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It's official. In the latest of a series of Webmaster videos, Google has confirmed that it does use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to rank sites. Of course, it's just one of a large number of ranking signals, though, so don't rush out and just focus on building up only your social presence. We know that Google's been using social sites for ranking some live results, but this video confirms that this is now being extended to the wider search results.

There is a caveat though. In the same way that Google can identify if you're artificially building large numbers of links, they say they can identify if you're buying up Twitter and Facebook followers too. This is quite possible, because if your followers are indexed and followers of your followers, it would be possible to build up a pattern of interest and identify if the people following you have any real interest in what you do. This could also be confirmed on how regularly your posts are retweeted or shared to followers of your followers.

So, as always, it is back to basics.

• Start by making sure you have something on your site worth reading, and that's unique. Google isn't interested if someone's said it before, unless you can say it in a different way
• Make sure when you tweet or post to Facebook that you include a link back to your web site, such as to a relevant article you're referencing
• Contact your clients / customers, your suppliers, your friends and encourage them to follow you. Of course, people sometimes need a reason to do that, so make sure that what you're offering will be of interest
• Join interest groups where you can post updates (including automatically) or include links to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. in your profile; sites such as LinkedIn or UKBusinessForums.
• Post and tweet regularly to keep your followers' interest, but don't overpost to the point of spamming them
• Be patient. Unless you're really famous in your industry it's unlikely you'll have thousands of followers overnight. Social media takes time and effort to be effective.

You can view the webmaster video below:

By Chelsey Evans

Follow @AmpheonLtd