3 Big Tips to Optimize Facebook for SEO

In part 1 of our series, we told you 3 Big Reasons Why Facebook Matters for SEO and now, we want to give you some tips on how to optimize your Facebook marketing tactics to impact SEO positively. Here are 3 tips…

#1 Optimize Your Facebook Profile

This might seem like a no brainer but people forget that search engines will crawl their Facebook profile or company page just like any other web page. Therefore, keywords matter.

Here are some other tips for optimization:

  • Leverage longtail keywords whenever possible, but don’t over use them and place them where they don’t make sense.
  • Make sure your Facebook presence matches your brand and supports your brand’s purpose.
  • Pick a great name and claim your custom vanity URL.
  • Use high-quality pictures.
  • Spend time optimizing the About section.
  • Makes sure there are always back links to your website and from other content to your Facebook page content and tabs.

As the image below shows, people are often presented with a link to your Facebook page on the first page of results and that’s because Google and Bing see social media pages as credible and likely something searchers will be interested in viewing (where your profile ends up, of course, has to do with how optimized your Facebook Profile is for search engines). Your Facebook Profile matters and can impact your search ranking for your own website (indirectly for Google, but everything helps).

#2 Create Relevant and Frequent Status Updates

Creating relevant and frequent status updates that will help build awareness of your brand. Content is still king, even when it comes to your Facebook profile. You should spend time crafting your updates so both people and search engines find it appealing. The first 18 characters of your post will become the meta description and will tell people and search engines what the content is about, in particular, Google puts a lot of emphasis on the first word, so if you can make it a keyword, that’s all the better. Makes sure your content is accompanied by great pictures too—something loved again by both people and search engines. And finally, have lots of relevant backlinks which will signal to Google and other search engines that the content has quality and would be of interest to future searchers.

#3 Try Facebook Advertising

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, a study conducted by Hootsuite found that paid promotion has double the SEO benefit of organic promotion, likely because paid promotion increases reach (it’s estimated that only 10% of your followers see your organic posts, you need to boost your post to get the other 90% to see it). Whether you boost posts, promote your business page, or just run ads, all of these initiatives will increase visits to your website or your Facebook profile, which will in turn impact positively on your search ranking.

We know your time is precious, that’s why we’re here to help. Contact us today.

Here’s some more posts you might be interested in:

3 Big Reasons Why Facebook Matters for SEO
3 Tips to Make Your LinkedIn Company Profile Friendly
3 Big Reasons to Advertise on LinkedIn
Why LinkedIn? Because Professionals are Consumers too