1. Check the Facebook Guidelines

Let the eye-rolling commence. Yes, this is absolutely the first thing you need to check about when creating not just your cover photo, but every item of content on your page. Before you ask – no, Facebook doesn’t actually say what will happen if you violate the Facebook guidelines, but it’s probably not a good idea to risk having your page taken down over your cover photo, right?

2. Make sure it’s the right size

851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. You’ll want to get that right from the start when designing a photo, because why would you want to spend time getting a new image designed only to have it look funny once you upload it? You can view our full template for Facebook image sizes right here. (We’ve included a full image size guide in this post – scroll down to see it now.)

3. Keep mobile in mind

The Facebook mobile app doesn’t re-size your cover photo to fit everything in. Rather, it only displays the middle-to-right portion of your cover photo. If you’re targeting mobile users on Facebook, you might want to keep this in mind when including text or certain images in your desktop cover photo.
Keep the important information center- or right-aligned, or you could have large parts of it cut out to look something like this:

4. Lay out your content carefully

Be aware that your profile picture covers a section of your cover photo in the bottom left corner when the user lands on your page.
The part of the cover image that lies behind the profile picture won’t be visible until the user clicks on it, so be sure to keep that area clear of any text or information.

5. Keep it visual

This time last year, Facebook had finally done away with the 20% rule on text in cover photos.  This means that you have more freedom when designing the layout for your cover photo, but you should still be careful when including text in your designs.
Keep your copy concise and focus on the visual element of the design. That’s what the cover photo was designed for and will make your page much more engaging, even at first glance.

6. If you’re using text, make it count

When Facebook revoked the 20% text rule, they also allowed people to use calls-to-action in their cover photos. CTAs, key text and striking visuals – if you want your cover photo to help you convert, that’s all you need.

7. Speaking of text… got a hashtag?

If you’re promoting an event or product through your cover photo, be sure to include the relevant hashtag, where applicable. You can include it in the design of the actual image for recall purposes, but more importantly, remember to include it in the description to make your photo more discoverable.

8. Don’t forget the description

The calls to action on your cover photo won’t be clickable buttons, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still direct people to your landing page. Be sure to include clickable links in your cover photo description so that anyone clicking on your cover photo will be able to take the next natural step to wherever it is you want to take them!

9. Change your cover photo regularly

Make your cover photo work for you by changing it whenever you have something new to talk about. Highlight current campaigns, seasonal trends or special events by creating cover photos about them to build awareness or drive more traffic via the link in the description.

10. Own your content

You know by now that Facebook have removed most of the restrictions for page cover photos. In fact, they’ve dropped them all, except for one:

All cover photos are public, which means anyone visiting your Page will be able to see it. Cover photos must follow the Pages Terms and can’t be deceptive, misleading or infringe on anyone else’s copyright.

Simply put: be truthful, own your content and don’t make people change their cover photos to match yours.  Fair enough, right?
One last thing – keep other, non-Facebook regulations in mind when promoting something on your cover photo, especially if gifts and prizes are involved. The Maltese Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LGA) has specific regulations for any form of lottery or luck-of-the-draw competitions – even those held on Facebook or other networks – so keep that in mind before you start pumping your precious marketing budget into your next competition.
As promised earlier, here’s a handy guide to all image sizes you’ll need to consider when running a Facebook page. We’ll be sharing one of these for all the major social networks over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out!

The post 10 Tips for creating Cover Photos that work appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

I was set thinking about this while I was having a conversation with a friend recently who was complaining about the quality of search results and the way search engine optimisation works. Her point (which is a valid one, to be fair) was that the giants in the industry (for example eBay and Amazon) always get first places in search results for products they carry.

In order to learn how to search better you need to understand how search engines work and how people try to find ways of gaming the system in order to get better results.
The first and most obvious issue to keep in mind is that search engines only have one aim in mind: Delivering the most relevant results to whoever is searching. They might make all their money from advertisers, but at the end of the day the only reason people keep coming back to the Googles of this world is because they find what they need most of the times they search.
This means that something like Google will do all it can to sort out relevant content and to use a massively complex set of criteria in order to choose which content should be rated higher.
It was all simple enough when Google sorted its search results based on an internet which was not geared towards its sorting methods. However, once people realised that Google’s ranking meant a lot to the traffic you were receiving, people started analysing them in order to find ways to boost their placing in searches. From then on, it’s been a constant cat and mouse chase with Google improving their algorithms in order to filter out cheaters and keep on delivering the most relevant content on a regular basis.

There are thousands of factors that affect search engine rankings, but I’ve picked on one for the intents and purposes of this article: linking.

Links & SEO

Traditional SEO companies found ways to trip the system in their favour. Website publishers caught on to this and started cashing in on it. At first, Google used to determine your relevance based on the number of links to your site. This made sense at the time, because it was assumed that people linking to your site are a “vote of confidence”. This tactic was discovered and people started putting up links left, right and centre to boost their search engine rankings.

Google tweaked this to check the text in the hyperlink to try improving the system, but this was not enough. Next, it started checking the number of outgoing links on the page and splitting scoring based on that (so a site with 2 outgoing links only gave 50% weight to each of the sites linked from it). It then started checking the quality of the sites linking in to your site and giving you more scoring based on that. Finally, and in its most drastic clampdown yet, it decided to start penalising all low quality links pointing into a site. This meant that the “old” method of submitting links was basically not only not helping your rankings, but getting you penalised.

When traditional SEO companies tell you that they are working on submitting your site to build links, they will lead you to believe that they can bring your score up by simply increasing the number of links into your site. But the truth is simple: You do not want to game the system because you do not want to be in a system that can be gamed.

Search engines should improve, search engines should be doing their job better in the future, and history has shown that any time the large search engines have found someone trying to “cheat” their way up to the top, the fall was long and fast. Just ask RapGenius. Google caught them cheating and they lost around 80% of their traffic overnight. OK, they did get their traffic back after apologising publicly and rectifying their errors, but they were super quick to react and had enough clout to carry it off. Not everyone has major VC backup.

The bottom line

If you want to be found in search engines, there are things that you can do. It is not a lost cause, on the contrary, it is a very exciting time to be in the game. The equation is very simple, the more likeable your site is, the more chances you have of being noticed by search engines. There are thousands of technical factors to work on, and we do encourage you to make sure that all of them are bang on. Once you’ve sorted this out, work on a two-pronged strategy that will see you winning search engines over:

• Build a site with content, resources and tools that people want to link to, talk about, refer to and rave about.
• Work on a guest posting strategy that sees you building a slow and steady stream of natural inbound and outbound links.

At Switch we specialize in doing this as one of our services, learn more about this here: https://switch.com.mt/seo-malta/

But that’s enough for now. We’ll stop at the what. We’ll go into how to do these in future blog posts.

The post Search engines: The background, and why traditional SEO should die. appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.