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The number of Facebook "Likes" pointing to your website can boost its rankings in search engines. When a person clicks on the familiar thumbs-up Like button, it posts an update on their Facebook page and creates an inbound link to your website. Inbound links will increase your search engine rankings.

Now that Facebook has 500 million users, including half of the US population, it has become a force to be reckoned with. Even though Facebook is a source of consumer clients -- not business clients -- the Facebook Like is now an important factor in search engine optimization.

While you're reading this, please click on the Like button below.

A Facebook Like works as a “vote” for a page. Facebook itself uses the number of Likes on a Facebook page to measure both page popularity and relevancy to each separate user. The more people Like your Page, the more links there are pointing from public profiles to it -- and thus the more ways search engines have to crawl it, according to Ann Smarty, who blogs on search marketing and social media.

Hubspot predicts that Likes will be as important as inbound links for SEO purposes. "In 2011 the Facebook Like button has become indispensable for promoting web content," says Mark Spangler, Director of Client Services at Stuzo | Dachis Group."Likes also allow third-party publishers to
send future updates to those who have Liked their content. This gives content owners the opportunity to increase engagement levels, targeted referrals and recurring traffic. 

Law Firm Marketing Takeaway

Get the HTML code to plug a Like button into your website or blog post. Simply visit developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like where Facebook maintains an easy to use tool to create the necessary HTML to be pasted into the Web page.

This is a one-by-one solution. If you want to automate it, you'll have to call in your IT department and have them read http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph to add Open Graph protocol <meta> tags to your website.