Optimize your site in accordance with Facebook Like functionality
Online social networking is one among the many things in this world which were not with us sometime back but have become an inevitable part of our life. The growth of social networking sites is like wild fire which has spread rapidly in short period. One of the most used networking sites by people around the world now is Facebook. Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, was initially restricted only to the students of Harvard. However, it has expanded slowly and now there are around 750 million active users around the world.
Facebook can help you in increasing the popularity and number of users to your website to a great extent through one of its interesting features called Facebook ‘Like’. It’s simply a ‘Like’ button which can be placed on any website. It works when any Facebook user browsing through your website likes your site and clicks the button. When this happens, that action (or Like) will be displayed on his/her profile of Facebook along with the URL of your web page stating that he/she likes your web page. The advantageous part is that the ‘Likes’ of that user will be visible to his/her friends in Facebook too. So more the ‘Likes’ to your site, more people in Facebook will know about your site resulting in more visitors.
To do this, you have to optimize your web pages in accordance with the functionality of the ‘Like’ feature by using open graph protocol. Open graph protocol helps you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. Including the graph tags will make your page equivalent to Facebook page. This can be done by giving more information in meta tags of the HTML of your web pages. Meta tags generally give information about the web page, though it will not be displayed in the page. They are machine-readable tags used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata. More the descriptive and informative the meta tag becomes, more the visibility to your site in Facebook.
The open graph protocol will require the below four properties to be included in the meta tags of the HTML of your web page. • og:title – This property should contain the title of your web page as it should appear within the graph. • og:type – ‘Type’ should mention the type of content your webpage contains, like article, movie, etc • og:image – This property should have the URL of the image you wish to place within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. It can be of formats PNG, JPEG and GIF. • og:url – This property should contain the actual URL of your webpage.
If the above details are provided in the meta tags, the link to your page will appear with the image and the URL in the user’s ‘Facebook profile’ when he/she clicks the ‘Like’ button in your website. In addition, you can also add the below tags as well for more productive results. • og:site_name – Name of your website, e.g., "HioxIndia". • fb:admins or fb:app_id - A comma-separated list of either Facebook user IDs or a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page. It is valid to include both fb:admins and fb:app_id on your page. • og:description – This property may contain one or two lines about your web page.
Once these details are provided, you can add the ‘Like’ button on your website. The ‘Like’ button can be added with an iframe, or you can use the JavaScript SDK for the XFBML tag.
Including the above mentioned elements in the meta tags and adding the ‘Like’ button will positively increase the traffic to your website to a noticeable extent.
Facebook can help you in increasing the popularity and number of users to your website to a great extent through one of its interesting features called Facebook ‘Like’. It’s simply a ‘Like’ button which can be placed on any website. It works when any Facebook user browsing through your website likes your site and clicks the button. When this happens, that action (or Like) will be displayed on his/her profile of Facebook along with the URL of your web page stating that he/she likes your web page. The advantageous part is that the ‘Likes’ of that user will be visible to his/her friends in Facebook too. So more the ‘Likes’ to your site, more people in Facebook will know about your site resulting in more visitors.
To do this, you have to optimize your web pages in accordance with the functionality of the ‘Like’ feature by using open graph protocol. Open graph protocol helps you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. Including the graph tags will make your page equivalent to Facebook page. This can be done by giving more information in meta tags of the HTML of your web pages. Meta tags generally give information about the web page, though it will not be displayed in the page. They are machine-readable tags used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata. More the descriptive and informative the meta tag becomes, more the visibility to your site in Facebook.
The open graph protocol will require the below four properties to be included in the meta tags of the HTML of your web page. • og:title – This property should contain the title of your web page as it should appear within the graph. • og:type – ‘Type’ should mention the type of content your webpage contains, like article, movie, etc • og:image – This property should have the URL of the image you wish to place within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. It can be of formats PNG, JPEG and GIF. • og:url – This property should contain the actual URL of your webpage.
If the above details are provided in the meta tags, the link to your page will appear with the image and the URL in the user’s ‘Facebook profile’ when he/she clicks the ‘Like’ button in your website. In addition, you can also add the below tags as well for more productive results. • og:site_name – Name of your website, e.g., "HioxIndia". • fb:admins or fb:app_id - A comma-separated list of either Facebook user IDs or a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page. It is valid to include both fb:admins and fb:app_id on your page. • og:description – This property may contain one or two lines about your web page.
Once these details are provided, you can add the ‘Like’ button on your website. The ‘Like’ button can be added with an iframe, or you can use the JavaScript SDK for the
Including the above mentioned elements in the meta tags and adding the ‘Like’ button will positively increase the traffic to your website to a noticeable extent.
