One of the best ways to attract visitors to your website is the use of search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques. These aim to influence your ranking on a search engine by amending the content of your site and taking links from other sites into account. As these techniques evolve over time, they try to take advantage of new trends on the internet, like social networking.

Over the last few years, there has been a massive rise in popularity of the social networking sites, and now it appears that nearly everything has a page of its own. Lots of people and companies have pages on all the major social networking sites, as well as their main website. Correct use of these social network sites can really increase the page rank of your main website, and is one area where great SEO strategy has been targeting recently.

Facebook

As the biggest of the social networking sites, with over 500million users, Facebook is one of the internets most popular websites. A large number of people and organizations have their own site, and users can modify their privacy settings to make their profile visible to search engines. An SEO consultant would advise you to have a page for your business that has a link back to your homepage and is fully searchable from the internet and on Facebook. A page with a lot of friends or fans would appear higher in the rankings than one without, so a good way to improve the popularity of your website is to encourage people to be a fan of your company though a promotion or competition.

Blogs

Lots of people and organizations have a blog page, which is used to give regular updates to anyone that might be interested. Some blog pages get an update on a frequent basis, while others will get an update when something happens that is worth talking about. If the content on your blog is interesting and accurate then it will become more popular and it will get more links from other blog posts and web sites. This in turn will improve its popularity on search engines.

Twitter

Twitter posts are similar to blog postings, but limited to 140 characters so it is a lot more dynamic medium. One of the great things about Twitter is the ability of people to comment on news events as they happen. This results in a large number of tweets appearing about news that people are interested in. If a number of these tweets link to a webpage, then that webpage will become more popular at that point. All you need is lots of people, or someone with lots of followers, to tweet about your latest product or webpage and let the search engines take care of the rest.

Things to Avoid

One thing to watch out for is the use of fake profiles on the social networking sites. Some unscrupulous people could create a number of fake profiles and set them all as friends to make them seem more popular than they actually are. Another method would be to pay someone who is popular, maybe a celebrity, to post a link to their webpage, or even use a profile that pretends to be a famous person. These methods are often picked up by search engines and will lead to the offending profiles being blacklisted.

Over the last few years, SEO techniques have been refined to take advantage of trends in internet use. As social networking sites have become increasing popular, their relevance to search results has also increased and made use of these sites as a valid way to increase your popularity in search results.