By now, the surge in popularity for social media as a marketing tool has forced businesses to get involved – at minimum – with Twitter and Facebook. Smart companies have spread their social media efforts wider, improving their brand’s visibility and corporate website’s page rank.

By creating a company profile on LinkedIn, a fan page on Facebook and a Twitter account, your company will instantly have a strong presence on the search engine results page for branded keywords. Throw in a Wikipedia page, YouTube account, corporate blog and Google Local Business Listing and you might have a chance to completely dominate the first page of results while creating strong back links and a solid means of communication between business and customer.

Search engines naturally trust these social media platforms and and escort them to the front of the line.

The key here is to improve brand awareness and visibility while incorporating a platform to communicate with both potential and devoted customers. Companies often use Twitter to respond to negative press and customer complaints or to promote important and beneficial news. Corporate blogs can be used to disseminate press releases. Depending on the industry, image hosting sites like Flickr can be leveraged to share photos or artwork. While this improves a company’s online presence and opens lines of communication with customers, it also serves as a source of back links from trusted sites.

Search engines naturally trust these social media platforms and escort them to the front of the line. By embedding links on these social networking profiles that point to your corporate web page, you can help positively influence page rank and improve your standings in the search engine listings.