Do you have a Facebook page? I sincerely hope so, because facebook is an excellent instrument for luring customers to your website.

Here’s a few tips to get you started.

It’s past time to start considering your business Facebook page as basically a “secondary business website”. It sincerely has become that powerful. Facebook has a lot of features that can help you connect to people through your friends. Using the messaging system, the events calendar, and the news feeds you can expose your brand to a significant swath of of Facebooks 500 million users.

Here are some practical steps you can take to improve your facebook presence and drive traffic to your business.

1. Take some time to choose a good name for your page. Once you decide commit to it. Changing your facebook name is not unlike changing your business phone number. It makes it harder on your friends to refer people to your page.

A good name will stick with people and make it more likely that they’ll pass it on to their friends. Don’t stuff the name with generic keywords. It won’t work. Your name will be long, hard to remember, and spammy looking and even if you can get people to “like” you they’ll be more likely to hide your all-important news feed.

A good name should be specific. Facebook hates being played. They can be mean. If they think your page is a liability they’ll disable your ability to update your page making it a lot of work to contact your fans and killing any marketing benefit you were hoping to get from your page.

Don’t get greedy.

Use your company name in the page title and don’t be misleading.

2. Take the time to do it right. Fill out the info tab.

At this point I need to address a common misconception about Facebook. Don’t expect a significant SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, benefit from you’re facebook profile. Facebook obfuscates external links so Google won’t pass page rank to them or, in some cases, can’t see them at all. Facebook works very hard to keep link spammers off their site, and this is a very effective way to do that. The real marketing strength of Facebook isn’t in it’s SEO potential. It’s real power is it’s popularity. Facebook has become so large that it’s become an outstanding networking tool. Once you’re comfortable using Facebook you can use it to drive actual business to your firm!

There  are ways get some benefit to your website search presence, though, if you know what you’re doing. An important factor in your search engine ranking is the “domain authority” of the site’s linking to you. Facebook uses something called a “nofollow tag” on their links to keep Google from passing “page rank” to your site, Google DOES follow these links and can pass the linking site’s “domain authority” to you. This is why getting a link on Wikipedia can benefit your website even though their links use the same “nofollow” attribute.

It won’t hurt to include keywords and links on the info page. Include all your important information:

• Links to your own sites or other relevant resources
• City, state, and address, which are important fields for local searches
• Company overview, mission, and products, which become relevant when folks do product searches

Make sure to include your phone number and links to your “buy now” pages. Remember… over time this page will bring in prospects. Make it easy for your Facebook visitors to contact you or, better yet, buy!

3. Use status updates to post links to your website and other relevant sites. When it comes to getting Google to notice your facebook presence this is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Your status posts are sent out as news updates to your fans and are posted on their pages, too.

There are two kinds of status links. It’s important that you use the right kind of link to get a benefit.

Raw URL: Facebook will auto-link the text directly to the URL when you post the raw URL in the text of a status update. This is the best way to do it because the link goes straight to your site. Try to use an actual URL wherever possible.
Attach Link: Attach links seem really cool because they automatically pull down all kinds of cool information from the page you’re linking to, including a thumbnail image. This method gives you the option of changing the anchor text of the link. In this case you should avoid using attach links. These links don’t go straight to your website. Instead they pass through a facebook URL. The search engines won’t be able to follow them properly.

4. Get fans to comment and like content in your stream to strengthen intra-Facebook linking.

Facebook links a fan’s name back to their Facebook profile page when they comment or like content in your Facebook page’s stream. When these comments and likes are indexed, Google will see more links between your page and your page’s fans and will view this as a stronger bond.

Facebook can play a central role in improving the emergence of your firm and your website because it allows your page to be visible to Facebook’s immense user base. Sure, it will take a little time. You’ll be forced to do a little creative planning and you’ll need to actually build and update it, but when all is said and done your online visibility will increase.

About The Author

Brian O’Connell is the President and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading edge website design companies dedicated exclusively to accounting website design. His company at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, bookkeeping, and tax preparation firms.