What does it mean to rank #1 on the major search engines in 2010 and beyond? Is it as important as being the “big dog” a few years ago? Or, as some believe, is it not quite as important as in the past?

Not too long ago, Wired magazine ran an article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff entitled “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet.” In the introduction to that article the authors write, “Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services – think apps – are less about the searching and more about the getting.”

If this is true, finding your way to the top of the search engines won’t be quite so crucial, in terms of business success. The authors note that people may spend their entire day on the Internet and never really search the Web. Specific apps for email, social sites, news and business resources make it unnecessary to type and search.

Anderson and Wolff urge the skeptics among us not to toss this off as “a trivial distinction.” They call the new model “semi-closed platforms” that use the Internet as a transportation device. But there is no basic need for a browser to display pages. The bottom line is it’s “a world Google can’t crawl.”

When it comes to the idea of “conversions” and “converting” in online business we’re not talking about changing a PDF document to Word or a JPET image to GIF. With the technology available today there are online sites that will perform this service for you. But that’s not the conversion you should be interested in at this point.

We’re interested in is converting Web site visitors to leads that may mean a true increase in business. People have invested money in the pursuit of increased traffic to their Web sites but sometimes don’t go one step further and generate leads. This is the major step you need to take to have an effective Web site and to measure site effectiveness.

So many creative people step into the online world expecting great things from their Web site, their product or their service. But there is really only one way to measure success in this field and that’s through conversion. If you can move a solid percentage of your visitors into leads (then into customers) you are on the right track. Keys to this process are quality content, good design and the right call to action. Then it’s time to test and measure user data with such tools as heat maps.

In the world of Web analysis the software title Piwik is one that might be attractive to those who work in the open-source sector. Piwik is described as an open-source Web analytics program (General Public License) that works in real time. It can be downloaded from the Web site as “an open-source alternative to Google Analytics,” according to www.piwik.org.

Key features include detailed reports about visitors to your Web sites as well as specific information on the keywords and search engines used to reach your location. You can also track data related to most popular pages. Installation time from download is about five minutes, according to developer instructions. The download provides a JavaScript tag that can be copied and pasted on Web sites you would like to track.

One of the nicest features about Piwik is that you can use it whether you speak English or not. In fact, the software is available in more than 30 languages already and the number is growing.

Interested individuals can try Piwik with an online demo. To install Piwik you only need to download the latest release, upload to your Web server and open your browser. *PHP 5.1 and a MySQL database are required. Installation will take about five minutes and should be automatic.

The full name of this tool is Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. It is designed as a research and optimization tool that works with Microsoft Office Excel 2007, providing keyword expansion, pricing, KPI data and research. What this means for the business person is that you can make the most of your marketing investment.

With Ad Intelligence you can work with lists of suggested keywords, and develop your strategy for keywords using MSN and Bing query information. The details include volume, relevance, demographic and geographic tracking as well as cost history. This data helps you fine tune your bid strategy because you use actual pricing information and data that is specific to keywords. You get information on clicks, impressions, cost-per-click and position.

One of the key factors in business success is leverage. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence allows you to leverage true history and forecast data. This means your keyword efforts are based on actual customer activity. You get key performance indicators (KPI) to track performance.

*You’ll need to uninstall the earlier versions of adCenter Add-in for Excel. Of course, you should have Microsoft Office Excel 2007 installed. Be sure Excel is closed when you go through the Ad Intelligence install process.

Think of Facebook as a digital form of you. If you and the others who work with you can grasp this concept you don’t need to be an Internet expert or a technology fanatic. To bring you into the discussion from a business viewpoint, consider that some of the most valuable customers and clients are using Facebook. It’s the new community and the companies that aren’t using it might not make connections with their target demographic.

For those traditional company managers and advertising professionals who think Facebook is a way for college students to gossip, think again! Professionals in a number of fields make up a significant portion of the Facebook population. Adults in the general population are another group using this form of social media. Marketing “experts” who survived and flourished in the world of traditional media will need to gain knowledge and skills with Facebook and other online methods.

But those who decide to use Facebook as part of an overall marketing system should understand that this is a very personal method of presentation. Your business personality will need to be closely tied to your personal identity. The vast majority of Facebook users expect authenticity if not complete openness.

Google just released a bunch of innovations to AdWords ads aimed at getting better targeted advertising that will drive more traffic to your site. A number of Ad Extensions have been introduced in limited release so that AdWords advertisers can include maps, videos, product listings, multiple address listings, and “Click to Call Extensions,” which is in full release (not beta). With a Click to Call Extension, when someone searches and gets one of your ads on their iPhone or other smart phone, they’ll be presented with a phone number for your business. They can choose to click on the phone number to call the business, or click on the URL to go to your website. You’re charged the same whether they reach you by phone or by URL.

