With 500 million users and counting, companies have been flocking to Facebook in droves. However, brands must ask themselves whether fans are flocking to their brands. If your Facebook profile isn’t optimized for search, you may not be seeing the traffic you should see. As you build or enhance your brand’s Facebook presence, here are some SEO best practices to consider. ?
First, give yourself a good name. The best page names are focused on the brand term, or more specifically, how consumers search for the brand. For instance, think “Coke” instead of “Coca-Cola,” or “Burger King instead of “BK.” When you chose a name, be sure to understand how consumers search for your brand by using a keyword research tool so your page ranks high for popular searches. ?
The same idea goes for selecting your “vanity URL.” Once your page has more than 25 consumers who “like” it, ?Facebook allows you to choose a username. Visit Facebook.com/usernames for more information. Facebook even helps brands avoid “name squatting,” or the practice of consumers signing up for new accounts with brands’ names instead ?of their own. ?
Brands should also finesse the “about” and “info” sections on Facebook. For pages to rank well for specific phrases, ?especially category terms such as “insurance,” incorporate targeted search phrases in the “about” and “info” sections. Next, make sure to set the “info” tab — a copy-heavy, crawlable section — as your default landing page.?
When it comes to text and links, more content equals more value. Pages with a lot of text and content are valued highly by search engines, and pages with more text tend to rank higher. Since native text copy opportunities are limited ?because of the default “about” and “info” sections, adding tabs with copy-heavy sections will benefit your page’s ratio of text and help rankings. ?
Marketers should also be sure to post regular and relevant Facebook status updates. They are more than a vehicle for keeping your followers updated. In addition, status updates are a great way to build the relevance of your page and increase your brand’s chances of appearing in the “real-time search results” section of Google’s results page. ?
Last of all, brands should remember to “connect the dots.” Since search engines view the number of links that point to a page as a critical ranking factor, make sure to include links to your Facebook page from your other non-Facebook digital brand assets, and vice versa. The more links your page has pointing to it, the more popular it will become. The more popular it becomes, the better it will rank.
