According to a study by Searchmetrics, social signals, such as tweets and Facebook Likes, have a large impact on your search engine rankings.

The company looked at Google UK search engine results for 10,000 keywords, 300,000 websites, and millions of links, tweets, and shares.

When it comes to search engine rankings, Facebook is the highest correlated factor. In fact, the social network ranks even higher than domain name keywords and backlinks.

The strongest social signal is a Facebook share — which has more of an impact than the total aggregated influence of all social actions on the platform — followed by comments and Likes.

But Facebook isn’t the only social network with some search influence; Twitter is proving to be quiet valuable as well. According to the study, tweets are the sixth most-correlated factor, coming in above on-site images, keywords in the description of the site, backlinks with keywords, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, Searchmetrics found that the number of Google +1s a site had was the strongest factor in a higher search ranking. However, it can be argued that because Google+ is relatively new and has a small active user base that the results were a bit skewed.

There are all sorts of tips, tricks, and myths surrounding SEO and Google’s algorithms. While backlinks continue to be a powerful influencer of good rankings, social media appears to be a rising contender.

[Via: AllTwitter, Image credit: Volacci]