One of the benefits that social networks provide is to drive increased traffic to targeted websites and blog sites. This incoming traffic has been proven to boost the rankings in the search engine results page (SERPs).

The SEO experts have historically looked for ways to stay ahead of the ever-changing search engine indexing algorithms. As a result, they are now looking at how social networks can play a role in the search engine optimization game. This has created an entirely new subset of search engine optimization called Social SEO.

There are two basic tactics to Social SEO; spreading links through the social media channels and using social bookmarking sites to create direct bookmarks of the different links and RSS feeds.

Be careful! Both of these tactics could be used the right and wrong way. They can play an important role in both the good and bad strategies of SEO. From the good side (aka white hat SEO), traditional site indexing was concentrated on optimizing the site content itself and the bad side (aka black hat SEO) involves tricking the search engines. Creating a link farm for the purpose of spreading links through social media channels can (and most likely) will still be considered black hat SEO and could prove dangerous to your strategy. Creating a purposeful and strategic plan to increase link traffic to your site that takes relevancy into consideration is gaining more popularity in the Social SEO game.

Social bookmarking sites themselves are providing additional benefits of boosting your site indexing because the search engines themselves are now being forced to take the links generated into consideration. Social bookmarking and the links generated as a result can only provide relevancy to the links generated. Search engines take the relevancy of the links coming you’re your site with a higher degree of importance than most any other links created.

The answers have yet to be determined (and if the history of how the search engines have evolved tell us anything, we may never know) but this past week Google has taken the first steps towards reducing the impact that historical strategies have had on manipulating results.

Social Media replacing SEO as Google makes search results personal.