Ranking Number 1

Optimizing Your Facebook Page – Social SEO

Facebook is rapidly becoming an essential part of many businesses’ online strategy, and employing an effective optimization plan is an important step in ensuring your content reaches the largest targeted audience possible. Facebook is making a serious attempt to compete with the primary search engines in becoming the visitors’ place of choice for finding the content they need.

Tradition search engine optimization consists of on-page and off-page tactics, together with a significant amount of keyword targeting and link-building. But unlike traditional SEO, Facebook optimization adds a more complex layer of social interaction that has a fundamentally bigger effect on the popularity of your page and its contents.

Facebook has 500 million active users, with 50% logging in every day, and each user has an average of 130 friends. The impact of this is staggering, not just in the depth of the social graph created, and the number of new high quality targeted visitors you can reach, but also how many existing customers and employees are already extremely active on their platform. And since search will emerge anywhere there’s a significant amount of data, Facebook is a critical new channel for anyone who takes their online presence seriously.

Here are some important steps in Facebook optimization that you should consider before starting your Facebook page.

Selecting your page name

Whereas titles in web pages have latitude to contain keywords to attract engines, the same approach in Facebook can appear spammy, causing visitors to have less trust in its content, and become less likely to ‘like’ the page. Facebook has also removed pages that are too broad or generic, so your title should represent your business name and area of expertise rather than focusing on keywords or general topics.

Choosing your Facebook URL

Facebook allows sites with a minimum number of ‘likes’ to establish their own URL, which is shown as www.facebook.com/my-chosen-url. Facebook has a long list of generic terms and trademarks that you’re not allowed to use, so it’s best to choose the shortest name that reflects your business or brand without appearing to target broad terms. Also note that once you’ve selected the name, it can never be changed – so choose wisely.

Use ‘About’ and ‘Info’ Effectively

In these areas, you can add keyword-rich descriptions of your page, together with outbound links to your website, and local information about where your business is physically located. These areas are frequently overlooked on business pages, but represent almost all of what you can do from an on-page SEO perspective.

Using FBML

It’s relatively easy to add a static FBML box to your page – which is the Facebook equivalent of HTML, a stripped-down and modified version of the real thing. While there are all sorts of things you can’t do with FBML, it’s easy to render graphics and text as you would in a basic web page, and all of the regular on-page SEO techniques can be used here.

Build your fan base

Although ‘fans’ have been replaced with ‘likes’, the principle is the same though the fan terminology is more logical. Put simply, more popular pages rank better than less popular ones. You can build fans by driving customers to your Facebook page and placing your Facebook widget on any external sites you have.

Employ Facebook ads

Facebook ads are often cheaper and more effective than search engine PPC equivalents, and can help bring demographically-targeted fans to your page. This is singly one of the best ways to develop page growth – and don’t forget that once someone clicks your ad, they’ve effectively added your page to their news stream for a long time (unlike PPC, where the visitor either converts or leaves).

Build your content

Facebook loves pictures, events and discussions – make sure you add media and start conversations with your fans. Facebook, by the way, now hosts more pictures and media than Picasa, FlickR and all the other photo sharing websites combined. The more interaction that occurs between Facebook members and your page, the more popular the page becomes – and in the Facebook world, popularity is everything.

Be Fresh

Content ages quickly in social media and Facebook is no different – make sure you add new status updates and media regularly, since anything over 30 days old disappears from member newsfeeds and becomes irrelevant in page promotion. You must develop a disciplined routine for constantly keeping your page fresh, and giving members a reason to visit and like your content.

Facebook optimization is different to traditional SEO, but still requires careful planning and maintenance to maximize its effect. For more information, take a look at the new edition of The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko.

Tags: facebook, seo, social media