First things first! For people who are newbies in the field of Internet marketing strategies, getting to know SEO and what it can bring to your website is a good starting point. SEO enhances traffic to one’s website, giving it better Internet exposure through high rankings in search engines. Nowadays, search engines –such as Google – serve as the “tee off” of an online user as he search the Internet.
Search engines are widely used in obtaining background information about something, as well as doing in-depth research using online sources. Hence, website owners who invest in SEO can be assured of favorable page rankings in various search engines, enabling them to reach out to a greater market of internet and online social networking users.
The good thing about a social networking site – such as Facebook- is that it already has a lot of search engine juice. Google added public updates from Facebook pages and integrated real-time updating functionality. Now, information provided by Facebook page owners will appear seamlessly and so is shared links, status updates, multimedia, etc. Google claimed to have 503 million indexed Facebook pages. Of this huge number, half are local businesses.
So how do these resort managers make the most out of Facebook Fan pages? Resort owners who advertise their business online can learn a lot from 7 easy steps that website owners should know:
1. Get a good URL
Uniform Resource Locator (or URL) is the global address of websites, documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. URLs play a large part in SEO. Google as well as other search engines such as Bing/NineMSN, Wombat etc. use myriad information to determine the importance of a specific web page for a given search. Presently, Facebook gives a vanity URL for Fan pages with over 25 fans. This vanity URL can help Facebook users to easily find and access your resorts’ page and effectively gets more Google “juice”. For example, your Facebook blog has the following URL: "www.facebook.com/bestresort", which makes it easier to access. The short URL is extremely effective at getting the “juice”.
2. Configure Your Default tab
It is important for resort managers to make the first page of the resorts’ Facebook profile contain relevant text so it would be constantly crawled by Google. You can configure your Facebooks’ default tab by following these 2 simple steps:
Step 1: Click the “Settings” link on your Facebook Page
Step 2: Selecting the tab you prefer to display by default.
3. Generate links to your Fan Page
If you decide to drive traffic to your resorts’ Fan Page from search engines, the most vital thing to do is create links. To boost your page ranking, link your Facebook page from your resorts’ existing website. Likewise, you can also get links from other sites that will further increase your web rankings. You can do this by participating in online forums around the web and setting your Facebook URL as one of your signature URL. This signature URL would link back to your Facebook Fan Page at the same time to your existing resorts’ website. This way you will most definitely gain pull power in Google.
4. Link to other relevant pages
Basically creating links to relevant content would help you boost your web ranking. By pointing your online visitors at useful and relevant information you help them. This way it would make your Facebook profile more valuable in the process. And if you link to quality and relevant websites you benefit by association. Search engines like Google, for instance, checks the relevance of web pages you are linked to as it determines if your Facebook Page is relevant to the topic or theme being searched. So always link appropriately.
5. Use Facebook for inbound links to your resorts’ website
One essential ingredient of SEO is creation of inbound links. Because of inbound links your Facebook profile will start getting more hits from external websites. These inbound links are one of the most effective means to enhancing Internet recognition. And because of this it is easier to get links. It would also increase sales as more relevant visitors visit your resorts’ website. These links would drive traffic from people who are actually searching for your resort and your services.
6. Choose a good name for your Facebook Page
Unless you or your resort is a household name, a good name builds a good first impression. A good name for your Facebook page is your own unique identity. Try to get a name that's easy to remember and sounds good. Most importantly, choose your name that is also your resorts’ website name. You may also use keywords that will also help reinforce your search engine rankings. Choosing a good Facebook name reflects that your resort and your website are crucial marketing or advertising avenues for your enterprise.
7. Post keyword-rich content in your ‘About’ box
Facebook restricts the place where page owners can place their texts. So it is necessary to take advantage of this little box at the top left of your page called ‘About’ box. This is one of the few areas of your profile page that is accessible to search engines. Naturally, search engines give the text in the ‘About’ box priority over text that is located further down the page. In this way, the ‘About’ text is relatively high up in the page HTML. Then placing up to 250-character keyword-dense text is the solution. To add text to this significant box, click the “Write something about [Your Page]” below your profile picture.
Take time to create a Facebook fan page! It wouldn’t cost you a thing and can even help you maximise your online promotion by boosting your page’s growth rate. Build off your page and make it interactive and graphically appealing so that your fans can easily go back to your virtual home should they want to contact you for a second visit. An appealing website is also easy to refer and spread around.
