Social media has come a long way in regards to influencing SEO aspects and ranking factors. Business owners recognize social media as a viable way to help brand their business and increase their rankings with the search engines.
The newest social media giant, Google+, may be the greatest social site for helping SEO rankings. This is largely due to its ties to the main search engine. Google relies on the weight of users’ opinions when ranking sites. Of course, they don’t only rely on social proof for ranking algorithms, but the thumbs-up button certainly helps a website’s ranking.

High Quality Content
To help weed out low-quality sites and create a greater user experience, Google has been launching campaigns with code names. For example, the Panda update and the Penguin update have done a lot to identify sites with bad links, poor content, and any other factor that users may not like.
However, Google also knows that it wants to show users what they like, so they use the information from cookies to help track user behavior on certain sites. If 2,000 people like a particular site, it is probably for a reason. Therefore, Google wants other people to easily find this site if they need it.

Popularity of a Website
Google accomplishes this by encouraging people to use the +1 button anywhere it can be found. For example, in the search results page, you can +1 a site directly from the search results. Google also gives webmasters the tools they need to embed the +1 button to their site; much in the same way Facebook allows people to embed a like button on their site.
Google also collects data directly inside the social site. Whenever people share videos and other content within Google+, Google uses that to help determine the site’s popularity. The more shares and interaction that particular piece of media has within Google+, the greater the chance of that media being pushed up in the search algorithm for those particular describing keywords.

Increasing Search Engine Rankings
This all ties together to help your site’s SEO. If your brand becomes viral or even semi-viral, you will benefit from the greater SEO rankings. The snowball effect takes place, and you can enjoy the leverage you have from the Internet.  Just remember to stay within Google’s graces by following its policies and creating quality content that people will want to share.