Ever since the concept of Search Engine Optimization came into being, the way people receive search result has changed, Google has always been the leader in search engine optimization. However, with Microsoft`s much vaunted Bing, Twitter and Facebook garnering so much attention worldwide, will Google`s position be compromised? Will the concept of search engine optimization change completely?

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The concept of search is changing. Many new ideas are coming into play and people are lapping these up. So much so that social networking sites have also started playing an important role in search engine optimization. Microsoft has decided to battle Google with its new brand Bing, a developed version of Live Search.

Google is the undisputed leader in search engine optimization. Most people, when they want to search something on the Internet, go for Google. On 28^th May 2009, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, announced at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego that Bing is going to replace Live Search. Immediately after that, on 3^rd June 2009, Bing went live. Having done some research on Bing, we can safely assume that Bing has already captured some attention worldwide.

Let us see what Bing has done that is different from Google. For starters, Bing has a background image that is supposed to change every year. When a search is done via Bing, an explorer pane is displayed on the results page on the left side of the search results. This explorer pane lists the related search results. This concept is very much unlike Google, which displays related search items at the bottom of the page. Bing also categorizes some search results. Although some search marketers have raised their eyebrows on this point, Bing has assured everyone that search engine optimization will continue to work well with this model.

So, how does all this affect search engine optimization? Not much, to be honest. The appearance of Bing has simply heated up the market. Both Google and Bing will coexist peacefully. No strategy change is really required now that Bing is live.

Facebook is now the most visited social networking website in the world. Facebook has an enormous number of users who remain logged into it and hence are invisible to a great portion of the web, namely search engines. To be visible to these Facebook users, websites have to be associated with the site`s feeds and searches. Facebook has also introduced vanity URLs that is expected to increase SEO of people and companies using it. The vanity URL will allow users to choose usernames and have separate pages starting with http://www. So, someone may have something like http://www.twitter.com/softxml. Therefore, if someone searches for softxml in Google, the results will display this URL. This will increase SEO. For a company this can safely translated into targeted web traffic, and subsequently conversion. It is easy to create a brand username and get displayed. This has created huge opportunity of SEO using Facebook application for businesses.

Facebook also added new internal links to it`s brand Pages in users` public search listings. So, if someone is a fan of something, that will be displayed in his or her public search listings. That way, companies will have a great chance of exposing themselves to Facebook users and increase their SEOs.

Twitter has now emerged as an important tool to find live information. There are many tweets that concern what is happening around the world. Searching tweets can keep people updated on many real life news items. Twitter also works well in sending visitors to other web pages and this is a great advantage for search engine optimization.

To increase SEO, business can follow some steps that will be effective. Choosing a good username is important. The username should reflect the brand being endorsed. Added to this effective username should be optimal utilization of bio.

After all this is done, constant tweets are a must. The tweets must be interesting and relevant to the product or service. They have to made keyword rich with carefully selected initial characters. Since search engines display about 42 characters in their search results, this is vitally important to make the users understand what is being offered.

The tweets should direct the users to a landing page where they can find exactly what they want. No hunting around for the users please! Finally, the marketers need to spread the word about their twitter account that leads to the organizations` landing page.

Social networking websites have this tremendous potential to create buzz about multiple subjects. Once a topic picks up steam, it spreads like wild fire. Facebook and Twitter can certainly drive traffic with effective SEO campaign.

Search engine optimization is here to stay, at least in the near future. It doesn`t matter whether people are going to divide their time between different search engines or spend more time logged into social networking sites. If the content and the news is good, people will still talk about it using different modes of Internet communication.