When you hear the word Facebook, you probably think of: networking, friendships, funny pictures (that probably shouldn’t be seen by the general public)… pretty much a fun little bubble where your online life can exist and risky things can be kept secret.

Now, depending on your level of involvement with the Internet industry, you may hear search engine and immediately think of… well… searching for things/information/products/etc. For the seasoned Internet adventurer, you may think and be familiar with terms such as algorithms, search queries, keywords, SERPs, quality score and so much more.

Enter Facebook Search

Facebook is now challenging and blurring the lines between search and social by offering Open Graph abilities that tie external websites to internal Facebook processes and thus entering the search market. Originally, when building and marketing a brand’s website, you had few things more important than search engine optimization and:

  • Targeting (the right) keywords
  • Targeted metadata (title tags, descriptions that will entice people click through to your site)
  • Link building (especially important)
  • On-site optimization
  • Conversion rates

This all goes along with other marketing/SEO aspects.

Now, site designers and brand owners need to view ‘SEO’ in a completely different way and shift and adapt (these are two of the most important words in any good Internet marketers lexicon).  With Facebook’s Open Graph offering the option to implement a “Like” or “Recommend” button on your website, we not only need to have useful, compelling and informative content, but we need to be able to do make sure that our content is ‘Likeable’ and that our customers and visitors will want to share it.  Thus showing up in the Open Graph search.

Facebook is almost acting like its own conglomerate “Internet” package – it offers the ability to share user content and now (since they technically stepped into the search market) they are offering an internal “SEO” of sorts. How long will it be until the “Like” feature replaces a traditional link?

Link vs. Like

Word-of-mouth marketing  has been a tried and true strategy for many brands, and to this day, it’s still one of the driving factors of brand recommendation. The “Like” or “Recommend” feature is almost an online version of word-of-mouth marketing. People see content or products that they find useful- and they “like” it. When it shows up in their friend’s activity feed, they’ll check it out and possibly “like” it as well.

This is how it happens. Let’s use CNN for an example:

  1. CNN puts out content while integrating the “Like” or “Recommend” feature on their physical web presence.
  2. Users login to the external website, thanks to Open Graph, (CNN for instance) and “Like” an article.
  3. CNN now aggregates this into your friend’s activity feed, on the CNN homepage, if they opt in to CNN to receive this information.

  4. Facebook then pulls this information in, via Open Graph, and it displays in the news feed and on your profile page.

  5. The code that the websites are integrating to enable this cross-capability can also be optimized in an “SEO” like way- just like with regular code.

As you’ll see on the Open Graph protocol site, in order for your object to be represented within a graph, you have to pick which type it belongs to, which can range from:

  • Organizations
  • Groups
  • People
  • Places
  • Products and Organizations

…and more.

These objects are what will be helping sites surface within Facebook’s Open Graph search results while linking to the external source.  While it’s not known exactly how the details are actually going to work out, you’ll notice that it’s already been rolling out and appearing in search.

I took the liberty of searching up a page that I already knew was bringing to light some SEO proof.

If you search up “Annapolis Marriott” in the search bar, you’ll come up with these results:

You’ll notice that the second result has “Source: tripadvisor.com”- which will link you out to the external page. Those results are eventually going to be ranked by the amount of “likes” once the whole system is into place.

TripAdvisor (and their millions of reviewers) are evidently ahead of the game.

Is this the end of the SEO game for Google?

How will this impact traditional SEO practices?

So what does this mean for Google and other search engines? I’m not going to be all doom and gloom, like I was previously, saying that this will be the END of traditional SEO as we know it. I will, however, take a step back and say that while this isn’t a direct threat (right now) it’s going to be working almost parallel to traditional SEO practices.

Not only will we need to be link building, maintaining on-site SEO and implementing findability strategies for websites, but we’re also going to have to put a strategy in to place to push our content out and make it social and shareable. Wouldn’t it be a shame if your site was ranking on the first page of Google for a search term, but the majority of people are searching within Facebook and you lose  a possible conversion because you weren’t taking Open Graph seriously? Trust me, it would be….

Don’t make this mistake. Even if it’s not a direct threat now, it’ a NEW market to optimize within.  As Internet marketers, we need to be constantly shifting and adapting to new techniques and practices.

What are your thoughts?  Are you taking Facebook’s Open Graph seriously?

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