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The way search engines work is simple. They index every word on your website. They index every word on every website. They also make note of every link going from your Web site to everyone else’s Web site; this is how they magically find other Web pages to index. Then, when you do a search, the pages with the most search term matches appear higher in the rankings.
Of course, there are a few other things going on: certain instances of the search terms are more valuable than others. The page title (what appears in the top bar of the window) is more important than the tiny-sized words at the bottom of the page. And your prior searching history is also now taken into account. Precisely how the various factors are weighted is a big mystery, and the algorithm changes from time to time.
Page Ranking is also determined by inbound links.
Inbound links are an absolutely critical ingredient for a higher ranking, more important than any other factor, with the exception of the search terms themselves. This suggests a critical Web site marketing strategy: solicit as many inbound links as possible from as many high-traffic sites as possible.
RSS feeds allows for the syndication of your content elsewhere on the internet. it’s not just people who can subscribe to your RSS feed; other Web sites can do so too, broadcasting your content even farther. This is how most portal pages, such as MSN, Google, and Yahoo!, allow you to pull in content from other sources. In fact, there are a number of sites (Digg, Technorati, etc.) that exist only to index and categorize blog postings and make them available to yet even more people.
Here is why this is relevant: if you are clever enough to add links back to your Web site from within your Social Media and blog postings, you can generate literally hundreds and hundreds of inbound links, all from high-traffic sites. If you post your content on multiple Social Media sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, your own blog, others’ blogs, etc.), with links to your Web site embedded, these inbound links will multiply even further. Then, as if by magic, your search engine rankings will increase.
Socialopia 
I agree..but I have a question… (you know I would never disagree with anything you say), but…when you “solicit as many inbound links as possible from as many high-traffic sites as possible” would you not agree that you would rather have 10 backlinks from relative high-traffic sites than 1000 from unrelated sites for SEO juice? Would love to here your feedback on that and thanks for another great post!
“Practice doesn’t make perfect – perfect practice makes perfect”
Yes Mike, I do agree with you. I also love the quote especially since everything I have learned has been from trial and error. : ) Maybe solicit was not a good word choice there on my part and since i am trying to reply with a broke right arm (yes, slick here has broken her arm yesterday) I am going to refer to SEOMOZ post by Randfish “Head Smacking Tip #20: Don’t Ask Sites For Links. Find People And Connect..” This is a great post by Randfish. Thanks Mike! If only my girls were old enough to type : )