Social media has begun to make a profound impact on search engine optimization and the way that search engine algorithms' rank your websites.

Gone are the days when a really good SEO friendly headline pushed you up in the ranks. As social media becomes used by more and more people including marketers, advertisers, big and small businesses, search engines are starting to implement a sites interaction on social media networks as a tool to help measure and place in optimization rankings.

Keywords are still very important, especially in your SEO friendly articles. They provide the meat for search engines when determining whose content is more useful for people searching a specific topic. However, now social media can be considered the potatoes.

Using your keywords and keyword phrases when creating the descriptions, updates, posts, and comments will go a long way in helping that content get ranked by the search engines.

While Google+ isn't the most popular social media site yet, it's the one with the most influence on rankings. Including the +1 button is no longer optional. Research shows that sites using the +1 feature have seen a 3x improvement in visitors from Google.

For more help with SEO Type your name into the browser and see the results. If you don't have a full social media profile, you might be missing an opportunity if prospects search your name. It's easy to see how powerful this could be. Articles, blog posts, photos, profiles, and more come up when people search your name. Take advantage of this feature to drive traffic to your site.

 Twitter profiles, Facebook profiles, and Pinterest pages all need to have completed profiles for both the company and key leaders. If these pages use the right keywords and link back to appropriate pages, this serves to increase the number of highly respected back links pointing to your site and will drive rankings.

Do not overlook Facebook, as it is a strong contributor to your SEO rankings. In a recent study Searchmetrics identified Facebook shares as the leading contributor to higher rankings on Google. The study looked at 300,000 websites and found that Facebook shares outperformed back links and tweets as the number-one driver of higher rankings on Google.

What this means to you and business alike is that you have to provide your Facebook friends with educational content for them to share with their friends. We post it. We encourage them to share it. They share it. We rise in the rankings.