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Glad that you are planning to get links, the legitimate way… there can be several ways to get quality likes on your facebook fan page. My suggestions are that you should go for the likes that are coming from your targeted audience and in order to do that here are my advices: As you said you offer a personal development training, so why not offer a special discount to your facebook fans only and if someone wants to avail a discount he/she have to be the facebook fan. Encourage targeted people to like you and share it with others though Tees, activities and others… Offer free lecture on personal development training and make it available for the people upon liking the page. There can be many ideas so the more you can invest the more likes you can get out of it.

Joel, It's also important to point out that you should use the same Google account that's associated with your Google+ page.  This way the two can be paired together.

Did you get it to where you wanted it?  I see it has moved to the social share bar.

Anytime you see "traffic exchange" beware...

I'll probably do the API. I know that Yelp doesnt want business owners to solicit reviews.  However, it's extremely difficult to get reviews unless you do.  I send out follow up emails to clients after each job and ask for a review (positive or negative), but I've still only received about 13 reviews in a year.  I'm even thinking about creating a giveaway drawing for those that review each month.

Good timing - one of Australia's biggest sporting stars has just shut down his Twitter account after getting outed for buying followers. Article here Quite funny that a fellow sports star outed him! So yes, it does happen.

Targeted likes and shares on facebook page will matter on brand credibility, if like and share comes from different areas where the business should be just a local business would give an alarm. Why? Because questions will arise from there, are the likes and shares for real? are they not just spam accounts?and so forth. It won't really give much on keywords SERP, unless you have good content on your facebook fan page that includes yourr keyword or they are currently active and engaging in your fan page- I was talking about the fans. Hope this helps.

Numbers make a visual impact but there will be no interactivity or brand loyalty...

Just wanted to let you know that Google has announced they ignore links from UpDowner. Search Engine Roundtable covered it at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-updowner-ignored-15369.html. In the Google forum itself, a person from UpDowner lists how you block the updowner bot, and how you can request that they remove their links. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/MCbFlzbI5eE/discussion

The Like Box will work great. At the end of the day you are looking for likes for your page to build relationships with users. Likes on a URL won't necessarily boost rankings but does help give exposure. My opinion is use tools like the Like Box for the main page or somewhere static while having the "like button" for dynamic URLs to target more unique URLs. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

A few things, your site is not working when clicking on Facebook icon. It brings me to Facebook.com (i'm not logged in). Another thing, you can get direct likes from your home page by using plugins like the "Like Box" that can be found here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/. Also OSE updates every month and they will be updating at the end of this month. This will update your FB likes assuming the likes are for your URL.

I definitely recommend using google +1 on your website.  I think it will just be more and more important as your business grows especially for local search. I think as more and more people use it we will see a bigger impact in the organic rankings for those who have a lot of +'s. Certain markets may be more apt to certain social sites. I think google plus has a larger user base in the computer/techie community verses your average person although they are pushing it on a lot of their gmail users. I'd say put it all out there and see what works best.

Hi Ben Thanks for reply. Yes I believe people are more likely to use FB Search to search for page/company/brand name than actual product keywords, but when a company's name is pronounced First Second Third, even though its written concatenated I'm thinking they are more likely to key in to search as seperate words, and if they can't remember all the words and just type in some, then as FB SEarch only matches on full strings I think going for separate words in Page/Username makes more sense. I guess this question is one where I'm pretty much 80% sure of what is right, I was just kinda hoping from some input from folks with much experience than me in Facebook marketing to confirm my conclusions.

Hi Nightwing, Nice to see you here. My advice is to wait for the promised merge and see where you're at then. In the meantime, you can submit your email address to Google to be notified of the merge. Here's the link to the form: http://support.google.com/places/bin/request.py?contact_type=verification_address_collection&&rd=1 Hope this helps! Miriam

Thank you for the info!

You're right that people may not be fans of pest control like they would Pepsi, but you can create interesting content that people will share (worst infestation photos, top 10 most common pests, before/after). The goal with social will be to share and disseminate content, not direct Facebook fans for the company. I do agree that social should be a part of what should be a more dedicated website content strategy.

Agreed! See the problem is that these companies are probably reaching out to small businesses... explaining the association with SERP's and Social Signals. Then they pitch you $29.99 for 500 Likes... if these companies are in existence and continue to be.. is because they are doing a good job at selling ... Now is it a 'fatal technique' ? I would probably say Yes... but would like to see some real data to make sure. (Not that I am interesting in Purchasing Likes) but because it is no different than 'Buying LINKS' - and this is, unfortunately, a common practice in our industry.

Thanks, I'll do that now - hopefully this can be easily resolved.