There’s been a flurry of news and activity on the net about Facebook and URLs, but in case you’ve missed it or think you’ve missed the boat, read on.

Facebook announced recently the option of registering a unique URL for your account. This gives you a unique and readable URL for your Facebook profile page, like this:

http://www.facebook.com/drrichard

…which is much nicer than the old version.

If you are already a Facebook user, you can register yours now. You’ll need to be quick though, since millions of usernames have been claimed already.

If you’re not already a Facebook user (or a group with less than 1000 fans), you’ll have to wait until June 28th. Facebook is using this window to try to reduce spammy-type grabbing of usernames – called username squatting.

OK. Back to business – how does this help you with your website? Is it worth doing?

Well, the current URLs for profiles aren’t very friendly, easy to remember, simple to pass on or very ‘brandable’. If you’re concerned about any of these, it’s worth seeing if you’re name is still available.

If you plan to try on the 28th, make sure you start early!

Here’s the 5th rule for successful keywords:

5. They must be good for conversions on your website

What’s a conversion? It’s just an event that leads you towards your website goal – such as clicking a link, buying a product or signing up for a free report.

If you keywords don’t lead your site towards your goal, then why use them? it’s potentially worse than this though. I’d be really upset if you wasted weeks of SEO effort chasing keyword combinations that do nothing for your site.

It helps if you’ve checked some of the other 1-4 rules here: if the keyword is laser-targeted to your niche and relevant to the page, then you increase the chance of a conversion. This doesn’t guarantee it’ll convert though.

So that’s the 5th rule, unless I think of any more!

A good keyword has to be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

If you can get all of these right, you’ll succeed in the search engines. Another way to put this is that if your keyword doesn’t seem so good for any one of these points, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

I’m making a bold assumption here of course (it’s Friday after all). I’m guessing you don’t have a major website with a huge presence like Apple or Google and that you don’t have 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank of 7. Am I right? If you are one of these sites then well done! You can probably let go on a few of the points listed above.

If you’re one of us little guys then read on.

My Four Points listed above might sound a little bit harsh. Why shouldn’t you be able to compete on a nice, simple keyword like iPhone or Gordon Ramsay or 24? A direct answer would be “OK. Have a go then”. I’ll see you in 6 months after you’ve spent all your time collecting links, tweaking pages and checking your Google position.

The point is, you can’t win on these highly popular keywords. There’s too much competition out there. Too many other websites and too many relevant backlinks to these sites. You’ll blow your entire marketing budget and still not get the search traffic that you deserve.

The better approach is to find a niche that you can dominate and build from there. Follow the keyword rules above and you’ll get site that appears high in the search rankings for relevant, good volume keywords. This will help to grab the visitors.

Next time we’ll go into some more detail on why the four points are important, what happens if you don’t follow them and some handy tips to check how you’re doing on each point.

Megan Casey announced the new check tool on SquidBlog a couple of days ago. If you are a Squidoo user you’ll find the tool on your lensmaster dashboard, under My Lenses. Float your mouse over the lens you want to check and follow the link marked ‘health’.

The new health check has a few differences to other versions out there…

The recommendations on tags are quite different and include some very good tips. You should only choose a handful of simple, relevant tags for your lens. Many people have blogged and written about this in the past and the recommendation has often been to include as many tags as possible (Squidoo allows 40) and to stuff them full of all the long tail keyword variations you can think of.

It makes sense to simplify your tags though. They provide referral paths from other lenses so you need to choose tags which are used by other people on Squidoo. If your tags are too long and complex, you won’t find any other lenses sending you traffic.

There are also good recommendations on the primary tag. This is clearly used by Squidoo to determine what ads to place on your lens, so again, should not be too long and complex. The primary tag should also reflect the subject of your lens.

I also like the tips about renaming your lens modules so they don’t keep their default headings. This helps to differentiate yourself on search engines and also helps your lens readers to understand what you’re talking about. This is a good thing!

Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?

Imagine you are standing in the crowd and you want everyone to look at you (all 50,000 of them).

No chance. It’s the same problem as the internet.

How would you get yourself noticed in the football crowd?

