Introduction to Facebook Graph Search

Earlier this week Facebook introduced Graph Search. It is giant leap forward from their current Facebook Search technology. The goal of Graph Search is to get users the information, product or service that they are looking for. The difference is they will not be relying solely on traditional SEO components, but will be leveraging your friendships and relationships with businesses. Although it is not available to the public, there are things you can do prepare for its launch.

1. Get Social

I would like to think that most websites are already doing this. With the Addthis, ShareThis and a handful of other social media sharing tool bars it is easy to add a series of buttons for your users to ‘like’ your pages. These likes will be leveraged as Social SEO signals for Facebook Graph Search. If nobody likes your page, there’s a good chance Facebook doesn’t know about it. There are other Facebook widgets you can utilize. Facebook Comments, Activity Feed, Facebook Recommendations could all provide social signal for Graph Search. All of these Facebook Plugins are easy to install and integrate into a current website.

2. Update your Facebook Profile

From the Facebook Graph Search preview, search results appear to be linking to Facebook pages. So it is important to ensure your Facebook profile is up to date. Perhaps you business changed locations, added some additional services or have some recent successes you could highlight. This profile will be come a conversion point to generate customers. Just like your website, put your best foot forward. The last thing you want is a customer showing up to your old address, or calling a disconnected number. That will surely garner some unlikes.

To make it more discoverable, ensure that all of your profile fields include the popular keywords you normally would like your website to rank for. Without overstuffing the input boxes describe the products and services you offer, so when users now search for these phrases you’ll show up.

3. OpenGraph Schema

When users like your pages through a Like Box or Like Button, Facebook scrapes your page looking for Open Graph schema to tell it more about your website. This schema includes everything from the title of the page, to the street address of a local business. Properly incorporating this Open Graph schema will help associate your or website business properly with the search. This schema is relatively easy to implement for anyone with basic html skill. Just include a few tags in the head and your good. After implemented use Facebook’s Debugging Tool to see what schema is being picked up and how it is being displayed.

4. Build your Fan Base

Another thing Facebook has shown us is that fans will play an important part of the search results. Facebook Graph Search phrases such as ‘Restaurants my friends like’, ‘Popular Clubs in San Diego’ and ‘People who like Vegetable Spring Rolls’ all have one thing in common, Facebook Friends. With each additional Facebook Fan, your site has 229 potential connection points. But it is not just about volume. These users need to be real people. Users that are engaged with Facebook and their network of friends. The more engaged the more influential they will be in the social search results.

5. Be Good…

With the introduction of any new web search engine or technology that drives traffic, individuals will look to game the system. I’m sure Facebook did a great job of protecting their Facebook Graph search results from external influence, but because a lot of the search result will rely on data gathered from external websites they are open to gaming.

Helpful Links:

• Facebook Graph Search Intro
• Facebook Open Graph Schema Debugging Tool
• Facebook Plugins
• Facebook Open Graph

The post 5 ways to preparing for Facebook Graph Search appeared first on Shane Hale.

If you are anything like me, your trying to work Responsive Design into all of your designs. Fairly simple CSS trick allows a website to scale nicely no matter the device that is viewing it. But one of the more challenging obstacles is external widgets served as an iFrame. This is the case with Facebook Comments.

The standard implementation of the Facebook Comments code includes calling the Facebook JavaScript SDK and a single line of html for the DIV container. This installation sets a ‘data-width’ parameter that tells Facebook how wide Facebook Comment widget should be. In a responsive design, you want to avoid setting width. Set widths do not scale with the website on different browser sizes.

Responsive Facebook Comments Code

Modify the data-width parameter, so that there is no width specified. So rather than having data-width=”480″, write ‘data-width’.

<div class=”fb-comments” data-href=”http://example.com” data-width data-num-posts=”2″></div>

Responsive Facebook Comments CSS

The solution is to utilize CSS overrides on key elements within the Facebook Comments Widget. This is going set an importance on the width element to be 100%, rather than the set width that is served by Facebook.

.fb-comments, .fb-comments span[style], .fb-comments iframe[style] {width: 100% !important;}

That is it. Pretty simple to update and add to a responsive stylesheet. To see a Responsive Facebook Comments in action, check out the comments section below.

The post Facebook Comments in a Responsive Design appeared first on Shane Hale.

What is exactly is a Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors only viewing one page of your site. It is measured by taking the total number of visitors viewing one page divided by the total page entries. This can be measured site wide or by a specific page. A bounce may occur if a user closes the window or tab, clicks the browsers ‘back button’, their session time out, or they entered new url in the address bar. Most analytics software will use 30 minutes as their session timeout.

Why does Bounce Rate matter?

When a user lands on a website, it takes them less than 5 seconds to determine if the content they searched for is on the webpage. If they can’t find the information, feel that its not there, or landed on the wrong site they will hit their back button and bounce. If a user is bouncing from a website the user experience will be poor. They will leave the website and look for a website that.

To provide a positive user experience your must fulfill purpose of building the webpage content. If you rank for a page about gizmos, you better make sure that landing page talks about gizmos. Better yet, the page talks about gizmos, and provides links to related gizmo pages, such as ‘buying gizmos’, ‘gizmos in the news’, ‘famous gizmos’ etc.

