So what is all this fuss about Facebook and why should a company have a Facebook fan page?

There are definitely benefits from being able to reach your customers socially but I’m going to skip all of those and talk to you from the Search Engine Optimization point of view, after all that’s what I do.

First of all, let’s make sure we are all familiar with one work Backlink. What is a backlink? It is a link from an external website pointing to your website.

Why are backlinks important? Because search engines increase value (and therefore position) of your website based on how many trustworthy and related external links you have to it.

To understand this let’s take a look at a search engine like Google and understand what they are trying to do. What Google wants is to create search results that are exactly what the customer wanted to find, the most appropriate possible website should appear on top, the next on below it and so on. How do we use this? We help Google do their job in relation to our website.

Google obviously can’t read the mind of their customers so they figure if other customers and places thought a website was appropriate enough for a specific subject to point to it then it must be good, the more places related to the search point to it the better the equation. At the same time though if Google finds un-reputable or inapplicable links it doesn’t count them in your favor. So we can now all agree that the thing to do is to build reputable links.

So how does Facebook fit in? Every “Like” on Facebook is a link to your website, every posting where you point to a webpage is a link. Are they reputable? Well, they come from the customers themselves, what could be more reputable than that?

So going back to my point earlier, let’s help Google do their job by making it very easy for them to discover that many customers really think you should be the one appearing when they search for your products.