SEO News: This is a very interesting time for search marketing, with the influence of Social Media on SEO a particular priority on many people’s plan. Google and Bing have all but admitted that they look at social signals so like it or despise it social media affects your rankings in one way or another. Which is why, as any digital marketer will tell you, it’s becoming increasingly important to look at SEO and social media as a whole and not as two separate entities. Social visibility in SERPs also holds increased importance for those who use social media channels as their primary web presence. For those without a website, it’s crucial that their Facebook/Twitter/YouTube pages are findable in search results. It’s no secret that Google and Facebook don’t see eye to eye, and Facebook only releases limited data to Google making it difficult to gain any Solid SEO leverage.
Page name and URL
It seems like an obvious point, but one many businesses get wrong. Keep the page name punchy and on-brand. Try to avoid terms like welcome to and the official page of in your page name. Likewise, when setting a username (custom URL) for your page, make sure it’s relevant and brand focused, ie. Not, ‘Facebook.com/ourawesomepage’. Try and also keep the name of your page consistent with your other social networks, such as your Twitter handle and YouTube page name.
Likes
There’s no escaping that little blue thumb. ‘Likes’ reflect popularity, and on Facebook, popularity is everything. The more people who endorse your content, the bigger chance there is of Search Engines taking notice – it’s getting the likes that’s the hard bit.
Privacy settings
Facebook hasn’t been without controversy when it comes to users’ privacy settings. Subsequently the company has made an effort to improve privacy, allowing users to hide personal information to those outside of their friend groups. Increased privacy is great for individuals, not so much for businesses. If you’ve gone to the effort of building a Facebook page, make sure it’s visible! Check you aren’t keeping your page hidden by reviewing the privacy settings.
Content
Use the info page and the about section to pack in some quality, keyword-rich content and links. Getting your Facebook page to rank in competitive SERPs is no easy task. Even big brands are struggling. People often overlook Facebook’s internal search engine, but with the site approaching 700 million users it shouldn’t be ignored. As Facebook continues to grow so will the number of internal searches, as will the competition, so for this reason it’s going to become increasingly important to optimize pages for Facebook search as well as for external search engines.
Ultimately, the key to optimizing a Facebook page for Facebook search is quality and engagement. Again, optimizing for robots is important, but optimizing for people should be your priority.
