Optimize Your Facebook Business Page

Social media should be the main ingredient of any marketing strategy. While some marketing techniques may get a bit expensive, this one is free and may bring you big profits.

It’s vital to have your Facebook Business Page correctly optimized with some SEO best practices in order to maximize conversions. First of all, there is a correlation between a well-developed social presence and your search rankings and in the end, a Facebook Business Page becomes a “second home page” for your online business. Since there are many rumors about Facebook Business Page Optimization on the Web, let’s put this straight. Within this post, you will learn some essential rules that will leverage your Facebook page….

Let’s start with the optimization basics!

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1. Choose the right name
When it comes to correct optimization, it is fundamental to find the right name for your Facebook Business Page because you choose it once and it is permanent. It’s key to remember that the first word of your Facebook page title is the most significant in the eyes of Google.

This is why stuffing your page title with generic keywords won’t work. Doing so might make it look spam-like and discourage people from getting engaged, let alone sharing your updates. You need a brandable name that represents your business and shows its personality. This is the real intent behind any Facebook Business Page.

2. Custom your vanity URL
Never settle for the dynamic URL which is automatically generated when you sign up. On Facebook, you can easily personalize your address and unify it with your brand name. Make it unique and easy to remember. If you match your Facebook vanity URL with the page’s title you are going to strengthen your brand recognition. Moreover, personalization will hugely improve the findability of your page both in Facebook search and in search engines.

facebook_vanity_url
3. Fill out your profile
Make sure that your avatar, cover photo, bio and profile info are complete and contain up-to-date information. A complete profile reveals your professional attitude and is a clear signal to your audience that you are engaged. Moreover, aim for consistency across all of your social media channels, and make sure that the main visuals match. Utilize a Facebook cover photo that is 851 x 315 px.

Facebook-Cover-Photo
source

Build your marketing personas and improve the communication with your targeted audience by using the appropriate voice and tone.

4. Pay special attention to the “About us” section
The truth is, your visitors want to know all of the details about your business: where your office is located, what service you offer, what your working hours are and so on. Therefore, provide them with complete information. The “About us” section is a good place to emphasize values and benefits your products or service may bring to the customers. Similarly to Meta Description, you need an apt description short enough [you get 155 characters] in order to be correctly displayed in the search engine snippet, both on desktop and mobile. Make sure that you choose an appropriate category:

Local business or place
Company, organization, or institution
Brand or product
Artist, band, or public figure
Entertainment
Cause or community
Categories-on-Facebook
Complete your short description diligently and use accurate wording (including targeted keywords) to concisely characterize your business.

Pro-tip: Remember to add the link to your website or landing page within the short description because it strongly improves the findability of the particular offer or content page.

5. Sprinkle your business page with keywords strategically
Optimizing for keywords remains crucial, even when it comes to social media. Place your targeted ones in the most important, strategic parts of your page. Include them in the URL, page title and “About us” section because they will be visible on the front page and will appear in search results.

Remember that the name of your page corresponds with the title tag and your short description works as the meta description tag. However, make sure that you do not overuse keywords: stick to a top six and mention them naturally in the proper context.

6. Include the phone number and address in your Facebook page
The current Facebook design shows your business category, location, phone number and business hours straight away, on the front page. Therefore, make sure to fill out your street address, city, state, zip, and local phone number. Adding the address helps with indexing your brand for local search results and increases page following. Google simply pays more attention to pages that give specific contact information.

7. Optimize Facebook updates
The first 18 characters of each of your Facebook posts serve as the meta title and the meta description in SERPs. Therefore, anytime you are going to post on Facebook, share the content or upload a picture, and take advantage of the fact that you can add a description.

Facebook-updates
8. New features that you should implement
Facebook is constantly introducing new useful tools that are going to make running your business easier. To keep your page well-optimized, make sure that you keep an eye on any new features that emerge and implement them when available.

