Social SEO - Whitepaper by Facebook and BrightEdge

Kathy - Thanks. Our real estate technology Facebook Page already shows up on page 1 on Google when searching for realbird At least for me. Now we have to work on making it rank well for more keywords, like Facebook real estate marketing Note, how I linked to it with different anchor texts in this comment :)

-- Zoltan

Jenny - It is pretty simple. These are just best practices, but choosing the proper anchor text (the text that you actually use as a link in a post or webpage) is very powerful. It's a basic SEO tip, but we forgot to utilize it when linking to our Facebook Page.

Andrea - I agree. The problem with SEO is that results are disconnected from the actual actions. You make your change according to some best practices, but the tiny results that they may cause in search engine rankings happen only later in future, if ever. The best way to approach it is to have 5-10 best practices memorized or listed on a note, so that when you write a blog post, you can easily check your content to meet these requirements. One of them, that I mentioned in this post is to use keyword reach anchor texts for links. Everyone struggles with reminding themselves not to link an expression " click here" for example, as it is completely useless information for SEO. But rather, review the links before publishing and change those that need more keywords in the anchor text. Also, you probably need dozens or more links with New Milford homes for sale and the combination of related keywords to be picked up Google to have some measurable effect in ranking. I just linked to your FB page with one combination :)

-- You are welcome.

-- Hi Hannah

This whitepaper lists 3 techniques to make your Facebook Business Page rank high in Google (Bing etc.) searches:

1. Link to your Facebook Page by adding your brand (or other targeted keyword) in the link's text itself (or the alt tag of an image link). Most of us just simple link with "Fan Us on Facebook" or use a flashy Facebook icon without using the keywords in the text itself.
2. They suggest to use these targeted keywords in your shares as well. We already do this, whenever it makes sense, we have RealBird as a keyword in our status updates, even when we share a link in the commentary. Of course, you don't want to overdo this, it has to make sense semantically, but this study claims that when Google etc. indexes your Facebook Page, it actually uses terms in your status updates for ranking
3. The whitepaper also suggests to create additional pages on your Facebook Page (these used to be the Tabs before) and chose content and links that corresponde somewhat with your real estate sites main category. This is a bit more complicated and time consuming but nevertheless an important SEO technique. We still need to do this for our RealBird Page. In our case it would mean at least that we have separate pages for our main product features, e.g. the RealBird Single Property Websites, the Property Search, the Mobile Real Estate Website. In you case, it would be something that corresponde with your main content categories
4. Finally, this is less keyword targeting but important for ranking: collect as many Likes as possible. Easier said than done, but the point is that social network interactions, content sharing and voting has an increasing importance in organic search engine ranking

Andrea - Great. Thanks

Kim and Kristine - You are welcome

Denise - What's your FB Page url. I take a look and may have some suggestions.

John - Anchor texts are very powerful SEO techniques. I can't believe that we - knowing it - still link to our own Facebook Page with some general term, rather than using RealBird Real Estate Marketing Technology on Facebook :) I 

The idea is that you either want to have your target keywords, like John did in the Facebook link's text or the brand (company etc.) or both. With ActiveRain, most people use a Facebook icon in their signature footer, that - most likely - has no keyword filled anchor text attached to. There are two places to search engine optimize the Facebook links on AR

1. Signature footer: Use a text link with keyword-filled anchor text and/or add the alt="keywords come here" tag to the Facebook image. Google does check alt="" tag's value for keywords. This will be included in all reblogs and hence increasing the pointers to your Facebook Page with the correct keywords
2. Sidebar links - These are dofollow links (AR does not instruct Google to ignore them) and whatever you add here shows up on ALL of your posts. So just by adding a simple link here, you get dozens or hundreds of pointers with the right keywords to your FB Page as well.

Hi Denise - Thanks for your kind words. We noticed that autoposting links to Facebook Pages is not too effective. Most of the likes and comments happen on those posts that have a thumbnail photo and also some personal commentary. Plus the new Facebook Page Insight shows where the Page Likes are coming from and for us the biggest source of new Fans are via our Like Boxes that we place everywhere, our blogs, RealBird itself. Just some tips ...

Trang - Thanks