How Do You Use Facebook As a SEO Tool?

Time:2010-09-03 18:24:33 Source:Ezinearticles Author:A Karmakar

Do you know that Facebook is fast becoming the second home page for business houses? It is exactly so. Many Facebook page-owners with a commercial motive are trying hard to become expert marketers of their pages. Facebook too has evolved a lot and has given several opportunities to the page owners to increase their pages' visibility through the time-tested technique of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here, let us explore a few of these useful SEO techniques.

Choose your Facebook page's name with care

Shakespeare had once said, "What's in a name? Rose smells as sweet as in other names". Had Shakespeare been using Facebook as a business site owner in the twenty-first century, he would have refrained from saying so.

You need to choose the name of your Facebook page with care. Do not use any generic name as Facebook discourages it. You need to name your page with your actual business or brand name. Once you have coined the name, do not change it. This measure is to remain in line with the search engine algorithms.

Selecting the URL

Facebook allows its users the facility of a vanity URL. According to Facebook, this is the username. This username has a tremendous SEO potential. For long term success, use your business or brand name as the username. This will be search engine-friendly. However, there is a prerequisite to getting a unique URL for your page - you must have at least 100 fans. If you have a lesser number of fans than that, consider adding more fans to your list.

Writing keyword-rich content in the "About" section

An important SEO strategy for Facebook is to write content laden with high-density keywords towards the upper part of the page. The most important place where this strategy works is the 'About' box. The About box is in fact the highest place in the CSS structure of the Facebook page where you can add custom text.

To write in the About box, click "write something about [YourPage]" in the box beneath the profile picture of your page and start keying in the text. Remember that there is a 250-character limit here. So, choose your wordings and keyword placements carefully.

Use the "Info" tab judiciously

Facebook offers an "Info" tab that should be used judiciously to improve the SEO score of your page. This tab contains important fields that contain important metadata for your page. Some of these fields are:
- Address
- City
- Zip Code
- Company Overview
- Mission
- Products

The first three fields in the above bulleted list are important from the standpoint of local searches. The last three are important for product searches.

Adding Photos and Events with Appropriate Descriptions

Facebook encourages interesting content for its pages. Be careful not to leave out any of the fields. When posting photos, use appropriate keywords-laden description. While posting events, use appropriate descriptions with keywords too. Better still, add a "Discussion Forum" to your page. Facebook shares all these content with the search engines and allows them to index the pages. This has a direct bearing on your SEO score.

Getting More Inbound Links

Just as inbound links from authoritative sites propel the SEO score of a traditional site, the same is true for Facebook pages also. Getting more inbound links will boost your page's page-rank. Using direct text links do work; moreover Facebook now offers the new "Find us on Facebook" badge that the page-owners are encouraged to use. The "Fan Box Widget for Facebook pages" feature also includes back links to your pages.

Another way to increase your SEO score is to keep adding more and more fans. As the default user profile of a fan contains links to those pages where the person is interested, increasing your fan-count helps. The default user profile pages of all users are accessible by the search engines and you can easily guess that your SEO score is directly proportional to your fan-count.

These are some of the measures that you can take too boost your page's SEO rank.

All these require careful planning and regular monitoring activities.

A. Karmakar is a successful writer and runs a Content Development Company with a worldwide clientele. You can visit Content Writers Organization to know more.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=A_Karmakar

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