Nielsen has released a study that puts social media into perspective, and shows at its current state how it’s viewed by the people. The basic results state that while search and portals are still dominating, social media is making it’s way as a defining search method. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of people who use social media for searching the internet:

Again, portals and engines still dominate but a 18% pie isn’t anything to snicker at. Especially considering how new social media is. Knowing the base numbers isn’t enough though. The trick is figuring out how to make social media work for you. And to do that you have to figure out why people ‘search’ with social media.

We can look again to the Nielsen study to formulate an answer. A single question was asked in the survey that sheds light on the emergence of social media:

After seeing these numbers, have you stopped to think how flooded we truly are with information. It’s almost too much to handle for some, which is why many turn to social media. When you search for something using an engine you are met with cold and calculating answers. The sites that ranked high for your search might have amazing keywords usage, or have inbound links from sites but does that mean it will be useful to you? Instead, would you trust friends and colleagues you know personally with helping to find relevant information?

So, social media is growing and people are comfortable having it as a search option. What does this mean for your business or site though? Basically, you have to start thinking of how to evolve your site and the experience you want to offer visitors. Developing trust is becoming paramount, and if you don’t believe me then search for social media blunders recently. If you can develop trust and have people rave about your site then you’ve got a healthy base. Which in turn will lead to a better closing rate.

The more that people use Google Maps, the more important optimizing for landing pages becomes. First, you have to discover what you want most from your business and as an extension your website. If it’s about allowing people to sign up for a service, then have that be a staple of your optimization.

In conclusion it’s important to note that not all businesses have Place Pages. You can of course notify Google, but that doesn’t gurantee anything. The best you can do is keep up with your SEO, and always be mindful of where your content is being used, or could potentially be used.

I know that it’s frustrating but if you’ve made it to the top of Yahoo, or any other search engine then you know the head aches involved. Before it’s required you might want to get ahead of the curve and start optimizing for Bing now. Before Yahoo becomes the past.

The first thing you’ll want to check is keyword ranking. Just because certain keywords are ranking well for you in Yahoo, doesn’t necessarily mean they will in Bing. So get back on the research wagon and discovering the keywords you need to improve upon.

As a precautionary measure try discovering other ways to boost traffic. Invest a bit more time in the social media market, or perhaps even invest some money into traditional advertising.

Just like any other major change like this, you can never be too over prepared. If you think of something that will potentially work then act on it. You’d rather try and fail than get to the change and not have anything ready for the potential outcome.

I’m not saying that their algorithms, and engines are as powerful as Bing or Google but many of the rules you apply for those you should be looking at for social media, Twitter especially. Content, links, both very important.

First on the plate is content. While you’re not going to have as much content as say a blog, there are still general rules to follow when posting on a social networking site. Keep it all relevant, and make it engaging. When someone becomes a fan on Facebook, or follows you on Twitter there’s a reason. It’s because they find your content engaging, and worth having a look at on a regular basis.

Be creative, which honestly to me is more important in the social world than the search world. When someone searches a word on Twitter, all sorts of non-sense is going to pop up in their face. Make sure your content is what they want to see, and be more engaging than the other guy.

Obtaining links is a bit trickier than content. Most of your visits are going to be obtained by friending, or following others. If you’re not a personable person then definitely learn to adopt an online persona. People want to follow someone who is interesting, is friendly and trustworthy.

“Since Google ranks ads by bid times ad quality, ads in higher positions tend to have higher quality and higher quality ads tend to have higher conversion rates,” says Varian. “Thus you may see a correlation between auction position and conversion rates just due to this ad quality effect. However, the real question is how the conversion rate for the same ad would change if it were displayed in a different position.”

and of course he has an answer,

“We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad,” continues Varian. “For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions. In other words, an ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position, would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average. Ads above the search results have a conversion rate within ±2% of right-hand side positions.”

So there you have it. No longer should you be worried about the ‘placement’ of your ad, but the quality of it.

This drama caused many people to get into an uproar and change everything around on their site. Fast forward to today and not much as been made about that fiasco. Now, we have an entirely different problem on our hands. Luckily for Google this concerns their rival — Bing.

While people were in an uproar over Google’s change to no-follow, people are upset at Bing for not even adhering to the no-follow tag. Because at this present moment, they’re being indexed. This is of course making all you PR sculpters cringe, as having no-follow links indexed defeats their entire purpose.

Luckily, Microsoft looks to be addressing the problem. Here’s an official statement from one of Bing’s program managers:

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.

So there you have it. The problem is being looked into, so you don’t have to go scrambling about trying to fix anything. Hopefully, Microsoft has enough people on their team to fix this in a timely matter. If you feel as though you can’t wait, just shoot them an email and you’ll get your quick fix.

I find that many people who have sites that begin to tank should begin looking in one place — links. As you’re updating content it’s easy to lose track of your links. Whether it’s a link campaign that you started to boost awareness, and drive up page rank. Or you started utilizing a lot of intra-site links and haven’t been doing so lately. Links are one of the most important facets of your site, but many times you just naturally begin to forget about them. Try and drive the inbound links to your site up, and start to link to relative intra-site content whenever possible. More times then not this can solve your problem.

I stated earlier that the reason your traffic has gone down might not even be your fault. It’s very much possible that it’s someone else fault. And by someone else I mean competition. The word itself can do so many things to different people. Some are driven by competition, and love to see someone try and come around their block. Others become apprehensive, and tuck back into their corner. You really don’t have to be either. Just take a look at their site and do some analytic work on it. You could find that what they’re trending for their site is taking some of your traffic away. If so, put your creative hat on and get to work. Sometimes you’ll find that competition will break you out of the mold you’ve been in. Which can then lead to even greater numbers than you had before.

Whatever the reason for a drop in traffic, just don’t panic. Worrying doesn’t stimulated anything productive. Being aware, on the ball, and creative is how you want to approach the situation. Many times when your site drops and you change things you’ll find it performing better than ever. Just try not and lose any sleep over it..

Not only would they own two search engines, but that equates to 30% of the market. Which is needless to say a huge improvement over what they have now with just Bing.

The reason I’m hoping that this deal doesn’t go through is that it consolidates the competition. After this there will only be two companies vying for control. The battle for users’ searches will be entertaining for sure, but in the end we’re left on the short end of the stick. The more companies around, pushing for competition the better.

Oh, well I guess we should get ready for Google vs. Microsoft, instead of Google vs. Microsoft vs. Yahoo. How do you see the market changing because of this deal?

Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, made this statement in the official announcement post,

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

The interesting take away from the announcement, is how much the world of search is going to change with Google Chrome OS. Already, the internet has been taken over by the search engine. Now, our OS’s could potentially be dominated by the idea of search. I’ll leave you to ponder as to whether that’s a positive or negative.

Either way, as website owners and operators it’s vital to plan ahead and perhaps think of ways to take advantage of the potential change that Google Chrome OS will provide. For a good start, check out this article on Wired’s website.

Some advice given by Cutts in the video that is invaluable is to ease your site into the change. Maybe only change a certain section of your site, and then monitor its progress.

Cutts explains how you can setup a ‘preview’ of how your site will look with the CMS, “For example, if your CMS means that your layout has to change, you can mock that up,” he continues. “You can try to make it so you change your HTML so that it looks like it would look like from your content management system. And then make sure that your rankings don’t change. They shouldn’t change very much at all, but you know, if you change a whole bunch of stuff on your page, that can affect how Google scores it.”

So, with my advice with a little help from Matt Cutts you should be ready to take a step forward. Just be sure that the step your taking is in the right direction.