How to optimize your Facebook fan page SEO ~Guest post by Nathan Latka

There are a lot of rumors going around about the proper ways to optimize your Facebook fan page for the search engines (SEO). Some people suggest using keywords in the filenames of your uploads, and others say you need to have every URL you own linked to your fan page. If you’re anything like me, you don’t particularly have time to sit around and search for a tip here and a tip there, only to find out weeks later that it did you no good.
This post provides a few more tips on optimizing your Facebook page for SEO right now.

Choose the best name for your Facebook page

1This may sound like a no-brainer. However, it’s the most basic step when it comes to optimizing your brand on Facebook, and is also the most important.
There is always the temptation to stuff your fan page name with tons of keywords, like “Bob’s Bakery – Muffins, Bagels, Cookies, Breads – Catering & Events.” In actuality, having a name like this can hurt your viral growth rate inside Facebook. If you appear too spammy, your fans will be less likely to engage with your page, let alone share posts and updates with their friends. In fact, people can even hide your updates from their news feed – the horror!
Don’t be too generic, either. Facebook’s intent behind fan pages is that they represent real businesses, brands, personalities, etc. By choosing something too generic, like Travel, Sports, Fishing, etc., you run the risk of Facebook shutting down your ability to post updates and reach out to new fans.
Quick tip: The first word in your fan page title is given the most weight by Google.

Create a custom fan page vanity URL

Use a brief 140-character description for your fan page so your whole message displays in the search engine’s snippet

2After your fan page has 25 Likes, Facebook gives you the ability to create a unique URL (or usernames as Facebook calls them) for the page. Because URLs are heavily weighted by search engines, it is vital that your fan page URL reflects an aspect of your business.
If, by some misalignment in the stars, you find that another fan page has claimed your business’ name already, make sure to include what your business is about in the URL. You can check out some different username options Facebook offers before selecting your one for your fan page.

Use keywords in strategic locations on your fan page

3Just like traditional websites, keyword optimization is the most fundamental form of on-site SEO. The most important pieces to pay attention to are the About section, Mission, and Company Description, since these areas are actually pulled from your fan page as SEO elements.
Here is an example of how a search engine would index your page:
SEO Title = Your fan page name
Meta Description = Fan page name + the About section of your page
H1 = Your fan page name

To optimize your page for local searches, it is very important to include your address, city, state, and zip. For product-related searches, the Company Overview, Mission, and Products fields should be filled in with your appropriate information.
Quick tip: You may want to consider using a brief 140-character description for your fan page — perhaps similar to your website’s metadata — so your whole message displays in the search engine’s snippet.

Include your phone number and address

4As surprising as it sounds, there are a lot of businesses out there that don’t include this type of info on their fan page. As a majority of your sales may be from online traffic, it can appear to be not quite so important for you to include. But remember, indexing your brand for local search results is crucial to growing your Facebook page.
In addition, Google places higher importance on pages with specific information like your business’s phone number and address. So, pages that include this type of data can effectively increase your brand’s overall SEO.

Backlink to your fan page on existing channels

5The more inbound links to your page, the more authoritative your page is according to Google, and you will be ranked higher. That is why it is very important to bloggers when they have their content linked to from other websites, blogs, etc.
This same principle applies to your Facebook fan page. So, where it is appropriate, include a link to your fan page from your other digital channels, like your website, blog, and Twitter profile.

Optimize Facebook fan page status updates

6When posting updates to your Facebook wall, remember that the first 18 characters of a Facebook post serve as the meta description. So, take advantage of the option when Facebook prompts you to “Write something…” since that text will be considered the SEO title for that update. Including direct links to your small business website in your updates is also a good practice to follow.

Quick tip: Just like your fan page’s name, Google places a higher importance on the first word of your update, so you may want to consider making that a keyword.

SEO for Facebook Notes

7Facebook Notes is something that has been underutilized. When used appropriately, Facebook Notes can provide your fan page with an effective way at increasing your overall SEO. The SEO elements pulled in from Facebook Notes are:
SEO Title = the title of your note
Meta data = Your fan page name wrote a note titled, your note’s title
Facebook Notes gives your page the ability to create multiple “pages” underneath the main fan page. Notes are also a good way to expand on special offers or events that your business is hosting and have them indexed in search engines.
(A note about Notes: Facebook Notes were sort of put out to pasture in late 2001, early 2012 with the advent of Timeline and the new rule that status updates can run as long as 63,206 characters, or about 9,000 words. They’re still there; just follow this convention: https://www.facebook.com/jdlasica/notes)

Bottom line for Facebook fan page SEO

Don’t forget that the overarching objective of Facebook SEO is adding to the value of your overall brand. It is important to pay attention to the comparison between raw traffic and engagement level.
While using the methods above can help boost your search engine results page ranking, the most crucial part is that it coincides with an awesome product and incredible engagement to grow your following.


