How to SEO (optimize ) your Facebook page
Guess what? Facebook just got an even easier place to advertise.
“Easy” doesn’t exactly mean simple, though. It means there are now more ways to do it, and if you know how to do it right you’ll end up reeling in the benefits of big return for minimal effort. Isn’t that what everyone wants to accomplish with their advertising? A little SEO consulting and you’ll be on your way to success in no time.
It’s been a long time since Facebook social media was just another way a bunch of college kids could keep in touch online. Today, literally hundreds and hundreds of businesses are on Facebook promoting their products and services in a very specialized way, to a very targeted audience. Before you get too excited about the sales to made through the social networking site, though, you have to remember that just having a profile and updating your status every now and then isn’t enough in today’s online, interactive world. You need to be very conscious of search engine optimisation on Facebook social media just like you are everywhere else your business presence is made on the web.
Search Engine Land’s Marry Weintraub shares this opinion. As part of his online SEO consulting, Marty says that optimizing a Facebook page is becoming more and more important, especially since the company ahs bought FriendFeed. In addition to this, Facebook also has a real-time search option, so on page SEO opportunities for your page (and everyone else’s) has gotten even larger. In order to maximize your impact, you need to be very careful about where in your profile you put your keywords and how you go about targeting potential customers.
Weintraub summed it the problem of how to approach advertising through social networking media nicely when he said “Follow the timeless axioms of social media participation. Give more than you take by contributing unselfish & recurrent content recommendations for others to consume. Be holistic in how you promote your own content and (as always) think in terms of supporting the community first.”
In other words, don’t spam. There is a very fine line between letting people know about products you and your friends or complimentary businesses like without coming across as a spammer. Cross this line too many times and you’ll start to tarnish your online reputation and this can, in some cases, be the downfall of a company. If you bring your business into disrepute online, there is practically nothing to stop the word from spreading worldwide (literally).
So, with real time search results and opportunities to connect directly with your target audience, what can you do maximise the potential of your Facebook page?
- Choose a name for your page and DON’T CHANGE IT.
- Choose a clear, simple and obvious URL for your page. For example, www.facebook.com/my-page-name-here.
- See your about box? That’s where you want to squash in as many keywords as you can (without sounding like you’re just trying to squash in as many keywords as you can).
- Fill in as many of the info boxes as possible. Information like location and company mission will help in your on page SEO.
- Uses boxes to add quality content to your site.
- Use the page to link back to your main business website. Whenever something new goes up on the company site, link back to it through your Facebook page stream.
- Post photos! No-one wants to look at just text. Being online is all about multimedia.
- Post links back to your Facebook page from different sites to get more inbound links.
- More fans = more intra-Facebook inbound links.
- 10. Post things that your fans can comment on and like. Do everything you can to be as interactive as possible, that’s what will get you the most return.
