In a previous post I stated that Facebook Local could end up being a very important marketing opportunity for you business. Since then, thousands of businesses have created Facebook Pages - simple templates to create a page about your service that can be promoted via Facebook’s social network.
In principle the more networked your business’ page is (via customers, friends, vendors, etc.) the more likely you are to show up in Facebook and be found by a potential customer. These pages are also getting indexed in Google and certainly help drive search engine traffic to Facebook, but based on a small sample, most businesses are getting no local search engine optimizaton help from these pages.
For example, this page for an Arizona adoption attorney may be helping promote this business, but there is a “nofollow” tag on the link to the business’ website, meaning no pagerank is being passed on.
Of course what’s the point of blogging about this unless I had a solution for you. So here goes:
How to Get Local Search Engine Optimization From Your Facebook Page
1. Set up a blog on your website.
2. Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”, then “More Applications” and browse for a RSS reader application like Simply RSS (thanks RobD). Add the app to your page using your blog’s feed url - Make sure your feed urls are on your domain, or if they are going through an RSS manager make sure that the RSS manager 301 redirects to your domain else the links will be redirected and not pass pageran). Now your blog posts will show up on your Facebook page and the posts will not carry the “nofollow” tag. As long as the links are pointing to your domain (and not 302 redirecting via your RSS manager) you should be able to pass pagerank from this page to your site.
3. Post regularly with target keywords in the headlines so that you can get the SEO benefit from keyword rich anchor text.
4. Network your Facebook page up the wazoo. The more profile pages that link to your page the more likely your page is to get crawled and the stronger the page rank that will get passed on to your site.
For an example of this check out the blog links on this UK accountant’s Facebook page (and don’t forget to check out his friend Anna).
53 responses so far ↓
1 Matt McGee // Mar 24, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Very clever. Me likey.
2 Jeff Quipp // Mar 25, 2008 at 6:54 am
Very interesting Andrew! Thanks for sharing
3 Gregorio // Mar 25, 2008 at 10:14 am
It is a huge and great idea. I will think about that and try it. I will take care of what you suggest and I tell you later on
4 Andrew Shotland // Mar 25, 2008 at 10:18 am
As Tim Gunn says Gregorio “Make it work. Make it work.”
5 Catfish SEO // Mar 25, 2008 at 11:13 am
The only pitfall i can see with this is that I am not seeing any backlinks to your Facebook page from other profiles, so the page rank coming from your Facebook page to your blog is very low. I would love to see other profile links in the back link profile of this page, thus making the profile marketing suggestion much more valid. But so far I don’t see it. If you have any examples of pages like this that are showing profile backlinks, I would love to see them.
6 Catfish SEO // Mar 25, 2008 at 11:15 am
Seems like you would have to network with people that had a small amount of friends and public profiles to make this work unless you target other business pages instead of personal profiles.
7 Andrew Shotland // Mar 25, 2008 at 11:31 am
Catfish - you are correct that the localseoguide Facebook page is a pitiful example - I have not networked it and it’s pointing at Feedburner urls. But if you look at the links to the mentioned accountant’s website (link: goodadvice.tv) in Google you’ll see that their Facebook Page is the third link listed.
Maybe I am misunderstanding your intent but wouldn’t you want to network with people who had large amounts of friends so that all of their public profile pages showed a link to your business’s Facebook Page?
8 D Legal // Mar 25, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Great article Andrew! I’ve gone ahead and setup a page for my company LemonFree.com.
If anyone is interested or would like to become a fan you can check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/LemonFreecom/10026683569
I’m going to push a couple of links into the page to get it spidered and indexed. Google is going to give a ton a weight to a link coming from such an authoritative site; especially one that has very few links pointing outside itself.
9 Andrew Shotland // Mar 25, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Hate to turn your free lemons into real lemons D but your blog links are pointing at wordpress.com. This is not going to help you much.
10 MikeBradbury // Mar 25, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Lets take it a step further.
What if you could pay unwitting college students with strong profiles to put your RSS feed on their facebook?
A hmmmm…..
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12 Dev Basu // Mar 25, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Genius tactic here Andrew! I only wish that there were more blog post sharing strategies rather than hot air in the seo sphere.
13 Ken Jones // Mar 26, 2008 at 4:26 am
Absolute genius. I’m sure it won’t take long for this tactic to get used up and worn out, but for the time being it seems like a real winner
14 Jon Clark // Mar 26, 2008 at 10:17 am
Great post!! Better question though…where can I get one of those T-shirts?? haha
15 SEO Ranter // Mar 26, 2008 at 10:33 am
Haha, nice simple post - and yes, I did check out his friend Anna. I’m sure that’s rather more appealing material to have listed in ones friends than a mass of withered accountants, especially after this financial year!
