ReadWriteWeb

While the social, real-time Web is hogging all the buzz as of lately, it's still important to keep an eye on good old fashioned search engine optimization for your company's site. SEO can be an expensive endeavor, especially if you hire an expert, but it doesn't have to be.

We've covered the basics on how to improve your business website's search rankings, and here are a few tools to get you started without breaking the bank.

Superfeedr, the real-time feed transformation service funded by Betaworks and Mark Cuban, announced today that it now offers real-time keyword tracking across all 2.1 million feeds that are run through its hub.

Any time your keywords of interest appear across Tumblr, Posterous, Typepad, Gowalla, Gawker, HuffingtonPost or a number of other sources subscribed to Superfeedr (including ReadWriteWeb!) you can receive real-time notification pushed to you within seconds.

The ongoing game of cat and mouse between China and Google continued today as the Internet search behemoth announced it is making some changes in an attempt to please the Chinese government. The dust up began in January of this year when Google refused to censor any results on Google.cn after accusing China of orchestrating a cyber attack on its servers. Threatened with losing its license to serve content, Google eventually decided to redirect users to its Honk Kong homepage - a work-around which until today had gone unchecked by the Chinese government.

Quirky Boston-based startup Baydin won this year's Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad competition with their interesting take on e-mail search: Unsearch. Unsearch, now in closed alpha, is an Outlook plugin that analyzes individual e-mail messages as they're read, and provides relevant search results next to the message. Imagine Gmail, but with related files and e-mail conversations instead of ads.

Streaming real-time search company Collecta announced today that it has secured additional funding, to the tune of $4.7 million, from Dace Ventures and previous investor, True. Prior investment already totaled $1.85 million.

The company delivers streaming news, via widgets, APIs and its Site Search Platform, to partners. It intends to use the infusion to build out its team and establish more partnerships, according to Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. Past partnerships have included CNET's coverage of the iPad launch and MySpace's Today on MySpace feature.

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Most of a year ago we asked "Will Google's Caffeine Update Really Change Search Results?" At that time, Google had announced a beta launch of a new indexing system for their search results. It took a while to roll that launch all the way out. It took until today.

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

Last month, Google launched an encrypted version of its Web search, allowing users to enable a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to encrypt their information. Like several other Google products that feature SSL encryption, including email and Docs, Google touted this move as a step towards enhancing users' privacy and security.

Update: Google spokeperson Kat Eller contacted ReadWriteWeb with this statement: "We're aware that encrypted search can create difficulties for some educational institutions using other Google services. We're very sorry for the inconvenience, and are working to identify a solution as fast as possible. An imperfect and temporary fix is to enable our SafeSearch lock feature."

Good news for developers and fans of mashups, as this morning Microsoft has announced the availability of a software development kit (SDK) for building map apps on Bing Maps. What's more, last week Microsoft announced the creation of the Bing Search Library for PHP - a wrapper built in conjunction with PHP expert Cal Evans that gives developers easy access to the Bing Search API via PHP. Microsoft seems to be embracing third-party developers more openly now with these tools, so here's a breakdown of what's available now.

During his WWDC keynote today, Steve Jobs announced that Microsoft's Bing will now be one of the search options in Safari on the iPhone. Microsoft already developed a Bing iPhone application that allows iPhone users to use the search engine's features on the iPhone without having to create a browser bookmark. Now, Bing will take its place next to Google - which will remain the default - and Yahoo Search.