For the past couple of years I’ve been discussing, well… preaching might be a better word, about the merits of social networking. From Myspace to Facebook and Twitter (anlong with countless others). Throughout it all I’ve been saying that you need to have a presence in the social space. I’ve spent my days (and nights) integrating my clients’ sites with a number of tools to make this job easier and faster. And for those that leverage the social space, life can be good. But there is a downside that I feel the need to caution against. Managed incorrectly, the social space can actually hurt your web presence.

So when you are building those social pages out there, remember that your goal is to leverage those sites to drive traffic to YOUR site, not to those sites. If your social space contains too much information, or more information that your “real” website then you are hurting yourself.

Some things to consider:

1. Your goal in the social space should be to push your information out to where your users are and by doing that draw them back to your site. If you post everything on Facebook (for example), then why would your Facebook fans bother to come to your site?
2. When you create content on social sites you are building the social site, not your own. Their site, their users, their ads, their control. Again… leverage that tool, don’t build your business on it. Put YOUR content on YOUR site, under YOUR control, with whatever other message you want those users to see.
3. When a user sees ALL of your information about a given topic on a social site, and therefore doesn’t bother to visit YOUR site, they may miss other items of interest that you’ve spent time developing (look to the right for an example). So don’t leave them out there, bring them home.
4. Lastly, remember that trendy, social type sites come and go. Their popularity may be huge this month, but six months down the road it may fall off when the next new site comes along. So if you have all this great content, and “followers”/”fans”/”peeps”, and posts on your “wall” telling the world how great you are… and it’s all out there on your Tripod account… what do you do when the next thing comes down the road, rebuild it all? Conversely, if you are pointing all those things towards your own site then you can just go with the flow… and when the next big thing happens you just draw customers from that site as well.

So keep building those social pages. Reach out to where your current, and new, customers spend their time. Just remember that your goal is to bring them back to your site and build those pages and posts accordingly.

Google announced yesterday that it is rolling out a new “engine” for its search engine. Code named “Caffeine” this new engine won’t look much different on the outside, but early tests do indicate that it will perform much better on the inside delivering more relevant search results, and delivering them faster. And by golly they should… earlier today it took 0.29 seconds for them to give me Results 1-10 of about 12,900,000… that’s far too long (please note the sarcasm).

With Microsoft’s new engine “Bing“, and the upcoming Yahoo/Microsoft team-up, Google does have to stay on top of things. So we’ll just have to see if these new changes, which again will be mostly transparent to end users, will make any real impact or if they will just help Google stay on top.

Regardless though, the landscape is changing. And if you operate a web site that relies on search results you need to be aware of these, and other, changes. While Google still maintains a healthy dominance, they are not the only game in town. So a little attention to some of the “lesser” players is certainly in order. So brush up on your Microsoft SEO tactics if you haven’t already. The differences are minor (mostly dealing with how inbound linking is handled from what we can tell), but with Microsoft making gains on this front you don’t want to get caught napping…

Of course questions and comments are welcomed, as always.