Call to action on Facebook

Worth mentioning are call to action buttons for Facebook Pages introduced in December 2014. Thanks to the call to action, people can easily interact with your business page. You can choose the suitable destination for your type of business and direct your followers to it. The full list includes 7 types of actions:

Sign Up – mailing list or webinar sign up page, join the tool.
Book Now – hotel or restaurant reservations
Contact Us – contact form
Use App
Play Game
Shop Now – e-commerce store
Watch Video
choose-a-call-to-action-button
Messenger for Business

Layer 2 and Layer 3 Switches

Network switches are often described as Layer 2 or Layer 3. Lets Dive into the meaning and what are the advantages and disadvantages of the technologies involved?

Why layers?

Switches are used to built networks, linking network devices together and forwarding (i.e. switching) data from one port to another based on information gleaned from the packets being transmitted. Information is organised to conform to the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) seven-layer model, which is adhered to by networking vendors to insure interoperability between their products.

Hence terms like Layer 2, Layer 3 and so on, which you’ll hear used mostly in relation to switches but other networking devices, too.

How Layer 2 switches work

Layer 1, also referred to as the Physical Layer, describes the electrical interface and isn’t of much interest to switch vendors. Rather it’s to Layer 2 (the Data Link layer) that most switches look when deciding how to move packets around a network. It’s here, for instance, that a switch can find the Media Access Control or MAC address of both sending and receiving devices.

Layer 2 switches learn MAC addresses automatically, building a table which can be used to selectively forward packets. For example, if a switch receives packets from MAC address X on Port 1 it then knows that packets destined for MAC address X can simply be forwarded out of that port rather than having to try each available port in turn.

Because Layer 2 information is easily retrieved, packets can be forwarded (switched) very quickly, typically, at the wire speed of the network. Layer 2 switching, therefore, has little or no impact on network performance or bandwidth. And because they are relatively dumb devices no setup or management is required, making them cheap and easy to deploy.

What Layer 2 switches can’t do is apply any intelligence when forwarding packets. They can’t route packets based on IP address or prioritise packets sent by particular applications to, for example, guarantee bandwidth to Voice over IP users.

The information required for that only starts to become available at Layer 3 (the Network Layer).

Layer 3 advantages

Intelligent packet forwarding (routing) based on Layer 3 information is traditionally the function of routers. It’s here that IP addresses are found, for example, enabling a router to link different subnets together. Specialised routing protocols also use Layer 3, enabling routers to “learn” routes between networks.

In recent years, however, that same functionality has also been built into network switches. Routers are still used to forward packets across (relatively) slow WAN (Wide Area Network) connections but on local networks, high-performance Layer 3 switches – sometimes referred to as “switch routers” or “routing switches” – have largely replaced them.

Other intelligence commonly found in Layer 3 switches, includes the ability to logically segment a network into two or more Virtual LANs (VLANs) plus enhanced security controls to prevent unauthorised setup changes. Facilities to prioritise different types of traffic are also commonplace, to provide guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) when, for example, building converged voice and data networks.

Layer 3 issues

Extra processing power is required to retrieve and make use of Layer 3 information. As a result, early switches could cause bottlenecks; nowadays, most Layer 3 switches operate at full wire speed just like their Layer 2 counterparts.

Prices are higher than for a Level 2 switch because extra processing power and memory is required for Layer 3 switching. Such switches also require setup and management. Most are configured via a Web based GUI, although support for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is another common option.

Layer 3 switches can be complex to manage, especially on large distributed networks, but the concepts aren’t that difficult and affordable Layer 3 switches are now available for small business deployment.

Which switch?

Small networks can be built using just Layer 2 devices, but most corporate networks will have a mix of Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches. Dumb Layer 2 products are a cheap and easy way of providing connectivity to workgroups while more intelligent Layer 3 switches enable departmental networks to be segmented and controlled with no loss of bandwidth.

Finally, it’s worth noting that some switch vendors claim to support Layer 4 (the Transport Layer) and above. Load balancing switches, for example, use information beyond Layer 3 to distribute packets across large server farms. However, there’s blurring of the levels in these more sophisticated products such that it’s now more usual to refer to them as multi-level switches. Multi-level switches are more expensive and complicated to deploy and mostly reserved for specialist applications.