Many have tried, and failed, to write a good post about how to SEO a Facebook fan page.
For example, optimizing the filename of your profile picture is one
popular piece of advice that doesn’t really matter, considering Facebook
just renames the file something like 198135_10150109366....jpg. Another
popular tip: you should link to your main website from your Facebook
page. Yes, you should for visitors. But this doesn’t optimize your fan
page because Facebook just nofollows, redirects, and clusters your URL
in a mess of code anyway.
So let's take a different approach to Facebook SEO today.
I want you to imagine that your Facebook fan page is your website –
or another website for your brand at least. While it may not ever rank
first for a keyword, you still want it to be optimized.
If you want to keyword optimize your Facebook fan page, these are the
areas that actually pull SEO elements from your page's content for
additional optimization.
Your Facebook Fan Page SEO
- SEO title: The name of your page plus | Facebook.
- Meta description: The name of your page plus the About description of your page, followed by | Facebook.
- H1: The name of your page.
This is like the search optimization of the homepage of your fan page
/ website. If you didn't consider keyword optimization when you created
it, and you have less than 100 fans, you're in luck. You can still
change your page's name.
Two things to keep in mind aside from search optimization includes:
- Branding: It may be more important to have your page as a recognizable brand than a specific keyword phrase.
- Appearance: Whenever you comment as your page, or people tag your page, your entire name will come up, so if you're page is Your Brand - Keyword, Keyword, and Keywords it might look a bit excessive (and lead to less tagging).
Your title can be as long as you choose, but keep in mind the
standard length of SEO titles (70 characters) before getting too crazy.
Also, since your page name is also a part of your meta description, you
might not want it to make it too long and overshadow that.
To edit your
About information to make a great meta description, go to your page and Edit Page > Basic Information, and fill in the
About field with a 140 character description like you would with any website meta description.
Facebook Fan Page Updates
- SEO Title: The first 18 characters of your update.
If you’re posting a standard status update, the SEO title will be
pulled from the first 18 characters (approximately 18 characters,
sometimes a bit less). The following update by
Search Engine Watch's fan page has a title of Yahoo Search, which is pretty good.
If you're posting a link to your fan page wall, you'll have an option
to "Say something about this link..." – the first 18 characters of what
you enter in this field are going to be the SEO title for the
individual page of that status update.
If you don't post something there, the SEO title for your update will
just be Facebook. Plus it won't take up as much real estate in
someone's news feed, which means it will be less noticeable. So I would
suggest that, regardless of whether you care about the SEO, you fill
this part out when adding a link to your wall.
If you’re concerned about optimizing your updates while considering
them as individual pages for your overall fan page / website (click on
the timestamp for any update to see it on its own page), then you might
want to consider sticking some keywords right at the beginning of your
comment.
Using the above example, I could simply put the post category / main
keyword as start the update such as Google Analytics and then write the
rest of my comment. If I continued this trend with my updates, my fan
page would have lots of "pages" underneath it optimized for my main
keywords.
The best part is, unlike Twitter status updates that don’t go that
far back, you can see your Facebook fan page updates at least two years –
mine go all the way back to when I created my fan page, which was in
February 2009.
Facebook Fan Page Notes
- SEO Title: The title of your note plus | Facebook.
- Meta Description: Your page name wrote a note titled the title of your note plus | Facebook.
Facebook notes – they don't get a lot of love anymore, but they do
have a more controllable SEO title when you create them and, of course,
they add to the additional "pages" underneath your fan page / website.
Notes allow you to add lengthier updates to your fan page without having
to take your fans offsite to get more of your content.
Some people use them to syndicate their blog posts on their fan page,
but I find this feature is a little inconsistent. Unique notes, on the
other hand, could add more value to your page.
Facebook Fan Page Discussion Topics
- SEO Title: The title of your discussion's topic | Facebook.
Ever wanted a little forum / discussion board, but don't want to
invest in forum software? Facebook has an often-overlooked discussion
board, with each topic giving you a little SEO title credit.
It might be a nice place for you to have discussions with your fans
that they don't necessarily want on your wall. If you don't have one on
your profile already, you can get it by going to the
Discussion Board and using the
Add to My Pagelink to add it to your pages.
Your Facebook Fan Page SEO Tips
Those are the parts of the Facebook fan page that I’ve found
specifically have controllable SEO titles, descriptions, and so forth.
What other parts of the Facebook fan page have you tried optimizing for
SEO, and what results have you seen?
Cheers
Greatsol-SEO Team