Most businesses and marketers now understand the importance of incorporating Facebook into their marketing mix and engaging your audience via your Facebook page needs to be something you’re doing on a consistent basis.

 

We’re guessing we don’t need to tell you that. What you may not know however, is that similarly to how you can optimise your website (for high rankings), you can optimise your Facebook page too.

Here are some ways you can go about doing so.

1. What is in a name?

If you’re just creating your Facebook page, the first thing you’ll need to do is select the prefix for your Facebook URL, for example, facebook.com/yourcompanyname.

This is an important step when it comes to beginning the process of attracting an audience to your business page. Although, it may be tempting to think that you can maximize your visibility by placing keywords in your pages titles (Example- Shoe Store London, Bromley Diner) , the truth is, that this does little to increase the number of views and what’s perhaps even worse, you won’t stand out.

This is because “stuffed names” will appear as spam to your potential readers and will make your fans less likely to share your content or promote your page.

Facebook was designed to help businesses authentically represent themselves so this sort of gimmickry will be frowned upon by your more experienced fans. In fact, lately Facebook has been moderating inaccurately or misleadingly named pages so we highly recommend that you stay away from this practice.

The best thing to do here is to name your Facebook page with your business name. Assuming, you’ve followed a similar choice for your website as well (For example, having a website address such as www.yourcompanyname.com and NOT www.whatwesell.com) , Google will be able to pick up the association between your Facebook and website and reward you for it.

2. Choosing A Custom URL

The so-called “Username” on Facebook is actually just a custom URL for your Facebook page. When you are setting up your page you will be asked to select a username which will then become the visible vanity URL that visitors to your page will see. www.facebook.com/thisisyourusename

By introducing usernames, Facebook has created new opportunities for businesses to be identified within the Social Media platform through SEO. For this reason, once again it is in your best interest to make your username, your businesses’ authentic identity.

Once again this is another area where the Facebook moderation team has been known to crack down on businesses not using the appropriate usernames. If you use a name that does not belong to you in order to fool people into liking your page then Facebook will most likely pick this up soon enough and delete your page, in the worst case scenario.

3. Place SEO content in the “About” Box

Once you are all set up with a page name and unique username, the next step is to fill in your profile with relevant content. This is where you’ll have the opportunity to use keywords within the content, especially in the “About” box.

What makes the “About” box so important is that it is the one place on Facebook where users are able to place large amounts of custom text. However, you want to use keywords in the correct context and ensure that the description is free flowing. Stuffing keywords here can be seen as spam by Facebook and more importantly, by your fans.

How To Input Text In The “About” Box

To add text into the “About” box on your Facebook profile simple, click the “write something” link and then begin typing. The about box is now located under the about tab. Remember, you are only able to enter 250 characters so choose your words wisely.

4. Using The “Info” Tab

This is another fun little place for you to include important keywords and text on your Facebook page profile. For every new Facebook page, there is a field with left for metadata describing that page. This is where you want to specifically fill out your information such as: location, company overview, mission, and products.

By describing your business very specifically under the “info” tab, you will be able to categorize your page so that it is more easily identifiable for people who may be looking for you.

Things That You Should Include in Your “Info”
When it comes to filling out your info, the more specific you can be the better. Below we have listed the most important details that should be included.

• Address, City, Post/Zip Code, County, Other location details
• Company/ business overview: explain your service or business and it’s mission. Describe some of the products that you sell or what types of services you provide.
• Link to your website: you can place hyperlinks to relevant webpages related to your company.

There may also be some additional categories for you to fill out depending on what kind of page you have chosen to create from the category page. Be sure to choose a category that best suits your business description.

 

5. Using Static “FBML” Boxes and Tabs

Although the “About” section appears to be the only area where you can place static keyword text on your profile, Facebook does allow page owners to create additional boxes or tabs to place more descriptive content in.  The types of content that users are able to include are text, images, and web links.

When you add this kind of content to your page you can boost the SEO density of your Facebook page.

How To Add Custom Content Boxes & Tabs

Step 1: Click “Static FBML” application on Facebook

Step 2: Select “add to my page” located on the left side. Choose a page to add a custom content box on.

Step 3: Once you have chosen a page to add the content on, close the dialog box and look for it under your profile picture

Step 4: You will see an application titled “FBML #1”, click the pencil icon to edit the page.