One answer is that you could be one of the famous guys on the pitch wearing a #1 jersey. People have already heard of you and they already have their attention focused on the place where you are standing.

Let’s assume though that you are not already a famous person on the internet.

So how would you do it?

Try this: get a small group of friends who are with you at the match.

Get them to stand up and raise their arms with you. Then sit down.

Do this again. Do it a few times.

Pretty soon you’ll find that 10 people sitting around your friends are copying the message too.

Soon after that 50 people are doing it. Then 100, then 200, then 500, 2000, 50000.

You might not have the whole stadium staring at you, but you’ve got them to spread the message that you and your friends started.

How did it work?

You created a message and then amplified this by getting your friends to copy it. You repeated it until other people near your friends noticed it and recognized it as a familiar message (a mexican wave) and started copying it, knowing that other people would do the same.

The key here is that the message is recognized, repeated, familiar and easy to transmit. That’s all it takes.

People notice people noticing stuff (read that again if you want).

OK – how do you apply this to your website promotion?

Same technique. Find a message about your site. It could be a story, or a tagline, or a viral video. Make it simple and easy to understand and base it on familiar things.

Find some friends who will copy your message, and make sure they do this a few times just to get it noticed.

They could talk about your story on some blogs, pass on your tagline in some emails or digg the viral video.

If the message is simple enough and interesting enough to pass on it will build and amplify over time as more people pick it up.

So there’s your website promotion. Easy (!) Clearly the key here is to get the right kind of message. Keep it simple, make it clever and give it a try…

Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself: would you share your bookmarks with a friend? How about 100 friends? How about 1000?

If the answer is no then don’t worry. It doesn’t make you a bad person. There are some good reasons why it can happen so read on…

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and stumbleupon allow internet users to vote on their favorite sites. You can even start your own based on Pligg. If these bookmarked sites get lots of votes (or tags, or diggs, or whatever you want to call them) they will make it to the top and get noticed. This is web2.0 in action.

How do you share your bookmarks? It’s very easy to do this. On most of these sites you have a profile page which stores all of the tags that you have created. Sharing or promoting your bookmarks is just a case of sending people to this page with a link.

So what would 100 people think of your bookmarks? Would they think you are a good Digger or a great citizen on StumbleUpon? Are you consistently tagging interesting sites that are relevant to the category that you choose? If so then the answer to the first question should be yes!

If the answer is no, it might be that:

1. You are bookmarking for the sake of it
2. You just Stumble your own stuff to get traffic. If you do, and it’s good stuff, then this seems OK to me. It can look a little self-centered though
3. You are bookmarking to try to raise your profile

Here’s an easier question: if you don’t feel happy sharing all your bookmarks with friends then how about sharing a subset of your bookmarks? Maybe they are tagged with the word “proud”, or “worth sharing”. Many of the bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, allow you to use tags.

If you can consistently show that you are finding interesting pages that are relevant to your group of online friends then you will get a good reputation and people will start to look at what you are up to. This leads to more visitors and more traffic to your own sites. That’s a good thing, and means you can say yes to the original question.

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.

1. Obsessively check your website stats

2. Book a round-the-world-tour

3. Go on your round-the-world-tour

4. Set up an AdWords campaign

5. Obsessively check your AdWords clicks and costs

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Watch an entire season of American Idol

What do you like to do while you’re waiting for Google? Leave a comment or you can Vote for your own ideas on my Google Alternatives Squidoo Lens

This is my final post. After today there will be no more updates to this blog.

How does this make you feel? A little bit sad, maybe? It probably makes you feel like checking some of my previous posts. You’d better take a look before it stops and you lose the chance to benefit from all the great wisdom…

The truth is this isn’t my last post, but this demonstrates a technique that is often used to raise interest in a product, or a website.

“Available for one week only”

“$10 now but the price will be $30 after 15th May”

…and so on. I’m sure you are familiar. If you use this technique on your website then remember that you need to be authentic. If you’re pulling the product then don’t put it back 2 weeks later. If you do your customers may get angry and they may tell other potential customers that you are a fake.

Also don’t forget that this works for the short term only. “Available for one more year” doesn’t really have the same pull, does it?