16 Comments »This is Day 7 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
For those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internet marketing, you probably are not aware of what search engine optimization is. The main goal of search engine optimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to any given site by search engines. Currently search engines (and mostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journey around the web. While many users will go directly to their favorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a day by most internet users to discover resources they haven’t previously found.
What’s great about Facebook’s public profiles is that Facebook already has a substantial amount of search engine juice. Google alone claims to have indexed over 503 million pages within the site.
1. Get A Good URL
URLs are a large portion or search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information as possible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. Currently Facebook enables those pages with over 100 fans to get a vanity URL. A vanity URL is the short Facebook URL that helps people easily access your page. For example our blog, AllFacebook, has the following URL: http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook which makes it easier to access. The short URL is extremely effective at getting Google “juice”.
2. Configure Your Default Tab
On day 15 we will be going over how to configure a tab as a “landing page” but the primary thing here is to ensure that the first page being crawled by Google contains relevant text. You can set the default tab by clicking the “Settings” link on your Facebook Page and then selecting the tab you’d like to have displayed by default. Currently I’m not focused heavily on promoting my Facebook Page so the current landing page is more focused on getting users to take action then to organically drive them. This emphasizes how important it is to understand your objectives. You probably don’t want to create ranking issues with your site versus Facebook.
3. Generate Links To Your Page
If you are looking to drive traffic to your page from searching engines, the most important variable is always incoming links. One quick way to boost your Facebook page rankings is by linking to your page from your existing website. Additionally, any way you can get links from other sites will help increase your rankings. On their own, Facebook Pages tend to rank extremely well but a little additional effort will go a long way. One great way to increase the number of incoming links is by participating in forums around the web and setting a signature which links back to your page. If you are active in any forums on the web, I suggest placing your Facebook Page as one of your signature URLs. This will most definitely help you gain some traction in Google.
4. Link To Other Relevant Pages
I’ll be elaborating on this tip in Day 10 but essentially linking to relevant content helps boost your ranking. If you created a site that was about shoes but kept linking to blogs that were about technology, do you think that would really help out the readers with finding what they’re looking for? Probably not. Google takes into account the relevance of pages you are linking to when calculating the relevance of any given page. Try linking to a few relevant sites. There’s a good chance that you’ll not only help out your readers but increase your overall Google rank.
5. Use Facebook For Inbound Links To Your Company Website
One of the most important components of search engine optimization is generating inbound links. While some companies will take aggressive measures to generate inbound links, generating a link from you Facebook page is extremely valuable. Take advantage of landing pages and the information tab to link back to your company’s website. If you use the Static FBML application that I highlighted on Day 3, you’ll be able to post links that will help boost your search engine rankings.
6. Select A Good Name For Your Facebook Page
The name of your Facebook is extremely important. Many search engine optimization experts will tell you that spending a lot of time on the title of a website isn’t important as long as that page is written for the reader. On Facebook Pages however there are few things you can use to boost your search engine rankings and page titles happen to be one of those things. Don’t go overboard with your name and create a keyword dense title. Just name the title after your company or whatever phrase will be most effective for fans that are searching for you.
7. Post Keyword Rich Content In About Box
That mysterious box at the top left of your Facebook Page is one of the few areas on your page which is accessible to search engines. It’s also relatively high up in the page HTML which means that search engines will give the text priority over text that’s further down the page. Take the opportunity to fill the about box with keyword rich content. While it may not give a huge boost to your rankings in Google, you ‘ll want all the help you can get.
Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO Juice
Some resources on the web have suggested that generating links to your site by posting links to the news feed. While it may drive you traffic it’s not going to generate any SEO juice because Facebook dynamically generates feed content using javascript. Additionally, if you click a link from within Facebook it will redirect you through a Facebook pass-through page. As far as I know, Facebook isn’t making any exceptions for search engines and providing news feed backlinks.
Conclusion
These were just seven tips but overall you should be considering your Google rank when developing your Facebook Page strategy. Since an increasing number of people are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that the person following a link on Google also happens to be on Facebook and could quickly become a fan. While targeting keywords other than your brand name is not at easy from within Facebook Pages, any effort you make is well worth it.
Daily Task
Make at least three adjustments to your Facebook Page that will help boost the optimization of your page. Also determine where to put a link from your site back to your Facebook Page that will help build awareness and generate some SEO juice for your Facebook page.
