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Social media marketing can help any business rank higher in Google. In addition to the plus one algorithm, which Google launched in the middle of 2011, marketing on other social media streams has a massive effect on the way your pages rank in the nation's favourite search engine.

We'll use plus one as an example before we widen it out. Google Plus One is a vote made "for" a particular page of yours, by a consumer of your product or service. The consumer is encouraged to hit the Plus One logo (it's like a Facebook "like") to show allegiance with your company. The more Plus Ones you get, the higher up the rankings your law firm shows when a search pulls you out of the web bot's index pages.

In miniature, this is basically how all social media effects the page rankings for your law firm. The more instances of your law firm's name or web address that appear across the various social media streams, the better your chances of climbing higher on page rankings.

This is because Google tries to model its behaviour as closely as possible (when you aren't paying it) on the behaviour of real human web users " all of whom rely on the social media world for trustworthy information for service providers and product sellers.

You can manage of a lot of your own social media marketing. The key is time and consistency " you need to spend regular time producing consistently interesting and illuminating blog posts, Tweets and comments. You also need to engage with your major business suppliers (the professional organisations and persons from whom you take your referrals) in a digitised version of your old "real world" connections. The more business associates choose to follow you on LinkedIn, or are linked with your law firm by dint of their connection to your individual lawyers, the more credibility Google gives to your standing in your social networks.

What Google likes more than anything else in the web is an expert. Google gives more weight to what it considers to be an authoritative source for a search term or key phrase " and the way that Google decides you are an expert is if something you create is continually receiving large numbers of inbound traffic and long term links. The more people linking to one of your lawyer's blogs about a very complex area of law, the heavier a hitter Google decides that you are.

Social media is not just for overpaid pop stars or people who are wasting time at work. It's a way of digitally measuring the amount of influence you have within your immediate professional sphere. And that's something that Google can measure and take account of.

So don't ignore your social media presence, when you are worrying about your Google rankings. How you fare in the social network could well be the missing link.