Facebook Vanity Urls– get yours!

3 million users took their names last Friday in Facebook’s vanity url rush.

But even bigger than that is grabbing the vanity urls for your fan page(s), which opens up June 28th. If you have at least 1,000 fans by May 31st, then you can grab them now.  Likewise, if you’re a journalist or a name brand, you can request their team to do it for you.  We took that liberty for a few of our casual dining clients. It might even help us rank on pest control eventually.

For example, if you’re looking for Send Out Cards, you don’t have to go to some crazy url anymore.  And the Facebook team has smartly 301 redirected the old url to this new one.  The new url is only on the 3rd page of Google organic results, but will climb over time.

Want to SEO your Facebook fan page? I was chatting with one of the Facebook executives, who described how anything you do in traditional SEO applies towards SEO for your Facebook page.

• Get more friends to fan your page– the link juice will flow. Put up a ton of good content to attract links from inside Facebook and from external sites. Facebook will likely already rank for your name as well as your organization’s name– so link to it from other sites you control.
• Create a ton of content— Facebook has widgets for music, videos, WordPress blogging, twitter, and everything else imaginable. Tie all these social sites together– not just for SEO reasons, but so that users can connect with you via their favorite method. I don’t use FriendFeed and Plaxo, but there are enough friends that do that I automatically update status there anyway.

Even if you’re not interested in being a social media expert, at least you can have a placeholder to avoid reputation management problems such as that of North Dakota State University Admissions. And don’t just grab your Facebook url, tie it in with stuff like your FriendFeed for Dennis Yu.