Thank you. This is easy to understand and written so that anyone can find use in it. This was not only helpful but was actionable for me.
it should be noted that links from Facebook and many other social media sites are no-followed so probably won’t count towards building your inbound links
Edit icon in the edit page section is not working since 8 hours, any idea what is going on with Facebook?
@Bill - it should also be noted that Matt Cutts advised webmasters to take off the No follow tags. The SEO social networking stuff still works.
Hi Nick,
Couple of thoughts on wall posts. You are correct if you use the Facebook Link (attachment) feature or share function, links are created using a Facebook redirect. This redirect happens when the title of the attachment/link is clicked.
If a link is in the status, or description of the attachment/link that link will be called directly and not through the Facebook redirection. But these non re-directed links have no-follow tags on them.
If you use the Vitrue Social Relationship Manager (SRM), the first application suite to leverage the Facebook Stream API for Pages, links are posted directly to the wall without the Facebook redirect and without the no-follow tag.
The Vitrue SRM can create links with Image, Video or Audio attachments. All viewable on the page and the Fan’s news feed. I’m quite certain my PR team reached out to you when we launched, and the invitation still stands if you’d like a tour of the Vitrue SRM application suite.
http://vitrue.com/blog/2009/08/11/introducing-the-vitrue-social-relationship-manager/
http://srm.vitrue.com/
thanks,
-mike
Michael Strutton, VP Product Management
Vitrue, Inc. - we make brands social
http://vitrue.com
I want to set a vanity URL for our company’s Facebook Fan Page but I’m having trouble: I can’t locate where exactly to do this, but I did find an old link for when FB first started using vanity URLs, and it takes me to a page that says I must first verify my account by having a code sent to a mobile phone. Everyone in our office has already used their own mobile phones to verify their own, personal accounts, so what can I do now??
(Our Fan Page has over 100 fans, so we ARE able to get a vanity URL based on those stats)
@Jack - I think Matt’s most recent “no-follow” discussion was about sites using the no-follow internally to sculpt page rank. I’ve seen a few cases where it appears that sites using this tactic to sculpt their page rank have been penalized.
I don’t believe he made any comment about no-follow as it applies to links going off-site from forums, blogs, etc. I imagine no-follows in these cases would still hold their value to keep spammers from overusing the tactic to manipulate rankings.
I work under the assumption that Google understands the differences between the two uses of nofollow (internally & externally) and treats them accordingly.
That being said I’m still putting our links on Facebook and other social media sites where there’s the chance that I can drive some qualified traffic whether there’s a chance of passing PR or not. And there’s always a chance you can pickup some new links from third parties by keeping your info out there.
What about becoming a Fan, not everyone that visits your FB page becomes your Fan. Is there anyway to post a “Become A Fan” button on our website?
Thanks for the tips. I think it is necessary to open seperate accounts for personal and business. I signed up for facebook to promote my business, but a bunch of my friends and family were on there.
Thanks for the great tips. There are so many things that you can take advantage on FB these days. It’s the only matter take action and do what ever you learn from here.
I am not the SEO/ SEM guy but I just have a quick question.
Look at this result real quick.
Search Term - “Callaway Golf Fans” on Google.
Look at the #2 on the first page. It is linked to a specific status update instead of the fan page.
Simliar concept:
Search Term - “Callaway Golf Community” on Google
The last one on the first page is also linked to a specific status update intead of the fan page.
Doesn’t this go against your suggestion? “Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO Juice”
What do you all think?
Could you be more specific about how to get a vanity URL? I have instaled this application http://apps.facebook.com/webaddress/ but couldn’t get the domain http://www.facebook.com/* like yours.
I just got my facebook page vanity url 5 days ago. However, the url when typed in at facebook.com/MyCompanyName is not working. If you are not logged on, it just takes you to the login page. Is there a setting that needs to be fixed to have my site show up on google so I can use the facebook badge and link to my site?
Other pages are working but mine is not.
Any suggestions?
Sheila, I’m having the same trouble. how do you link to a facebook page from an outside source - the link just reroutes to the homepage. perhaps you have to have an account with facebook to see facebook pages? that seems strange.
Make sure that you’re not confusing a standard user profile page with a “Become a Fan of” page. With the latter you can actually add followed links now with a little bit of Facebook wizardry.
Thanks for the tips. I think it is necessary to open seperate accounts for personal and business. I signed up for facebook to promote my business, but a bunch of my friends and family were on there.