There are having several benefits of increasing the Facebook likes expression of affinity, more engaged users, email marketing capability, viral syndication of content, through likes more likes will come to your website, it becomes a part of Facebook graph, through this advertising will be more effective.
Hello! Through Facebook you can increase the number of visitors, engage them since it is a social network and communicate easier with them. And nowadays any website has a related Facebook page too. So, yes, Facebook can help the optimization process of a website. Good luck!
SEO - means optimize; optimize for more traffic to website and it's effects to rank of any website. So, if "facebook likes" brings traffic to your website, then definitely it helps to SEO.