16 Palmer Web Marketing // Mar 26, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Good info. Didn’t even know that Facebook allowed a business profile.
17 David - Los Angeles Internet Marketing // Mar 26, 2008 at 4:32 pm
You sure a feedburner feed doesn’t pass pagerank? It’s been bought out by Google, does a 301, and claims to have no detrimental affect on SEO? (Assuming it is detrimental, I will stop using it.)
18 Andrew Shotland // Mar 26, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Holy crap David I think you are correct. I have revised the post to reflect this. Apologies to Feedburner.
19 Local Search SEO with Facebook | Tug Blog // Mar 27, 2008 at 3:39 am
[...] Read the full article Here. [...]
20 SEO Consultant // Mar 27, 2008 at 7:22 am
This is a great idea. I actually found Simply RSS by looking at other people’s facebook page.
I wonder if it’s worthwhile to put anything on your blog directing people to your facebook page?
21 Daan Jansonius // Mar 27, 2008 at 8:04 am
Great tip! Does this work for a RSS feed widget on personal pages too?
22 Andrew Shotland // Mar 27, 2008 at 8:35 am
In theory it should but the /people/ pages I looked at with blogs are not displaying the blog posts.
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25 Link Builder // Apr 13, 2008 at 10:26 pm
good idea! xD
26 Scott Salwolke // Apr 15, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Interesting post. I’m still trying to figure out how Facebook helps companies other than for networking purposes. I look forward to reading other entries in your blog.
27 David // Aug 20, 2008 at 1:32 am
The one thing I’m not understand is if we’re trying to link to the facebook page with keyword rich link or to your blog…Linking from an fb page would accomplish nothing thanks to the no-follow right?
And getting an fb page ranked instead of your blog doesn’t seem like my favorite idea, although I spose if it brings in clients then its all worth it…
28 Andrew Shotland // Aug 21, 2008 at 8:21 am
D,
The idea here is that by adding a RSS feed to your Facebook Page you create outbound links without “nofollow” tags. If those links go back to your site, in theory you get a SEO benefit.
29 Eva White // Aug 28, 2008 at 9:20 am
This is something new that I have read. I am definitely going to try it out. Thanks for sharing tips.
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32 Fletch // Dec 2, 2008 at 8:33 am
Maybe I missed something here but the lemonfree guy (reply #8) seems to have nofollow tags on his links?
33 Andrew Shotland // Dec 2, 2008 at 8:43 am
Fletch, Senor LemonFree’s blog post links do not have nofollow tags on them.
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39 Josh // Feb 26, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Interesting. I just started up a facebook profile for our company and we are trying to build traffic through SEO. I will give it a try. I will definitely keep your blog as a reference for advice. thanks
40 Janaki // Mar 24, 2009 at 9:02 am
Very interesting idea indeed! Incidentally I landed on this page while searching info related to facebook and business. I had done some basic stuff with my facebook page but I think I will try your idea shortly.
Anyway thanks again for sharing!
41 Ulstrup // Apr 22, 2009 at 5:27 am
Could not get Simply RSS to work, it’s not updated. So instead I use the Facebook application RSS Connect, which also works without nofollow.
42 קידום אתרים // May 10, 2009 at 2:36 am
Nice post ! I used facebook for my buisness and it increased the amount of customers, no doubt it’s a good media to publish your products and services.
43 34 Links on How to Promote Your Small Business on Facebook — Web 2.0 For Small Business // Jun 29, 2009 at 11:15 am
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44 David // Jul 15, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Very interesting read. Some questions for this topic now that it is months old. I’ve looked at the source of LemonFree and those links are FB.com addresses that apparently redirect and otherwise DO have “nofollow” attributes. Is this a change in FB since this post was written? Second, are any of you having results from RSS links into your site from FB as this post describes?
~Thanks
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48 Facebook Fan Pages // Oct 5, 2009 at 6:16 am
Interesting post ! I am using facebook fan pages for my business and visitors to my site are increasing through my fan page. Thanks for sharing such a nice piece of information.
49 Kevin Stelfox // Oct 21, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Great tip
Thanks
50 Google Adwords Expert // Nov 4, 2009 at 2:24 pm
You have really got a great idea. Thanks man.
51 Facebook Application Developer // Nov 19, 2009 at 3:32 am
Nice post ! I used facebook for my buisness to keep update my users and customer about brand and services and it increased the amount of customers, no doubt it’s a good media to publish your products and services.
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53 Brit // Feb 6, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Hi
My feed has just come up with the date 6 Jan 1970 on my business FB page Hawkshead Vineyard New Zealand! Can someone explain what I need to do in order to change the date of feeds!?
Cheers
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