The numbers don’t get thrown around very much and I hear more jokes about Bing then I hear suggestions to take it seriously but the fact remains, 24% of users used Alternatives to Google in December 2009. Of course you want your website optimized for Google but you don’t want to forget to find your way over to Bing and the other also-rands to see what they are doing and what they have to say.

Nielson released a new report today that I have added below on search usage from Dec of 2009. Clearly and to no ones suprise Google had maintained its dominant role within the US.

There is a huge group of people using alternative search and this creates a huge question. Are there things I can do to make my business stand out more on Bing and its ilk that are different then what I already do optimize for Google? The easiest answer is to spend some time poking around in those communities and read the posts in search forums, things your SEO Consultant should already be doing (they are doing that right?)

Over my first cup of coffee this morning I read a couple of articles about Google rolling out its new search feature that adds almost instant results from Twitter, Facebook, Google News and other resources to your search results.

My first thought was oh no now people will see a bunch of crap but I soon realized the results are not part of normal search and that the user must choose to view Real-Time results. I have not seen any figures on how many people click on the specialized search options within Google or any other search engine and for that reason I can’t say how this may or may not disrupt the carefully crafted optimization of websites using SEO to place their sites higher up on search engine result pages (SERP). I do however think at this moment business users and nonprofits need not panic, for companies actively involved in SEO/SEM this may be something to add to your tool box and viewed as an additional opportunity to be seen.

Some people see Twitter and social media as a Siren Call actively seducing your business  into the cliffs and causing certain destruction, I don’t share this view. Twitter and other media properties are more like a huge crowd on the beach waving to you as you sail by, there really is no seduction going on just a huge roar with lots of flailing arms trying to get your attention. If you or your SEO firm use their handy spy glass you can find the gems amongst the teaming crowd, you can part the din to find what offers you the most value and helps bring success to your business or nonprofit.

Try tweeting during business and dinner hours for both the East and West Coast in the US and similar times in other regions of the globe. If search engines are really tuning into Real-Time tweets and its ilk then this is where you stand to get your best return for effort. Try blogging  in the US. between 9:00 and 10:00 AM East Coast time and then tweet and tweet again at 12:15 PM to catch the East Coast lunch crowd, follow upon that will tweets at 4:00 and 6:00 PM Eastern and then monitor traffic and mentions for a week remembering to monitor Latest Results in Google

UPDATE:  Ok I jumped the fence on some of my remarks above. today I see a real time window for Latest Results in the middle of the SERP’s, and it appears that the more popular the event or news the faster the small window scrolls. People not interested in these type of results will quickly learn to skip them and keep their attention on the search task at hand. The new results will distract people who want to be distracted.

In the rush to get your site listed in the search engines you might forget about going beyond having your address to your store or office just on a contact page or at the bottom of each page on your website. True it is important to let the people visiting your site easily find the phone and address to your business, it is equally important to optimize your website for local search.

Local search is a very fast growing section of the whole search universe and by all mean needs to be address in your SEO and SEM tactics. Optimize on page and off for best results.

One tip that many small businesses may not even be aware of is META GEO and while it may seem trival I assure your it’s not. Anything you can do to give more info to small and large search engines is something you need to do.

• <meta name=”geo.region” content=”US-TX”/> (if this was in Texas, for example)
• <meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Fort Worth,TX”/> (city, state)
• <meta name=”geo.position” content=”32.74862,-97.32927″/> (latitude; longitude)
• <meta name=”ICBM” content=”32.74862,-97.32927″/> (latitude; longitude)

Many of you have heard me talk about Squidoo.com and I expect some of you have actively invested time and effort into promoting your business or organization by building a couple of lenses at Squidoo. But just adding a couple of pages to a service like Squidoo or another free topic builder is not the end of the work.

In the last year I have built over 125 pages or lenses as they are called at Squidoo to test out what was possible, to test out what works and what doesn’t. Squidoo is a good source of back-links for your main website, it seems to get quick ranking and listing in search but unlink an authority site like Wikipedia it may not hold onto a high listing unless you are doing lots of regular updates to your lenses.

