Facebook and other social media are often scorned by website owners unless they are going to help with the SEO of their main pages. One thing many marketing managers don’t like to see is their Facebook page appearing top for their Brand name in Google above their main website.
Facebook have no follow external links, this means that having a Facebook page isn’t going to boost the SEO of your main website. However think about how easy it is to do SEO for a Facebook page compared to your own website that may have a low pagerank or even no pagerank for. You can work on your main website’s SEO in time but you won’t be beating your competitors for ultra competitive keywords overnight. However by doing just a little SEO for your Facebook page you could be coming top of search results for all sorts of Keywords you never dreamed of getting to the first page for before. Facebook is one of very few Pagerank 10 pages online and because they have no follow external links the pagerank spreads to most of their internal pages. This means you can use a pagerank ten page to get traffic directly from Google. Once your traffic has come to your Facebook brand page you can either keep them there or direct them to your main website: this will of course depend on what you do and what you want from this traffic. If you really want to increase brand awareness then you can do this through your Facebook page and try to get people to ‘like’ your brand and potentially come back there regularly when they are on Facebook anyway to check out your latest news. If you want potential customers to contact you as well you can provide address, phone and e-mail details directly through your Facebook page, it saves them time and they don’t need to come to your own website unless they are keen to find out more. Of course if you are selling something then your Facebook page will become very much about diverting traffic to your website, most of this traffic though will be traffic you could never have got directly to your own page and so you can avoid cannibalization. For a start concentrate on separate keywords on your Facebook page to your main website, go for the ultra competitive keywords on the Facebook page and the keywords much more within your reach on your main website.
Of course SEO for your Facebook page will still take some effort but expect to see the results of this effort much more quickly in terms of changes to search results. Like any SEO campaign you need to choose and include your keywords and you should try and fit in some longer bits of text and posts that may seem to not really fit with Facebook but are still important as far as Google are concerned; regular updates are also important to Google and to the people following you on Facebook. Inwards links are also important from highly relevant pages with optimized anchor text including your keywords, include link bait posts and images on your Facebook page.