Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Outstanding, William! Simply outstanding! Thanks for pulling my head out my rear.

RE: "Funny, OMG, weasel and rant topics will generate more traffic than any sort of biz generation."

This is why I failed to see the value of FB in the beginning.

I really don't get this. Promises of Madonna showing her panties will get more Likes and traffic than any legit business.

I have a competitor in Australia who is a new entrant into aviation safety software. My site (http://www.aviation-sms.com)has considerably more content, links and time in existence than his. aerosdb.com.

Competitor ranks higher than me, and I see that he has a lot of tweets and FB likes. Hence the start of this "Social Networking" crusade.

And the reasoning behind the question: how many FB likes do I need to make a difference. Maybe I should put a campaign promising to show Madonna in her panties. If they Like me, I show a picture. (just kidding).

btw, thank you for taking time to respond!

most of my clients (decision makers) are older generation and not FaceBook users.

These are managers in the aviation industry. I don't think FaceBook will be a prime marketing strategy. I just need to get some Google power from it because Google is evaluating the "social" aspect and using it to help determine rankings.

Just started the social scene.

We have a FaceBook page

https://www.facebook.com/SMSPro.Safety.Management.System

Only about  a year old, and until two weeks ago, we had about 8-10 likes.

Then I started working on getting likes (please like this page if you can).

Question: How many Likes do I need for Google to start counting this as significant?

Would also appreciate any comments on FaceBook page to help.

What is an optimal size for a description of an image without being penalized.

In the past, I would put whole paragraphs in the alt and title tags. These were well structured sentences to avoid the "keyword stuffing." Just wondering whether any research has been done on this element.

I saw Followerwonk. Pretty cool.

I saw an interesting example of SUCCESSFUL Twitter & FaceBook posting and how their social activity trumped my SEO efforts.

http://aviation-sms.com has modest domain authority. We've been selling aviation safety software for 5 years.

A startup entered the arena and they are outranking us in the search engines. Not because of keywords or backlinks, but because of twitter posts (~45,000) and FaceBook likes, (maybe a couple hundred).

This opened my eyes! WIDELY and I realized the value of their social activity. I look at 45,000 tweets and think that this doesn't seem reasonable. They must be using tools to generate Tweets.

So I'm on the social media track now as part of my SEO strategy, something I've neglected for years.

For SEO purposes to get links, does it make any difference whether URLs are shortened? Do the search engines analyze key words in twitter URLs for relevance?

I think the question was not phrased properly.

I don't want to push feeds, but PULL feeds. Will the pulled feeds add SEO value?

If we put relevant RSS feeds on a site, will it help the SEO value?

Years ago, I shied away from RSS feeds because they slowed the site down and I didn't like relying on them. However, the past couple years, the Internet has become better, especially in Alaska.