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On our site we want to put a Facebook Like button/widget-thingy. It is possible to create a like button, where the URL associated with the button is the page it sits on, rather than a Facebook page.

I would imagine that pointing a Like button to a FB page allows for the tracking of conversations, which in the end does help SEO.

In order to maximize our SEO efforts, which of the following is the best-practices method:

Add a Like button to a page; button points to the Facebook page. That Facebook page then points to the original page where the Like button is on

OR

Add a Like button to a page; button points to the page the Like button is on, without creating a Facebook page (self-referencing)

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Facebook has Developer Plugins that do exactly what you want.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/#plugins

<html>
    <head>
      <title>My Great Web page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
       <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=YOUR_URL"
        scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
        style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>
    </body>
</html>

To answer your second question, your goal is to have organic traffic comming to both your site and your Facebook page and you want to encourage cross over. When I was working on my author site a while back before I moved to blogger to reduce maintenance, we had a photo roll with me at a book signing in a box in the side bar and a like button there, for the page (we used the page badge for that).

Then, at the bottom of each blog post we had another like button, clearly segregated by theme (and the style of the button since the page button was the badge) which was for the post. This like button would be incorporated into the various share links, but typically you see the "Like" and "+1" buttons broken out from the other buttons for things like "Reddit" and what have you.

So in summation, you'll want both. It's important to understand that the Like button for URLs will not (most likely) work as you want for your FB Page (as in, copy/pasting the URL from your FB page into the code above in an attempt to have people Like your Facebook Page). As I understand it, the users would be Liking the URL (of your Facebook page) as opposed to the Page itself. You should use the Page Badge for this function, and the Like Button I pulled out of the FB Developer Guide for posts and actual Web pages on your site. (You could also use a Like Box in place of the Page Badge if you like.)

You can find the page badges here: http://www.facebook.com/badges/ (It's behind a login or I'd paste code too).

I hope I've answered your question. There's a lot to do with the Developer Plugins from Facebook, when I maintained my author blog on my own servers I used the plugins for comments as well as likes, which is especially useful because each comment causes a News Feed entry to happen on the Commentor's Friends' Feeds (as well as their own. ie: "Bob Barker commented on BLahBlahBLah..."). I'm getting off topic now.

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  • I understand that. But for SEO purposes, and increasing page rank... do you point this to the FB page, and that FB page then points back to the original page. That would give you an additional link-back right?
    – ElHaix
    Commented Apr 16, 2013 at 21:42
  • @ElHaix This is pretty much the answer to the question you asked. (There is no "correct." You can point the button at whatever URL you want.) At no point did you bring up SEO. If that's your focus, maybe you should go back and edit your question to clarify what you're really after.
    – Su'
    Commented Apr 16, 2013 at 21:49
  • @Su' - You're absolutely right - thank you. Updated the question accordingly.
    – ElHaix
    Commented Apr 17, 2013 at 1:37
  • @ElHaix No problem, I've edited to try and better answer your question.
    – DavidScherer
    Commented Apr 17, 2013 at 11:13
  • @DavidScherer - I think I got it... so on other sites I own, I put a badge pointing to the FB page for the site A. That FB page points to site A. That site has a bunch of results pages. On those results pages use the Like button with the page's URL in the like button - not the site's home page, right?
    – ElHaix
    Commented Apr 19, 2013 at 4:24

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