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The thumbprint of social media on search engine optimization is evolving. It used to be that the big rage was figuring out how to develop link bait that had a strong chance of making the front page of Digg, Reddit, or other similar social news sites. The results were good, mostly in terms of getting a volume of links to a page on your site.

This is still a great tactic, but social media can do so much more today. For example, with Twitter or Facebook it is possible to use networking and information sharing techniques to build high quality links. I have seen sites from a number of different spaces use Twitter effectively as a PR outreach mechanism.

This new type of PR has become a new technique for link building and promotion. However, fast forwarding from today, there is the widely held belief in the SEO community that social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future

via The Evolving State Of Social Media & SEO.

In the realm of e-commerce, one of the top marketing tools a company has is a Google ranking. The difference between a page 1 or page 2 search engine ranking can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for a company.

Because of this, companies are allocating more budget space than ever toward search engine optimization SEO, the strategy and process of improving the volume of traffic to a website by improving the search rankings of various search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask and MSN.

via SEO: Essential to Survival – Entrepreneur.com- msnbc.com.