The other extensions are in limited or beta release, and all of them look to be worthwhile. For example, Ad Sitelinks can hook up someone searching on a product not necessarily on your landing page, but possibly on a more relevant page deeper in your site, such as a gift registry page. You’re only charged if the searcher clicks through to your site from the ad, not if they expand the Ad Sitelinks plus box and don’t click through. The official Adwords Blog breaks it down for you, including a new feature called Search Funnel, which lets you manage your advertising data in almost countless ways so you can figure out what’s working and what’s not.

In short, paid content doesn’t affect short term SEO that much, but it does leverage domain gravitas and long-tail search results by buying up authoritative domains (such as Demand Media’s purchase of eHow.com), and filling it with content that may not get searched often, but when it does, they have a good shot at being number 1 in the results.

Google wants websites to use nofollow tags to clamp down on spam comments and spam entries in guestbooks. But they don’t want sites to use nofollow tags to direct their “link juice” toward new or struggling internal pages of their own sites. And Google has convinced some of the hot sites right now (like Twitter) to make all the links from people’s bio pages nofollow, even if that person has Tweeted his or her heart out to build a real following with real content. As you might surmise, there are lots of Twitterers who resent this.

Google has not yet figured out a way of teasing out the sites that are using paid content to hedge their search engine bets for obscure searches, but I’m sure they’d like to figure out a way to do so. Google’s steady drum-beat is “content is king,” and though adaptations like the nofollow tag may have their usefulness in squashing comment spam, Google really can’t blame webmasters for learning to use these adaptive tools to help their own sites.

Check out some of the updates to Google’s Webmaster Tools. The one that is making the biggest impression is the new “Top Search Queries” feature that comes up on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. You not only get a list of keywords, impressions, and click-throughs, you can find out where in the search engine rankings your page showed up for specific keywords. You can get a graphical representation of impressions over time periods that you can define.

You can in addition find out how many links there are to your site and where they’re from, you can find out if there have been any crawl errors. You can learn all about your internal links and statistics for your subscribers. A section under the “Labs” menu helps you gauge your site performance and walks you through installation of the Page Speed add-on for Firefox that gathers all kinds of data on how fast your page loads and what, if anything, you can do to make it load faster. This tool is likely to get some miles on it now that site speed has been added into the mix of things that determines website ranking.

Seriously, if you have a free or slow afternoon at work one day, you should go through each of the Webmaster tools and find out stuff about your site you might never have known.

You’ve no doubt heard the rumors and now you know it’s true: Google is using site speed as one of its over 200 factors in determining search engine rankings. Sure, we’ve all felt the frustration of waiting for a slow page – particularly if we’re using a mobile phone and all we want is the address of the place we’re going. On the other hand, there are sites that, for whatever valid reasons, load slowly. The webmasters of these sites are understandably unhappy about the new developments.

There are still several questions yet to be answered, including how Google will account for sites in other countries that only want to rank on their country’s version of Google and which may have slower load times in the U.S. Several users have complained that it is Google’s tools themselves (such as Google Analytics and Google AdSense) that slow their sites down, and they wonder whether having these Google features will end up penalizing their sites.

The truth lies somewhere between “We’re doomed” and “Hallelujah!” Google’s Matt Cutts says that fewer than 1% of sites will be affected by this new development. If you go to code.google.com, you can find several boots-on-the-ground ways of speeding up your site, all of which are Google approved.

Selecting a bunch of great, relevant keywords for your AdWords campaign is a solid foundation for ad dollars well spent. But you can make those keywords work harder for you by using negative keywords, exact match, and phrase match in addition to the default broad match your keywords assume.

Negative keywords will keep away clicks on your ads from people who are expecting something else entirely. For example, if you have a taxi service in Manchester, New Hampshire, you don’t want to pay for clicks from people in Manchester, England who are looking for taxi services, so you could use “England” or “UK” as negative keywords by simply placing a minus sign in front of them as you add them to your AdWords keywords. You can have up to 10,000 negative keywords with Google, and you don’t have to pay for them, so you might as well put them to work for you.

Exact match is the strictest positive match, because even slight variations on the phrase will not cause your ad to show up. You designate a keyword phrase as an exact match by placing square brackets around it. Phrase match is less strict than exact match, because the exact phrase plus other words will bring up your ad. To designate a word or phrase as a phrase match, put it in double quotation marks. Broad match is the default, and you don’t add any brackets, quotation marks, or other symbols to it. In general, with broad matches, you’ll get more click throughs, but fewer conversions due to a higher risk of non-relevant searches bringing up your ad.