Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Is the search engine marketing industry ready for the real-time web? Sadly, not many search engine marketers are ready to embark on the challenge that faces them. They certainly should have taken notice of the changes Google made to promote the real-time web at Searchology. Google unveiled functionality that makes it easier to show the most recent results of your respective search. Although this feature won’t be utilized by most, strategies need to be addressed to take full advantage of this real estate. Twitter has also announced a new algorithm based search that will follow the links posted by users on the popular micro-blogging platform.

We are still only in the beginning stages of the real-time web and the presentation of search on Google and Twitter will inevitably evolve into something much different than we are seeing today. We certainly have to prepare for real-time search being a much more prominent feature that users will want to utilize regularly. Consequently, what can we do to prepare for real-time search?

The first thing that needs to be addressed is your social media strategy. Social Media Marketing is naturally synergistic with real-time search and the reason it’s existence is entering the mainstream. You can review my previous post about formulating a strategy with 5 simple methods of social marketing. Content created through social media platforms will be a key component of the results displayed in real-time search.

Regular updating of website content will be a necessity as well. Updating your content was always important because your website would be crawled more frequently. With real-time search, the quality of the regularly updated content will be very important. The content needs to be relevant to the Keywords that are being searched and there needs to be a clear call to action for promotional purposes. The best way to offer this content to the search engines is in the form of a corporate micro-blog. Just like implementing a Blog on your website, a micro-blog would be setup to display quick messages to your users/clients. A micro-blog is better for real-time search because it is difficult and costly to regularly update a normal Blog in order to have results being displayed within a 24 hour timeframe. You could also use the Twitter API to display your Tweets on your website. Although, I wouldn’t recommend this because of potential duplicate content issues that may arise. With e-commerce websites, creating a micro-blog with special offers and special pricing would be a great strategy for real-time search. The important part of this strategy is the architecture of your website and the regularly updated content. A new page of content needs to be created in order for it to be displayed in real-time search results. Blogs and micro-blogs will usually create a new page for each post of content.

Universal search will also play a major role in the real-time web. Video and audio podcasts, news and pictures will have a better chance to rank well in real-time search because there will be less relevant content to choose from when displaying results that may not be more than 24 hours old. A relevant picture that was recently updated on your website could be the reason a product is sold. The content you create for Universal Search will need to be customized to fit your business objectives.

I am sure there are many other creative ways people will find to take advantage of real-time search as it progresses. Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts and ideas on how the real-time web will affect search engine marketing and the tactics we should utilize as search engine marketers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Brian Ratzker, SEO, Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.