This is Day 7 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
For those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internet marketing, you probably are not aware of what search engine optimization is. The main goal of search engine optimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to any given site by search engines. Currently search engines (and mostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journey around the web. While many users will go directly to their favorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a day by most internet users to discover resources they haven’t previously found.

What’s great about Facebook’s public profiles is that Facebook already has a substantial amount of search engine juice. Google alone claims to have indexed over 503 million pages within the site.

1. Get A Good URL

URLs are a large portion or search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information as possible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. Currently Facebook enables those pages with over 100 fans to get a vanity URL. A vanity URL is the short Facebook URL that helps people easily access your page. For example our blog, AllFacebook, has the following URL: http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook which makes it easier to access. The short URL is extremely effective at getting Google “juice”.

2. Configure Your Default Tab

On day 15 we will be going over how to configure a tab as a “landing page” but the primary thing here is to ensure that the first page being crawled by Google contains relevant text. You can set the default tab by clicking the “Settings” link on your Facebook Page and then selecting the tab you’d like to have displayed by default. Currently I’m not focused heavily on promoting my Facebook Page so the current landing page is more focused on getting users to take action then to organically drive them. This emphasizes how important it is to understand your objectives. You probably don’t want to create ranking issues with your site versus Facebook.

3. Generate Links To Your Page

If you are looking to drive traffic to your page from searching engines, the most important variable is always incoming links. One quick way to boost your Facebook page rankings is by linking to your page from your existing website. Additionally, any way you can get links from other sites will help increase your rankings. On their own, Facebook Pages tend to rank extremely well but a little additional effort will go a long way. One great way to increase the number of incoming links is by participating in forums around the web and setting a signature which links back to your page. If you are active in any forums on the web, I suggest placing your Facebook Page as one of your signature URLs. This will most definitely help you gain some traction in Google.

4. Link To Other Relevant Pages

I’ll be elaborating on this tip in Day 10 but essentially linking to relevant content helps boost your ranking. If you created a site that was about shoes but kept linking to blogs that were about technology, do you think that would really help out the readers with finding what they’re looking for? Probably not. Google takes into account the relevance of pages you are linking to when calculating the relevance of any given page. Try linking to a few relevant sites. There’s a good chance that you’ll not only help out your readers but increase your overall Google rank.

5. Use Facebook For Inbound Links To Your Company Website

One of the most important components of search engine optimization is generating inbound links. While some companies will take aggressive measures to generate inbound links, generating a link from you Facebook page is extremely valuable. Take advantage of landing pages and the information tab to link back to your company’s website. If you use the Static FBML application that I highlighted on Day 3, you’ll be able to post links that will help boost your search engine rankings.

6. Select A Good Name For Your Facebook Page

The name of your Facebook is extremely important. Many search engine optimization experts will tell you that spending a lot of time on the title of a website isn’t important as long as that page is written for the reader. On Facebook Pages however there are few things you can use to boost your search engine rankings and page titles happen to be one of those things. Don’t go overboard with your name and create a keyword dense title. Just name the title after your company or whatever phrase will be most effective for fans that are searching for you.

7. Post Keyword Rich Content In About Box

That mysterious box at the top left of your Facebook Page is one of the few areas on your page which is accessible to search engines. It’s also relatively high up in the page HTML which means that search engines will give the text priority over text that’s further down the page. Take the opportunity to fill the about box with keyword rich content. While it may not give a huge boost to your rankings in Google, you ‘ll want all the help you can get.

Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO Juice

Some resources on the web have suggested that generating links to your site by posting links to the news feed. While it may drive you traffic it’s not going to generate any SEO juice because Facebook dynamically generates feed content using javascript. Additionally, if you click a link from within Facebook it will redirect you through a Facebook pass-through page. As far as I know, Facebook isn’t making any exceptions for search engines and providing news feed backlinks.

Conclusion

These were just seven tips but overall you should be considering your Google rank when developing your Facebook Page strategy. Since an increasing number of people are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that the person following a link on Google also happens to be on Facebook and could quickly become a fan. While targeting keywords other than your brand name is not at easy from within Facebook Pages, any effort you make is well worth it.

Daily Task

Make at least three adjustments to your Facebook Page that will help boost the optimization of your page. Also determine where to put a link from your site back to your Facebook Page that will help build awareness and generate some SEO juice for your Facebook page.