Social engagement and SEO means more than just having a fan page. Image: Flickr / streamishmc / CC-BY-SA
A few months ago, search engine optimization company BrightEdge released a whitepaper detailing lost opportunities for Facebook optimization. Today, Facebook and BrightEdge released a paper detailing the best practices of Facebook-based Search Engine Optimization. Effective social media marketing should go beyond just having a “fan” page on Facebook.
Best practices of Facebook SEO
In a co-produced whitepaper released today, Facebook and BrightEdge revealed the six best ways to improve social search engine optimization through Facebook.
- Link to your Facebook page – Ensure that your Facebook page is linked on your website. Use properly structured links with anchor text that includes your brand, an alt-text image tag if appropriate and a canonical URL.
- Use your brand name – When you are posting to your social network profiles, be sure to use your brand name. Search engines comb the text of your posts, so if you don’t use your brand name, it is tougher to connect your brand name to your posts.
- Drive social engagement – Keep your pages updated, design your content for interaction, and put a facepile on your webpage. Encourage customers to link to and “like” your page. Facebook Connect, Activity Feed and other Facebook tools help drive interaction.
- Build Facebook Shares into your site – Build Facebook Shares and Facebook Like buttons into your website, and keep content on your website that will encourage the use of those buttons
- Create strong directory pages – On Facebook, you can create additional tabs or pages under your main profile. You can use this ability to create pages that target high-value organic keywords or pages that mirror your current website.
Build beyond Facebook
Facebook and Twitter have built huge numbers of users and SEO importance in the last few years. These two websites, however, are not the end-all-be-all of social network SEO. The reality is that there are several social networks out there, and targeting them correctly can help make your marketing dollars more effective. Marketing is about going where the customers are, and that means going online. Carefully choose where you spend your time, money and effort, but keep extra social networks on your radar. Reddit receives more than 1 billion page views per month. StumbleUpon sends more outbound traffic than Facebook. There are more than 15 popular social networks with more than 10 million users. The secret is to find these networks and authentically use them to engage with their residents.
