Tips for Facebook SEO

SEO has been a part and parcel of an Internet marketer’s life. Ranking high in Facebook has been a necessity if you are looking for optimizing your Online Business for Search Engines and Social Media at the same time. And to be frank, it is essential to consider both these frontiers simultaneously rather than being strong in one and neglecting the other. As Facebook has become an Hub for Netizens, it is very essential to consider it when Social Media Marketing comes into Picture. And this is the reason why Facebook Search Engine Optimization is such a hot topic. It has become a bare necessity to Rank high in Facebook search if you wish to gain Visibility in the Social Media scene.

Important Facebook SEO tips which will help you rank high in the Facebook Search Engine:

1.  Allow Public visibility of your Content

Due to the recent problems of Facebook privacy settings, there is still a lot of confusion regarding this. Remember that if you keep the content which you want to share as Public, then Facebook can show it to all those who search for it. Keeping it protected to any particular group will enable visibility of your content to only that particular group.

2.  Use proper Keywords in the Title/URL

Now you would say, this tip is very similar to our normal SEO tip! But the TITLE we are considering here is a bit different. Here the title can be the Title of the Blog Post which you are sharing or even whatever is your Status Update, or may be even the Name of some Facebook Group. If it is a Title of the Blog post then you should optimize it for normal SEs like Google, Bing/MSN and Yahoo and it will help you on Facebook too(nothing special required here). But if you are writing a Status Update or Creating a post in Facebook Groups then remember to include the Keywords you want to rank for!

Do not forget to Select a proper Facebook Vanity URL for Professioal pages.

3.  Optimize Meta Tags properly

When you share a link on Facebook using the ‘Link option’, Facebook by default uses the meta description of the Shared Webpage as an effective meta tag, but if that webpage does not include any meta description tag, then it catches the first 160-200 character of the content and uses it as the effective Meta tags. You can write the description of this Link in the Update Space available using proper keywords.
Also, When you make some group the Description of the Group is used as the effective meta tags for Facebook Search engine.

4.  Likes, Shares and Number of Mutual Friends

If you are planning to rank higher then the Number of Share and the Number of Likes for your Content/Comment (by different people) does come into picture. The more the number of Likes and Shares, the higher will be your position in Facebook Search rankings. When searching for different Individuals, the number of Mutual friends are considered as a ranking factor.

5.  Freshness of the Content matters the Most

If you write a Status update containing some keywords and someone else writes a very similar Status update some time after you write it, it is highly possible that his/her status update will rank higher for the keywords and not yours. Facebook gives a lot of stress on Real time (some time difference is always there) Search Engine results and so you don’t have any scope for error and rest. You must keep updating various data on Facebook which you want to rank in Facebook search.