SEO Basics For Facebook

Now that you have finally managed to get your company website buzzing with activity, you need to turn your thoughts to arguably the most important social media channel, your Facebook page.  Your question should be how to optimize your Facebook page for search engines.  Even big brands don’t take proper advantage of this interactive media.

Only about 30% of the big brands have their Facebook profiles ranking within the first 20 results!  The way the internet is structured today, social media provides amazing channels for consumer engagement and participation.

Customized URL

Facebook recently created a snazzy little way of getting your brand out there, getting your very own permanent and customized URL.  The format of your new Facebook address would appear as “Facebook.com/customizedURL”.  However, before you can get this, you need to have set up a page and get a minimum of 25 likes.

I suggest that you keep your customized URL as close to your company name as possible.  This makes it easy for your customers and those interested in your site to remember it.  Some parties, however, applaud the use of keywords within the URL itself.

The only problem with this is that it Facebook doesn’t allow the use of hyphens and underscores in the URL.  Whatever name you decide on, please pick wisely.  Once you choose it, you can never change it again. So, think about it and do it carefully.

Backlinks

For your Facebook page, some of the rules of normal SEO don’t apply.  When planning on how to optimize your Facebook page for search engines, linking still applies, though not exactly the same way.  Google and other search engines use the indexing method to rank pages.  The indexing works for your page in general, but not for content within your page.

For content within your page, it is important to note that linking does not work for ranking.  Putting up links to content within your page does not help with the search engine rank.  However, this does not mean it is not important.  This presents a great opportunity for your traffic to interact with relevant content and thus introduce them to your Facebook presence.

Info Section

Keywords are an important part of SEO strategy.  When thinking of how to optimize your Facebook page for search engines using keywords, the Info section plays a great part.

This part is typically divided into three.  For the first part, the “About” segment, fill in a small amount of information.  It is only a few sentences long and appears on your page for the consumer to read.  It should be short but informative.

The other two sections, the “Description” and “General Information” give you space to insert more information, and are where ideally your keywords should come in.

Keep It Active

If you want to properly understand how to keep optimize your Facebook page for search engines, you must first keep it properly updated.  Making sure your page has fresh, interactive and innovative content is ideally the first step to getting your Facebook page optimized.

Otherwise, those who land on your page will not have anything to keep them coming back to it.  Remember, Facebook is an interactive platform, keep it that way!