How to Increase Website “Likes” on Facebook, Boost Your Firm’s Social Media Visibility
By PaperStreet on February 22, 2011 in Social Media
With Facebook topping Google as the “most visited site of the year” for 2010, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of social media in your business’ online marketing campaign.
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, links (and the relevance and value of those links) have long been one of the most important factors in Google’s algorithm for ranking high in the SERPS (search engine results pages). The more Google sees your website being mentioned—especially from credible sources and along with having the keywords mentioned in the title tags and body of your webpage—the more it decides people should see your content for the keywords searched, making your site rank higher in the results.
Facebook “likes” are similar in that they tell Facebook what is important in its users’ Social Graph. The more “likes” a page gets, the more visibility it gets within Facebook search.
More importantly though, with 65 million users “liking” content daily, it helps drive traffic to your site by sharing your recommendations with your social network and making your content viral.
Think of a Facebook “like” as today’s word-of-mouth marketing, giving your brand a personal recommendation and sharing that recommendation with the user’s network. If someone “likes” your website, a story appears in the user’s news feed and page (viewable by all their friends) with a link back to your website. This can lead someone to “share” that story and, in turn, that is aggregated to that user’s news feed and profile page, along with a link to your page, which is viewable by all their friends. Overall, this increases visibility for your website with a simple click of a button.
Making your content sharable
In terms of Search Engine Optimization, title tags and descriptions are used to entice users to click the link as well as optimize the document for search engines. When it comes to making your website sharable in the social graph, Facebook uses the Open Graph Protocol, which calls for a set of meta tags to be added to a page to customize how you would like your content to appear when shared in Facebook. This allows you to specify the exact title, description and image to pull. Or you can give your content a “type” to categorize it (such as company, website, movie etc) or to specify your location to Facebook users.
Example of FB open graph meta tags:
<meta property=”og:title” content=”PaperStreet Web Design” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”company” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=http://www.paperstreet.com” />
<meta property=”og:image”content=”http://www.paperstreet.com/images/logo.jpg” />
When these tags are not in place, Facebook defaults to the website’s title tag and description of the page, and it creates thumbnails the user can choose to display from images on the page.
Having a well-written, search engine optimized title tag that is unique to the page in place, as well as Facebook meta tags, will help your business by making your content sharable on Facebook, as well as other social media websites.
PaperStreet Web Design can help your business dominate in both search and social marketing.
We can code your website as part of our search engine optimization services, as well as set up a social media campaign to engage your customers with a custom Facebook fan page design, FB meta tag implementation, and “like” button implementation on your website with our Social Media services.
We are happy to get your started; please call us today for a detailed quote: 954. 523.2181