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" Your keywords suck and are outdated "

By Chris Abraham

You probably built your website years ago by now. You’ve probably never updated your CV, just added your latest jobs and clients to the top. Your corporate bio, what you do, your products and services were probably written back either when your company opened, when you ported your brochures to the web, or the last time you did a major revision. Like I said, probably years ago.

Admit it

Why does this matter? Because language evolves very rapidly and how it evolves has little or nothing to do with what you call yourself, how you describe you your products and services, or the keywords you have locked and loaded into your tweets, your websites, your hashtags, your textual links, your Google AdWords contextual ad campaigns, your Facebook ad programs and Twitter promoted tweets.

And, if you don’t call your services what others are searching for, you’ll be surprisingly invisible when it comes to your prospects finding you on the Internet — and if you don’t add the exact, literal, titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords that people are using to find you and your valuable services, then you won’t be found at all.
As I have said again and again, Google may well be the most sophisticated, intuitive, and relevant search engine going, but there’s a terrible secret that even Google doesn’t want you to know about when it comes to folks searching for and finding you:

Google plays dumb until it needs to be smart

Google is amazingly painfully literal and only gets smart and clever when and if it can’t find relevant results that satisfy its customers immediately and easily. When it can’t find what you’re looking for, Google will search its databases for name variation, for light synonyms, and the like — but if Google Search doesn’t need to be ingenious, then it’ll just be useful, serving only results that explicitly mention the exact keyword strings that the customer shoehorns into search.
Why, you may ask, does it play dumb? Well, being smart is very resource-intensive so if Google’s literal, all it had to do is find a match in it’s cached-and-prepped index — literal is quicker, simpler, and mostly a better result than when Google tries too hard to be clever — it’s win-win, until it doesn’t result in you or your business anywhere to be found. And that’s your fault, man — own up!

Let me give you a personal example

When I started in digital, what I did was called new media marketing. Then it became social media marketing, then blogger outreach, then digital PR and digital marketing. Another example is a service I offered which cleaned bad search engine results off of Google. I called it defensive SEO then defensive search. Now it’s called Online Reputation Management (ORM).
And, who knows what digital PR and ORM will be called in the future? It’s always evolving and one needs to not only keep up with what the professional wordsmiths and copywriters are calling what we do, it’s also what sticks, what people adopt, and finally, what people call what you and I do if they’re not part of our acronym-loving digital Internet cabal — we’re very often way too clever for our own good.
So, have you brainstormed recently? Have you interviewed your friends, clients, mom, dad, high school mates, wife, husband, kids, and colleagues? To ask them when they would search for were they involved in a particular scenario and needed someone to perform a service like yours?

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Which country search index is your page in?

By Mike Moran
　
People love to talk about whether you Web page is in the search index. The search index. Like there’s one. If only it were that easy. First off, there is at least one search index for every search engine, so Bing has one, Google has one, and so does every search engine in every country around the world. But it’s even more complex than that. Google and Bing have a separate search index for every country. And, in fact, they sometimes have multiple search indexes for a single country, when a country has more than one popular language. (I am looking at you, Switzerland.) So what does a search marketer do about making sure a Web page is in the right country index.
The language stuff works fairly well–Google and other search engines generally detect the proper language from the words on the page themselves, but country is another issue entirely. Most languages are spoken in multiple countries and it’s not possible today for a computer to correctly detect the language frequently enough–the search engines need our help.
In the old days of search marketing, this was a vexing problem. Search engines generally looked at only two things when deciding to put a page in a country index–the domain name of the site and the location of the server that hosted it. So, if your page was ibm.de, then it would correctly put it in the German index. Or if the Web server of that page was located in Germany, that worked, too.
But when I worked at IBM, there was no page for ibm.de–it was ibm.com/de–and it was located in a central server hosting site with 20 other country sites. And we were mostly out of luck if we didn’t want to change one of those things. Most multinational companies were in the same boat.

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