Facebook Pages & Local Search Engine Optimization

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 pagerank). 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).