5 things to realize about SEO in the Facebook era

We always thought that Facebook’s Open Graph represented a watershed moment in Internet marketing history – which is why we built the Open Audience Manager.

When the Open Graph and the Like button was first launched, the immediate value to marketers was the ability to build a Facebook ‘friend base’ from their own websites. On top of that, Open Audience Manager offered an inventory management tool for Like buttons and the ability to market directly to visitors who had liked content or products on their sites.

Now, with the Bing-Facebook search integration announcement, marketing sci-fi is becoming reality; search is about to change for ever, and along with it SEO and SEM.

See the video below for some more details on the partnership.

Our friends at Digiday made some interesting comments in this respect:

“Think about the implications of this for marketers for a moment. What if the “S” in SEO came to mean Social Engine Optimization? How quickly would the millions of dollars marketers and publishers invest in SEO transfer, virtually overnight, to efforts spent on making sure their brands, products and services get “liked” by consumers?”

This is exactly in line with what we’ve been saying for some time now, and have reiterated to skeptical SEO firms:

1. You can’t engineer yourself to the top of the natural search results with the right keywords and inbound links anymore.
2. Everyone will see different search results to their queries, filtered by activity in the open graph.
3. Pages will be ranked based on the number of Likes, user engagement, and the proximity between the searcher and people who Like the page.
4. You can’t be top of natural search results without being part of the Open Graph and having your pages Liked.
5. Engaging, targeted marketing will generate new Likes, thus marketing will become the most effective SEO tactic.

Prove me wrong.