Today over at Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan had an excellent article collecting a bunch of Facebook’s own data on why incorporating social media plugins and the Facebook “Like” button specifically into your website was so important — something every social marketing team should be aware of.
Facebook shared a lot of specific case examples showing how the incorporation of the Facebook Like icon radically improved website traffic and sales. The only broad statistic they gave was that the average media site incorporating Facebook saw a 300% increase in referral traffic.
Outside of that stat, the rest of it was a collection of case studies, but some of them were impressive indeed:
- Levi’s saw their Facebook traffic increase 40-fold after implementing the Like icon — moving from 1% of their overall traffic to a whopping 40% of all traffic sources to their site.
- Users reaching NHL.com from Facebook spent 85% mroe time and read 90% more articles than non-Facebook users.
- When a Ticketmaster users posts an event that they’re interested in on Facebook, it generates $5.30 in direct ticket sales.
Check out the full article of all of the statistics.
How to Improve Your Facebook Likes with the Like Icon
Facebook gives the following advice for increasing the number of Likes that you get, saying that the Like button gets three to five times more clicks if:
- You use the version of the Facebook Like button that shows thumbnails of friends
- The Like button appears at both the top and bottom or articles
- The Like button appears near visual content like graphics, infographics, and videos
- You allow people to add comments
Do you have the Facebook Like button on your website yet?
With Bing’s recently heavily incorporating Facebook data into search results and ranking, and more and more studies showing the demonstrable value of integration with Facebook, that Like button is quickly becoming essential for any consumer website, and very useful even for non-consumer sites.
In fact, that why we’ve just incorporated Facebook Like icon into the Trackable Social Share Icons plugin for WordPress blogs (available for free download) to help people make use of the Facebook Like icon to expand their social reach and drive traffic to their sites.
Other Facebook Posts:
[posts-by-tag tags = “Facebook” number = “7” excerpt = “false” thumbnail = “false” order_by = “date” author = “false”] [/posts-by-tag]
Other Case Studies:
Problem: Chapman Electric, a distributor of high quality underground utility tools, HDPE Pipe, Quazite, Klein Tools , PVC Pipe, HDPE and electrician’s supplies, had been attacked by a spam SQL Injection—leading to a manual Google Penalty and a corresponding drain in their organic sales. Without an in-house marketing staff knowledgeable in Search Engine Optimization best practices, they reached out to Ecreativeworks.
Process: When sites are hit by spam attacks featuring outbound links—Google’s natural processes and procedures will usually, in time, filter and devalue the links.
However, a SQL injection the causes your actually site to send out links is a whole different problem, and has a high risk of a manual or algorithmic penalty from the search engines. Obviously, this is a huge SOS and the corresponding procedure has no room for error.
First Step: Understanding the Hack
SEO SQL Injections hacks insert links and anchor text into your site that promote a spam site, allowing it to trick the search engines into ranking it at the #1 position for a highly commercial term.
These links are often hidden, not only from users, but from webmasters, using code that is meant to be confusing and difficult to understand. It’s meant only to be visible to search engines.
Second Step: Closing the Compromised Areas
There are two ways an injection like this can enter your site: through the database, or through the admin.
Admin: Have everyone that has administrator access change passwords—this simple step can prevent further breaches through the admin portal.
Database: There are a number of ways to increase security and flood proof the FTP access—in this case, our engineers created a new tiered FTP access that limited risk, as well as changing our usernames and passwords using algorithms written by our in-house engineers.
Third Step: Removing the Links
Our developers removed the created pages immediately. We digitally removed the pages, marking them with a 401 (permanently gone) response, and we used Google’s recommended best practices to remove the conspicuously created urls through Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Then, we audited our inbound links—and submitted a disavow form to Google’s webmasters. After all the previous steps were completed, we submitted a ‘reconsideration request’ to Google, and successfully had the manual penalty removed.
Results
Using diligent best practices, Chapman Electric was able to remove all traces of the hack, and remove the Google Penalty that had associated with their site. For more detailed information about hacking prevention or how to protect your site, contact Ecreativeworks – //go.ecreativeworks.com/contact-us