Facebook SEO Strategies Everyone Should Know

Facebook pages for businesses have become increasingly popular over time and more and more business owners are learning how to become Facebook marketers.  Facebook has tried to make it even easier for people to spread the word about their businesses by creating more optimization opportunities for pages to get more traffic through SEO.  As a Chicago SEO firm, we cannot stress the importance of search engine optimization enough!  It can do wonders to help you appear at the top of a Google search.  Outside of optimizing your Facebook page, you should also optimize your social media pages, like Facebook.  What can you do to optimize your Facebook page?  Focus your optimization on the following parts of your Facebook:

(1) The URL: We rank the Facebook URL as the most important factor in optimizing a Facebook page.  In the past, Facebook has been known to punish generically titled pages, so we suggest avoiding that in case Facebook cracks down on that again.   Choose a username that very closely represents your brand or business.  That's the best and safest option.  Also keep in mind that once you've chosen your URL you cannot change it, so if you're not sure, sleep on it.  Choose when you're certain.

(2) The page name: Choose the best name for your Facebook page and keep it.  Choosing the right name is vital, so choose carefully.  Your title should not be stuffed with keywords to avoid looking like spam.  Fans will be less likely to share the page with friends and more likely to hide your updates from their newsfeed.  Your name should authentically represent your business.  Recently, Facebook has been disabling updates for generically named Facebook pages, which will negatively affect their ability to reach fans.  Changing your Facebook page's name could hurt your rankings, so once you pick it, keep it.

(3) Info tab: Your info tab should feature metadata about your page.  This tab gives you the opportunity to provide more information about the page.  Filling out the info field gives you the ability to include keywords and links, which could help increase the content score for Google searches.

(4) About box: Similar to the info tab, the about box on your page should again feature plenty of content filled with keywords to help with search rankings.  The about box is one of the most frequently read sections of a person's Facebook profile.  Why is that?  Because of it's location on the profile page.  It is located at the top of the page right below the main picture.  Most people notice that section first, so make sure you provide good, keyword heavy information.

(5) Page stream:  Status updates are a great place to provide links to wherever you would like your Facebook friends to go and are a powerful way to help you place links right near the top of your page.  And get this-- Google boosts pages that link to relevant sites.  It really is as simple as that.  Provide links to external pages that coordinate with the rest of your page's content and Google will take notice, providing you with a rankings boost.

Looking for more tips on optimizing your Facebook page?  Feel free to leave us a comment or contact us.