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With Facebook’s huge growth continuing, it means more and more businesses are creating company pages to reach a wider audience. However, with the number of Facebook pages probably in the millions, how do you make sure your page actually gets found in a search, whether on Facebook itself or in the search engines?
I’ve tested the search facility on Facebook by entering keywords to see if a list of company pages is generated based on my query, however, the pages served in the results all happened to contain the keyword I searched on in their page title. So one of the ways to get your page found for a search within Facebook is to include keywords relating to your page within the title of the page itself. So for example, if your page is about ‘cake decorating’, this needs to be included in the page title when you set the page up. Unfortunately, once you choose the name for your page, it can’t be changed! There is a lot more to Facebook search than keywords in page titles and you can read up about it in this comprehensive blog post: Ranking in Facebook Search – Take Notice from VerticalMeasures.com
There are also techniques to optimising the page itself. When you’re logged in to Facebook as an administrator, click on ‘Edit Page’, then ‘basic information’. Make sure this is completed as comprehensively as possible including well-written descriptions, which include your keywords. You can read more on Facebook optimisation here: How to Optimise your Brand’s Facebook Page for Search Engines from ReadWriteWeb.com.
Completing these steps should help to make sure your page gets found for a search not only on Facebook itself, but also on Google & Bing. When it comes to ‘status’ updates, Google started incorporating page updates into its search results around February 2010. Google’s Realtime search indexes the web at almost realtime so blog posts, tweets and Facebook page updates can appear in search results within seconds or minutes of being posted.
Privacy settings on Facebook have to be respected so the search engines are only allowed to index pages or profiles set to ‘public’. If you don’t want your profile or updates being found on Google, you must update your privacy settings to ensure your profile can’t be indexed. You can read more about this here: Facebook Will Be Google-able (if your profile is set to public) also from ReadWriteWeb.com
If you’re active on social media, it’s not just your Facebook profile that you should be optimising. Twitter and LinkedIn also need to be optimised as part of your social media marketing strategy and we’ll be discussing this in future posts!
Have you optimised your Facebook presence? Has it worked for you? Is it driving more traffic and ‘likes’ to your page?
