7 Facebook SEO Tips for Pharma
In 2010, Facebook was able to be the first site in many years to surpass Google in total volume of traffic in a month. This is an impressive accomplishment, considering the fact that Google traffic volume continued to increase over years previous. Last year, many pharmaceutical companies started setting up shop in the social media world, and I personally anticipate that we will see more of that in 2011. If you are engaged with a pharma brand that is considering engagement within Facebook (or if you are already engaged), this post may help you with a few considerations that can help you increase your visibility within search. For the record, when I say search, I am talking about both traditional search engines like Google and Bing as well as within the internal Facebook search results.
#1: Choose a Good Name for your Facebook page
The Facebook Page Name is one of the first and most important things you can define for Facebook SEO purposes. The page name serves as the HTML title for the page, which is one of those key SEO factors to keep an eye on. It’s important to try and make this keyword rich, but not too much so that it seems spammy to users.
#2:Use keyword-rich content to describe your page in the “About this Page” section when you create your page. This section has a 250 character limitation, which may provide some level of difficulties for pharma companies, but it should provide a good opportunity to get at least a couple good lines of text toward the top of the page.
#3: Leverage the “Info” tab to embed important information about your brand, product, or service. The info tab has a section where you can provide links to your web sites, contact information and information about your company or product. All of these are important areas of information that can help your overall Facebook SEO score.
#4: Use the FBML App to customize your page.
The FBML application allows you to create a custom page and/or content on your Facebook Page. For exmaple, you can create a custom landing page. Using this FBLM application, create a page that has SEO friendly content and coding
#5: Build links and fans.
The first, most important thing to do is promote your page so that you can gain more fans. As mentioned above in #3, the vanity URL is an important factor for Facebook SEO and can help you gain visibility in search results. Beyond getting new fans, it is also very important to provide external links to your Facebook Page. Link from your website, blog, social media profiles and wherever else you can get links.
#6: Choose a keyword-rich “vanity URL”.
Once you have achieved enough fans for your page, you will be able to choose a vanity URL (facebook.com/pagename). Logically, this will be your brand or product name, but it may also be beneficial to consider a keyword-rich vanity URL if it makes sense.
#7: Always think about SEO when posting content on your page!
Status updates, photos with captions, events and discussions are all important areas where you can provide some level of SEO to your Facebook Page. Always think about the keywords you want to use and write content that leverages those desired keywords within the text. Link to your site within status updates whenever possible.
I’ll be going into deeper detail about each of these topics in the future.
