One of the best methods of improving your search engine rankings is to build quality links to your website from authority third-party sites and blogs. The higher the authority and relevance of the site being linked from, the more rank-building link juice will pass through to your site.

The same process can be applied to your social media profiles and pages. By linking to your social properties, you can improve their ranking and increase your overall dominance of the search engine results. As an added bonus, linking to your social properties will help improve the authority of your social profiles and pages; the more high-authority mentions your profiles get, the greater the impact you’re likely to see on your rankings.

In addition to the ranking juice provided by social media linking, your website will benefit from increased exposure which translates to increased leads for your products and services.

Linking to Your Social Profiles from Your Website

Start your social linking campaign by building links from your main business website. Add links to your social properties from your guest blogging and commenting activities as well as from any review sites that permit you to add your social profiles.

• Use basic text links in the author bio section of your blog posts. For maximum ranking juice your company blog should be hosted on your business website and not on a third-party blogging platform.
• Link through the social media icons in your website’s header, footer, or sidebar.

Gain Social Links with Twitter Profile Bios

Even though Twitter bio links are nofollow, they still contribute to your overall linking efforts and will help give you a diversified link profile.

• Encourage your employees who are active Twitter users to add your company’s Twitter username to their profile bios.
• The total number of combined Twitter followers for all of your employees will add up to some serious authority link juice flowing back to your company profile.

Link Your Company’s Facebook Page to Your Employee’s Personal Profiles

This tactic is similar to that used to link from your employee’s personal Twitter profile with one powerful distinction: Facebook links are dofollow.

• To take advantage of these high authority links and reach a new community of followers, encourage your employees with personal Facebook profiles to update the Work and Education area of their profiles with your company information under the Current Job section.
• Remind your employees to hover over the company name to make sure that it links to your Facebook page.

Take Advantage of Every Opportunity to Cross-Promote Your Social Profiles

A number of social media networks allow you to link to your other social profiles, which you should always take full advantage of.

• You can create dofollow links from your Google+ profile, linking out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn; access this opportunity from the About Tab for your G+ profile.
• Pinterest allows nofollow links to your Facebook and Twitter profiles from your Pinterest personal or business profile.

Analyze and Optimize Your Social Link Building Strategy

A great tool from CognitiveSEO, Instant Backlink Explorer allows you to analyze social profile backlinks for your own site or for a competitor by entering the URL of any social profile. You can view the total number of backlinks plus get a complete listing of all links along with their link authority rating.