Facebook for Social SEO

Facebook BrightEdgeBrightEdge, an enterprise SEO company, has written a great white paper on how to optimize Facebook for social SEO. Key takeaways:

  • Top 200 brands in the Fortune 500 rank 1st organically for their brand name, but 70% don’t rank in the first 20 results for Facebook fan pages
  • Optimize Facebook for social SEO:
    • Link to your fan page from your website using your company name as the anchor text
    • Frequently use your brand name in your posts
    • Getting more “likes” increases authority because you get links to your fan page from other user profiles
    • Add a fan box widget to your website or blog to drive social engagement
    • “Shares” is the number 1 social factor for search rankings so add Facebook functionality to share and like other pages on your website that could drive social engagement (i.e. blog, videos, etc.)
    • Create sub-pages on your Facebook profile that are optimized for search and inter-link them back to relevant pages on your website
    • Give your website a healthy dose of Facebook kool-aid to increase user interaction by adding more social plugins to your site - comments, activity feed, recommendations, and login

The Death of Meta Keywords

As an update to my post on, Do Meta Keywords Matter, Yahoo officially announced that they no longer include meta keywords in their search algorithm. This article from Search Engine Land indicates that Bing doesn’t support the tag either.

So, with Google, Yahoo and Bing all ousting the tag does it even make sense to include it in your on-page SEO efforts?  No! And if your “webmaster” tries to tell you otherwise please change your administrator password and start looking for a replacement. (Yes, someone today just told me that their site was optimized because it had meta keywords)

Photo credit: tammra

Do Meta Keywords Matter?

With Bing taking over search for Yahoo and MSN Live there has been a lot of talk lately as to whether or not meta keywords will play a role in on-page SEO.

Yesterday, Google officially published an article on their webmaster blog stating they “do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.” Matt Cutts had eluded to this on his site for some time, but now it’s official. In fact, they say they haven’t included it in their ranking for years.

My colleague Mark found an article from Bing’s webmaster blog that suggests they may include it in their ranking algorithm. Well, at least they suggest we not ignore it entirely.

The tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

So, what would my suggestion be? For now, here are a few tips:

  • Use no more than 8 to 10 relevant meta keywords per page
  • Use singular and plural versions of keywords
  • Include common mispellings if they exist

Bing also gives some great tips:

  • Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the and description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
  • Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
  • Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list

Do you have any other tips for writing your meta keywords?

Photo credit: tiagodoria