Twitter, Real-Time Search, and Your SEO Strategy
Tuesday, a client asked me how Twitter might integrate into their SEO strategy. Here is part of my answer, paraphrased:
Twitter helps …as a function of our link building efforts. Twitter will help us (build) relationships with bloggers and site owners who may be interested in linking …an additional benefit is that both the profile and individual updates (may) get indexed in search. As a result, there are opportunities for both to rank for various keywords (the brand for the former and long-tail keywords for the latter).
Twitter profiles usually rank very well in search engine results, especially for name based queries. Individual updates appearing in results are much less common, but I have seen them appear from time to time.
Of course, there are additional, considerable benefits to Twitter, but since our client pays us for SEO, first and foremost they want to make sure our focus is with traditional search engines.
That was Tuesday; then came Wednesday.
A little after 10 AM EST, Bing announced their new real-time search engine, featuring results from Twitter (and likely soon from Facebook). A full review and close up can also be found on Search Engine Land.
Here are the write-ups:
- Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You
- Now Live: Bing’s Twitter Search Engine
- Bing Goes The Dynamite!
Less than four hours later, Google announced a partnership with Twitter to include updates in search results as well.
Here are those write-ups:
- RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!
- That Didn’t Take Long: Twitter Search Is Coming To Google
What does this mean to you?
If you were on the fence about getting invested in real-time social tools like Twitter (and Facebook), because there was a difficulty tying them to SEO (or ROI, or marketing strategy), it’s time to reconsider that position.
The top two players in the space are getting invested in real-time search. Bing Twitter is live today and Google will be rolling out their integration in the coming months. With a combined 8 billion+ searches per month (as of August 2009), there are a lot of additional reasons to consider Twitter as part of your SEO (and online marketing) strategy.
Oh, and that doesn’t include the highly anticipated launch of Google Social Search as well 😉