitting impersonal press releases. But you will be more direct, more personal, and more effective.

When you make a pitch, tailor it to the specific needs of the person and the publication you are pitching to. Is it a lone blogger in your niche? Find out what he likes to write about (you should subscribe to his blog and read it every day) and pitch to that.

Are you pitching to a national news magazine in your niche? What kind of stories do they run? What are their biases. Play to those.

Public relations is about more than building links and sending press releases. If you really want it to be effective, make it personal.