In the digital marketing arena, the top players have been constantly revealing new strategies where some work and some don’t. While this dynamic environment can be confusing to some marketers trying to decide which strategy to focus on, some are rightly allocating a serious amount of effort focusing on Facebook marketing.
Google used to base its algorithms heavily on age, on-site SEO, and backlinks but recently it started to count social media as one of the major cornerstones. It goes even further and crawls and indexes Facebook pages and comments. More importantly, Facebook likes has been on the way to becoming as effective as backlinks since the introduction of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.
The Open Graph protocol is a powerful concept of Facebook. It simply ties external websites to the internal processes of Facebook and allows a web page to function as any object on Facebook. This integration to Facebook is enabled by dropping Facebook social plug-ins into websites or blogs. From an SEO view point, Facebook likes benefit businesses to a great extent.
The “like” feature works almost as an adaptation of word-of-mouth marketing. When people think that a specific content, business, product or service is useful, they simply press the “like” button and become “fans” of the page. Then, the link of the page they “liked” is shared with their network on Facebook, and also they start to receive content from the “liked” source on their Facebook News Feed. When the link shows up in the activity feed, other people in the network will likely check it out and probably “like” it as well.
The “like” feature alone has an astonishing impact on SEO. The social implication here is that when people freely express that they “like” a content, business, product or service, they are willing to learn more about it. This gives businesses a great opportunity to interact with their visitors and increase traffic to their websites or blogs.
Obviously, in addition to being useful, persuasive and informative, pages should also be ‘likeable’ so that the visitors become interested in sharing them. Consequently, Facebook in a way forces businesses to create more valuable content and helps them increase traffic and enter new markets using social networks.
As businesses get more and more Facebook likes, their potential customer network will get larger. Each person will see a suggestion of a business or an organization and at least their curiosity will lead others to click the suggested link. As Facebook drives more traffic to their websites or blogs, the SEO value of websites and blogs will begin to improve and the sites with the most hits will show up at top of the ranks.
