The popularity of social networking sites on the Internet offers not only opportunities for friends to meet again online, or get in touch with your old classmates and office mates, but a new opportunity in the field of search engine optimization strategy. This article illustrates several ways an SEO practitioner can use social networking to increase rankings, build trust and authority within a selected niche.

Because there might be thousands of social networking sites on the Internet, this article primarily focuses on the top four most popular social networking sites. They are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Linkedin.

The home page URLS of these four biggest social networking sites are:

1. Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/ 

2. MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ 

3. Twitter: http://twitter.com/ 

4. Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/

Before you dig more deeply into this tutorial, I suggest that you secure an account on each of those social networking sites. This will help you to understand the methods discussed in this article more quickly.

Getting links on social networking sites

Getting links using the targeted anchor text pointing to your websites, or at least earning a link, is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. That's not only true for Google, but also for other big search engines, like Bing and Yahoo.

The good thing is that you can earn a link from social networking sites pointing to your website. However, below are the important points to note before you get started:

1. Do not sign up for an account for the sole purpose of search engine optimization. You need to abide by the site terms and conditions, and follow the intended purpose of the website.
   
   
2. Spamming and copying content from other websites and posting it on the social networking websites' blogging platform (yes, some have blogging features, like MySpace) is not recommended, and will result in your account being terminated.
   
   
3. Be an active member of each of the social networking sites on which you have chosen to participate. Get friends, contact old friends and make new contacts on a periodic basis. This is one of the best things you can do with your account, in addition to adding updated content.

Okay, now that you've taken note of these important reminders of how you are going to use these social networking websites, let's start looking at how you can get links pointing to your website.