Content is King! Right? We’ll a new major shift in the search engines may just prove those of us right who have been saying social media is not a fad, and will change everything in the next 6-18 months.

Here is a great example. In July 2010, if you had looked up information on Google for “Oil Spill”, you would gotten a lot of different links to news articles, and perhaps BP’s website.

Now look at the difference.

When you search “Oil Spill,” you can find a blend of search results of news stories, videos, blog posts, and tweets. BP organic search results are not to be found, and they only show up because of their paid AdWords campaign.

Here is what is interesting, blog entries and tweets now show up on Google results. In fact, not only do they show up, they scroll through an entire list of the most recent real-time entries.

If you glance at the image above (Click here to view the actual page), you’ll notice a box we’ve created. Within that box, the tweets you see actually scroll, showing the newest and most relevant tweets. Notice the word “Pause” next to “Latest results for oil spill.”

This is all part of the new Google Caffeine we have been talking about for most of the summer. (See our article, Google Caffeine Affects Every Business)

Google is not the only one. Yahoo! and Bing are also integrating Facebook and Twitter posts.

The integration of social media into the search engines is called “real-time search.”

Believe it or not, information now flows faster in the social media world than in any other. If you’re Google, you want a piece of that.

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, says, “People go to social media for recommendations and to search engines for research. Google senses the distinction…and is trying to capitalize on it via search.”

 What does this mean for you? It means a new way of looking at Search Engine Optimization. It is going to get harder and harder for you website alone to get found on the front page of the search engines.

It’s not hard to see that when a 2″ x 6″ box of real-time results gets added to a search results page, other listings are getting pushed off the coveted first page. Keep in mind, this is in addition to the space for videos, images, and books sections.

Everyone must get better at the basics and best practices of search engine optimization.

That means labeling content in headers properly, create really good content, build trust for your domain, and don’t forget to market your site on everything.

Search is already a moving target, real-time SEO just escalates it.

That is why you must get on-board with social media (i.e. blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of new ones coming out).

We all need to be thinking about real-time search. In a world that used to be all about links, the link graph has been eaten up by the social graph. What this means is the search engines are now keeping track of your value as a content source (tweets, retweets, followers, engaged followers, etc).

Don’t ignore the social realm. Though it is still the present, it will have a profound impact on the future!