What is a good bounce rate?

There is no set ‘good’ bounce rate. It really is set on an individual basis based on the websites business objectives. For example if your website is a large ecommerce site where your primary goal is a purchase, a bounce rate over 40% is probably not good. This essentially means that 60% of your visitors are not finding the product they are looking for and weren’t interested in any other related products. In a real world example: how many times have you seen 60% of the customers walk into a department store, pick up 1 item, put it down and leave? This is obviously a bad user experience.

Other sites such as informational websites might be ok with a higher 60% bounce rate, as its could indicate the user is finding the information they are looking for, and a positive user experience. If a user is looking for a specific piece of data, such as a phone number, date, or name, it might be easy to locate this data quickly on a page and move on to their next search query.

I will say a bounce rate over 80% will be bad no matter what the business objectives are. If you see a bounce rate over 80% your users needs are not being met properly. The website usability is so low that users are leaving the site because you are not fulfilling the promise organically ranking for that keyword or buying traffic for that keyword. I’ve seen bounce rate this high when websites are buying SEM for keywords related to their product, but not matching the product. In example if a website is buying the keyword ‘free credit report’ and the user lands on page selling credit reports, there is a disconnect, and a bounce will occur.

The post Bounce Rates: Why they matter to User Experience appeared first on Shane Hale.

It may be a good idea to review what I, Shane Hale, set out to accomplish in 2012, and if I fell short of any of these goals.

Last Years Goals:

• Give my fiance the wedding she always wanted
• Get married to my beautiful fiance.
• Improve my career satisfaction.
• Continue to grow Roughin’It, my camping website.

I feel confident I accomplished all of these goals. On August 25th, in a beautiful ceremony on bay of Coronado California, I married my fiance, and had the most amazing wedding I have every attended. All of our friends and family were able to attend, and Brandie saw all of her creativity and planning over our 20 month engagement come to life. In April I was promoted at DMV.org to the Director of User Experience and Conversion, and was able to share many of my thoughts on how to improve the culture at the office, increase productivity and grow the website. I went from a low point in career satisfaction to a high that I have never felt before. And finally with Roughin’It, I explored new traffic generating avenues and expanded the content on a regular basis. Thanks to some how to guides and a Pinterest campaign a post about ‘Natural Mosquito Repellent‘ saw traffic spike to a new high of 1000 visitors in a day. Not bad for a side hobby.

2013 New Year Accomplishments:

It will honestly be tough to follow up my accomplishments from last year. They were anything short of life changing. With momentum on my side, here are my goals for 2013.

• Purchase a House for Brandie and I to start our family and grow old in.
• Visit 4 United States National Parks (targeting: Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Redwood)
• Establish Brandie’s company, Epiphany Massage, as the premier Corporate Chair Massage Mobile Massage service in San Diego.
• Continue to grow Roughin’It doubling traffic and revenue from the previous year.
• Double DMV.org revenue while maintaining a positive user experience across the site.

The post New Year Intentions 2013 appeared first on Shane Hale.

So far on this trip we haven’t had the change to take advantage of the spas at each of the hotels we stayed in. But we heard this was the best so we waited. We booked an 90min couple massage.

We also checked out Tiki Village. This was a traditional tahitian dance show and dinner. There was a lot of hula and fire dancing. Simply amazing and a must see.

Moorea is another of the 1000 Places to See Before You Die. So I’m checking this off and I have a 900 some odd locations left.

The post Honeymooning in Moorea (14 Photos) appeared first on Shane Hale.

Our vacation package included breakfast and dinner, but we escaped to a local favorite. Bloody Mary’s is one of the more popular restaurants on the island and now we know why. Upon arriving we were presented with a wide array of fresh caught fish and New Zealand beef. You select your dinner right from this line up. The food at Bloody Mary’s was my favorite from the entire trip. I wish we had ate there twice.

With this location, I was able to check off another destination from the 1000 Places to See Before You Die. Brandie and I had an once in a lifetime experience. We hope to come back for an anniversary or two. After the 5 days I was feeling a little spoiled and home sick, but we had another stop, Moorea.

Photos:

InterContinental Bora Bora Le Moana

Bora Bora’s Volcano

Shane Hale on the Water Taxi to the Hotel

Overwater Bungalow #15 at InterContinental Bora Bora Le Moana

Video:

The post Honeymooning in Bora Bora (13 Photos, 1 Video) appeared first on Shane Hale.

Our first stop, and point of entry was Papeete, Tahiti. The capital city of French Polynesia and the Society Islands, it wasn’t very resort like, but exposed us to the tahitian daily life. We spent our first day in the city of Papeete, exploring the local market places. There was a lot of shopping and a lot of surf shops.

I heard that travel pictures of Tahiti, rarely are of Tahiti, and I now believe this to be true. They have the overwater bungalows but the water, wasn’t as clear and bright as the postcards. The real beauty lies in the other French Polynesian islands. Next up… Bora Bora, then on to Moorea.

The post Honeymooning in Papeete, Tahiti appeared first on Shane Hale.