Step 5: Enter a new name for the text box/tab in the title field, then type in the HTML that you would like to use for the page. Remember to save all changes.

Step 6: Click edit once again on the link located on the top of your page, and return to the applications settings.  Click once again on the pencil icon to name the application you have written.

Step 7: If you would like to add the  “FBML” that you have just written , click the edit button once again and move the content to your wall tab, so it will appear under your profile picture. From now on this is were it will be located on your page

Step 8: If you would rather have the page as an application tab then click “add” next to the tabs and the custom content you have written should appear on your page under the name that you have given it.

6. Posting Direct Links

The best way to post direct links to the top of your Facebook page is by posting current status updates, This is where and how you’ll engage your audience and hopefully, increase the all important ‘Talking about this’ metric.

However, know this – Google looks down upon unrelated posts or links. You also want to keep your content distribution efforts consistent – it’s better to post 1 update daily than multiple updates at the same time. From an SEO perspective anyway.

If you want to optimize this element of Facebook, follow any of these two status posting methods:

1. Include a raw URL by pasting in the text of the status update itself
2. Attach a URL by using the “attach link” feature on the sites publisher

The Difference Between raw URL’s and Attached Links

With raw URL’s you include the URL text in your status and Facebook automatically ads the hyperlinks. Here, you cannot modify the anchor text of the link, it is simply just the URL that you copy and paste. This link will go directly to the destination page, not through Facebook.com.

Attached URL’s may take a bit more time but they allow you to customize the hyperlink a little bit more. Facebook, will pull the title and body content from the linked page and suggest a thumbnail image from the website that you are linking. These actions help to up the Keyword density of the CSS region near the link. The thumbnail image will also link to the destination URL- making this a better method for hyperlinking when you are attempting to optimize your Facebook content.

7. Add photos with captions, events, and descriptions

While you are sharing interesting status updates and URL’s on your Facebook page it is important that you fill out the descriptive fields with relevant keywords on all of the images that you post. This only takes a few extra seconds and it will help increase your businesses’ Facebook page overall SEO ranking significnatly.

How this works is this: Facebook documents the content shared on your personal index, which is readable, by search engine crawlers. By actively using all of the features that the Facebook has to offer you are increasing the overall authority of your Facebook page.

8. Promote Your Facebook Page Throughout Your Website

A common mistake many businesses make is to forget including the link(s) to their Social Media channels via their website. We highly recommend you do so in order to get maximum impressions for your Facebook fan page.

This also has the additional benefit of improving your website’s rankings in Google as Social Signals have become an increasingly important ranking factor.

9. Get More Facebook Fans!

Fans and friends are very important because the pages that people like are listed on their profile page. The more fans you get the more times that your page will be linked within Facebook. This does a lot to help your overall SEO ranking.

Once you have begun to fully utilize your Facebook page, you will see the number of fans that you have begin to grow. More fans equals more links which allows for your page to rank higher on the search engine pages because all of your fans have inbound links to your page on their profiles. Imagine, how effectively this works once you have thousands… even millions of followers. This is why it is so important that business owners promote their pages, and encourage people to follow them.

10. Build Up Your Facebook Page By Encouraging Participation From Your Friends!

If you can encourage your fans to comment and like content on your page stream then you will be increasing the visibility of your page. This is because Facebook users actions are posted within their news feed. For example; John Smith likes… John Smith Commented On….

This creates a continuous pattern of link visibility and page indexing for search engines to pick up on. Basically, Google will see that there are interacting links between your page and your fans page’s and it will recognize your content as being strong and relevant giving it a higher rank for your page.

Conclusion

Continuously building and expanding your Facebook presence over time does take a great deal of dedication and work. By introducing basic SEO into your Facebook profile you can increase the visibility of your content and establish a strong online presence. It is important, that Facebook users carefully monitor their Facebook’s page analytic growth so that they can strategize their approach and connect with more people. SEO content makes this easier because it allows you to reach a much wider audience than you would organically. Introducing, your products and services to the entire Facebook user base, not just those who are in your immediate social circle.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency why not give Flow20 a try? We can help you with PPC management, Facebook ads, LinkedIn Advertising and Social Media campaigns and even Google Ads training.