Many people have written about how to use Facebook for improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your personal website, but have they actually provided useful tips in making your website more visible to Google, Yahoo, or Bing via your fan page? When it comes to optimizing your Facebook account or fan page, you need to do things that matter. For example, optimizing your profile picture's filename is a waste of time because Facebook automatically renames the file with random digits anyway.
Using Facebook SEO Recommendations that Actually Work
Furthermore, the popular (and seemingly commonsensical) tip of linking your Facebook account or fan page to your main website isn't actually all that useful either. Sure, it does alert your visitors where your website is, plus it does help in enticing them to visit it, but in terms of optimizing your fan page for SEO, it's a useless gesture because Facebook has the nofollow attribute in effect that nullifies whatever supposed search engine results page (SERP) ranking benefits such a link will bring.
This means your link back to your website will just be nofollowed, redirected, and clustered in a mess of code by Facebook. A different approach to optimizing your Facebook page is called for. Standard SEO techniques obviously will not work on a website that uses the nofollow policy. In fact, you should treat your account or fan page (you should get a fan page though, because it's more geared towards better exposure of your business) as another website for your brand.
Facebook Fan Page SEO Tips and Tricks
It's in your best interests to optimize your fan page for search engines even if it may not ever rank first for a keyword. That's because your potential Facebook audience can range from the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. As for keyword optimization, you should take note of the areas in your fan page that can actually utilize SEO elements in order to fully optimize them. To be more specific, the name of your page can spell the difference between Internet visibility and obscurity.
You should be careful about naming your fan page and the content you put in the About description, because that section is one of the areas mentioned earlier that's ripe for keyword optimization. If you didn't consider SEO and keyword optimization when you first made your fan page and you have less than a hundred fans following you, then you're in luck. Your page's name can still be changed without adversely affecting your SERP ranking.
The Importance of Branding and Appearance
Branding is a key element when it comes to dealing with social media SEO. Making a brand in general is important when it comes to the marketing world, because it allows the customer instant recognition of the product thanks to its uniform brand identity. It's a lot more important to have a page that's recognizable because of your brand than to have it rank high in the SERP on a particular keyword or key phrase. Your title should reflect in however way possible your company brand.
Your logo, your company color scheme, your slogan, your ads, and your website design should be uniform and consistent with the way you've developed your Facebook fan page itself. Appearance also plays a vital part on your Facebook SEO, because people are likelier to comment or tag your page if it's well-designed. Your entire name will also come up whenever people tag you or leave comments on your page, so a "brand, keyword, keyword, and more keywords" scheme to naming may look excessive, even spam-like.
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