When you search for keywords in your web browser related to your brand in Google search, you want to dominate the first page of results. How do you make sure you show up in the top ten results, not in the top 100? Optimize your Facebook brand or company page.

Just as there are ways to optimize your website for search engine rankings, there are a few tricks we can apply to your Facebook fan page to ensure that it ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Since Facebook is such a strong site in and of itself, applying a few of these best practices to your fan page will greatly improve the ability of the search engines to crawl and index your page and rank it for your keywords in the search results.

Why do you care about the rankings of your fan page? Higher rankings in the search engines means more visibility for your fan page, more visibility means more clicks to your fan page, which can push your customer along the sales cycle into the awareness or action stages. Your fan page works in sync with your website also because in the search results pages for your keywords, you want to dominate the screen with your own web properties. Facebook is probably your strongest social profile on the web, so let’s get started with the top Facebook page SEO tactics:

1. Customize your Facebook page’s URL

After your page has 25 likes, you can claim your vanity URL for your brand. This vanity URL means that it will be easier to remember the Facebook page’s URL when talking to customers or adding to advertisements. Additionally, having an optimized URL has SEO benefits as well, as an optimized URL gives the search engines a clearer metric to know what the Facebook page is about.

Select your page name from the drop down and you can change the URL (username).

The customized vanity URL is changed by changing your username. This username does not affect your Facebook login, it will only appear in the URL. Choose your company name and add a keyword if it makes sense, but avoid keyword stuffing.  Names are chosen at www.facebook.com/username.

2. Optimize your Brand or Company’s Name

An example of a clear, clean page name.

The Facebook page name should be your brand or company name and nothing else. Avoid stuffing in keywords or extra text. This is not the place to add your targeted keywords or special offers. When users are taking that second to decide whether to like your page or not, the page title makes a huge difference.

3.  Fill out your Info Thoroughly

An example of good brand information.

Make sure you thoroughly fill out the information about your page and add in descriptive keywords. This section offers a lot of opportunity for your Facebook page optimization. Depending on whether your page is for a brand, company, or artist, these fields will change slightly. Write informative, descriptive copy that highlights the best of your brand and includes a few keywords that you want to be found for.

4. Link to your page from around the web

Encourage users to follow your Facebook page with a link from your website

The more links coming into your page from other websites around the web, the more authoritative Google will think your page is. You can influence this by linking to your fan page from your website and any other social accounts you have. Examples of this would be your Twitter account, Google+ personal account, LinkedIn profile, Quora profile, and any niche social sites such as Etsy. You can also guest post on blogs and get a link back to your website and Facebook page.

5. Encourage internal Facebook links to your page

Poll your fans to encourage interaction and more Likes.

Internal links from Facebook fans and their profiles are important as well. This method goes hand in hand with engaging and interacting with your fans. You do not specifically get links to your page from other users, but by building up your fan base, you will have more links to your page from personal profiles. Take it one step further by interacting with your fans by asking call to action questions in your status, by using polls to survey your fans, and by sharing exclusive photos and videos that encourage comments. When search engines crawl your Facebook page they will take into account the social interaction with your page from other Facebook users as a positive ranking signal.