When it comes to adding social bookmarking buttons to my site, I like to keep things simple. The goal is to offer people something valuable and as them to help you spread the word about it. Fancy social buttons won’t necessarily help you get better results. But they may be worth testing if you aim to improve your conversion rate. AddThis not only has some of the best looking buttons and social widgets around, it is analytics-capable, giving you actionable information on how to proceed with your social campaigns.

Many webmasters choose to go with the simple social sharing box available through this service. By taking a look at the gallery page available on Addthis.com, you can find plenty of exciting ways to make your website social friendly. You have the option to add Mashable type floating boxes or Mac OS style sharing docks to your websites. Addthis has an app available for Wibiya, which is quite nice.

AddThis may be a great social sharing service, but it would not be complete without an analytics system. AddThis can measure clicks, shares, and your viral traffic. It can give you actionable information on how to improve your content and what areas to focus on the most.

Getting traffic from social media sites and keep adding more will take some time. Tools such as AddThis make it easier to add call to action buttons to your website and figure out what interests your visitors the most. What’s not to like?

Web Informer’s toolbar is pretty easy to install on any website (HTML, WordPress …). It has some of the top social networking websites that you would want your visitors to submit your content to. The sleek look and feel is not too shabby either.

Web Informer’s social bar is expandable. While your visitors get to submit your content to Facebook, Twitter, and even Mixx from the main bar, they can use the “More” link button to submit your website to services such as Tumblr, Friendfeed, Diigo, and much more.

Those of you who prefer adding a drop-down social button to your website instead of a footer bar can always go with the Default Theme.

Webmasters can develop their own social bars using Javascript. If you don’t want to touch any code, solutions such as that of Web Informer’s can be helpful.

Google is now going to start grabbing information from your favorite social networking sites that you have listed on your Google Profile. This is exciting on two fronts. On the one hand, you are going to be able to keep up with the latest developments in the world of social media. So you can catch the latest news and developments faster through Google Search. On the other hand, your results are going to be somewhat customized for you. It’s not personalized search just yet, but it’s a very good start.

In case you missed it, Microsoft is also trying hard to get a lead in this department to put pressure on Google. But the latest announcement by Google should stop a bit of momentum that Microsoft was going to make by taking Bing social. The move will certainly marry social media optimization and search engine optimization. Now you can share images, videos, text blogs, and so on across multiple networks and gain a lot more traffic from Google as well.

The future of search is social. It’s all about user generated content mixed with corporate content. It’s about time Google and Microsoft paid attention to all the content created by social media users on a daily basis. We are still in the early days of true social search. But too hard not to get excited about it all.