I recommend you create your Squidoo lenses in conjunction with your article marketing and satellite websites so that everything is traveling around your main website universe in a smooth orbit. Of course as with all subjects there is a wide latitude in what topics you choose when building lenses at Squidoo.

I’ll use some examples of lenses I recently add to Squidoo. First is my lens for Utterli which is a mobile service for publishing your social media bits. Second is Social Media Tips, a collection of things to do to expand your social media footprint. Third is my lens called Google Search Alternatives, thoughts and listings of search beyond Google. Forth is Micro Blogging and as the name says it is about the joys of Micro Blogging.

Each one of the lenses I list above is tied into SEO and this blog, I use them to add value to this blog and garner authority within search. As you can see the titles of the each lens fits nicely into my SEO universe but each can stand alone. Within this subject there are a multitude of articles I can write, pages I can build on my website and an equal number of external topic pages I can create at sites like Squidoo.

Populate your content universe with many views and colors of a topic, it will garner authority for your business and ranking for your organization.

Search for many businesses means just one thing, Google. Sure Google is the biggest and baddest engine on the block but it is by no means the only game in town. There are hundreds of niche Search Engines and thousands of niche directories and forums that can help with your business information needs.

Some of the engines aggregate the results from the big 4 and present you with the top results from all the results. Others try and fill a niche by searching only with closely defined parameters. One engine may only get its results from Wikipedia while the next one may only search retail websites for their results.

The key is to be open to information alternatives. Maybe using one of the services that will allow you to build your own search engine might better meet the needs of your clients. Adding focus both to your searches and to the information results can add depth to your organization.

I placed a list of some alternatives to tradidtional search on a Squidoo page entitled Google Seach Engine Alternatives. It also has build your own engine links and some other information you might find useful. Check It Out!

I’m pretty sure I could write about the 3 U’s everyday and still people would not get it. Marketing and Ranking on the search engines is dependent on new and “relevant” content. I stress relevant because if you have a website about Tabouli and you build a new page about Bulldozers it just ain’t going to help. Ok you might build the best one page in the world about bulldozers and Google may reward that page with a ranking of 4 or 5 if you are lucky, but it will do little to raise the ranking of your Tabouli website. It just is not relevant, the subjects clash and neither benefits the other.

So what can you do? You can build new fresh pages that are relevant to your subject and it’s not hard to do. An example is the Tabouli website. Say I want to build a new page every month that gives authority to the main theme of Tabouli, well I could build a page on each of the following subjects. Tomatoes,bulgar,garlic,mint,parsley,cucumber,black pepper,olive oil,chick peas,lemons,pita bread, and great side dishes that go well with Tabouli

Google and the other search engines are in and out of your website all the time. The ranking are in flux all the time, up and down the pages is the fate of your website. So make your pages relevant and always practice the 3 U’s . You can read more at Seth Godin’s blog and download his more indepth view of the 3 U’s Unique, Useful & Updated this cat knows what he talks about.

It’s a hum in our heads or it may be following us, we may bump into it going around the corner or trip over it getting out of bed. The “it” is change and try as we might it won’t stop. Large companies like Google or Microsoft seem to put up walls so the only change that occurs is in their control. We know however the change is its own agent and plays for no team nor joins sides even if they are red or blue.

Where I’m going with this rant is to share a recent post from John Battelle on his blog about culture as the agent of change in unseating Google. He recognizes the inevitable and this is remarkable given that society works so hard to have us believe the status-quo is, well, the status-quo. check it out.

More and more search engines pop up everyday and I thought I would share links to 3 of them with you. Snap has been around for a while and seems to have morphed into a search engine that gets people to use it by being everywhere, its SnapShot is an interesting strategy. Wikia Search is from those great people who brought us Wikipedia and it allows for voting and commenting on search results as well as adding URLs to those results. It too is an interesting strategy and surely bares watching and participating in. Finally there is Scour which uses MSN, Yahoo and Google results in a simple aggregation scheme. What might set it apart from other aggregates is allowing voting on results and in collecting points for searching that can be redeemed for merchandise. Like Wikia Search, using and being involved in Scour may produce some benefits to you and your business.