Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Dec 08, 2009 @ 07:29 AM
If you haven't already checked out Google Real-Time Search, just go do this:
- Go to http://google.com/trends
- Add "tiger woods" to the search box titled "More Hot Topics" at the bottom of the left column and click the "Search Latest" button
- When your results come up, click "Updates" in the left-hand column
Now watch the real-time Twitter tweets and Facebook, MySpace , YouTube, and Friendfeed updates as well as blog results roll in. Pretty amazing, huh? This is Google Real-Time Search. What does it mean?
It means that Google is now grabbing all of this information from social media as well as websites, indexing it and making it available in seconds anywhere, anytime. To be fair, Bing and Yahoo plan to add this capability as well, but Google is out there now. The implications are mind-blowing. Here are a few that come to mind:
- Your "reach" in social media and search engines has just been expanded several light years.
- Anything you say online is now available to everyone else (not just people who follow your updates) within seconds
- If you contribute to a "hot topic", your 15 microseconds of fame starts now
- How will Google deal with the mountains of spam that will erupt with this new tool? How will it decide what is spam and what is useful information?
Another major impact will be search engine optimization. It's not clear yet how real-time search will affect website page rank and other SEO-related factors. If you add a keyword-rich tweet with a link to a page on your website, will you get SEO credit? Will people start to flood Twitter and other social media sites with keywords instead of meaningful discussions? These are all hot topics for discussion and bear watching over the next few months as this technology develops and becomes more mainstream.
What are your thoughts and experiences with real-time search?
Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Oct 19, 2009 @ 12:27 PM
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The HubSpot founders have been on top of this trend since day one, and this book delivers the best rationale for inbound marketing I have seen, plus lots of excellent how-to details. I am recommending it to all of our clients and friends.
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Posted by John McTigue on Sun, Sep 20, 2009 @ 08:30 AM
OK, it's simple. You want to rank on certain keywords, put them in your blog or page title. In our case, we want to improve our Google ranking on the phrase "advertising agency cleveland". As of this writing, we are ranked #87, which isn't great. We have lots of competition, but how can we do better?
How to improve our ranking on Advertising Agency Cleveland
Yes, it's cheesy to put the keywords in the title without some kind of context. Yes, Google will actually penalize you if you don't follow-up with an article related to those keywords. So write a clever article about the subject and include your keywords in headings (see above) and image "alt" tags (see image).- Be realistic - do your keywords actually describe what you do? Yes, we are an advertising agency based in the Cleveland, OH area. Check.
- Be realistic - do you have any hope of ranking on your keywords? OK, we're starting at 87, so there is hope. If we tried to rank on "advertising agency" alone, forget about it. The cool thing is, as we start to improve our ranking on the long-tail keywords "advertising agency cleveland", we also improve our chances with "advertising agency". Maybe someday...
- Lather, rinse, repeat. One blog isn't going to drive thousands of visitors to your keyword rich page. Do it repeatedly, but keep it subtle. Don't try the same (some might say stupid) tactic that we used for this blog every time. Move your keywords around in the title and blog, try different word order and monitor results. As you track your keywords and page views you can see what combinations work best.
Let's see how we do. I will monitor our progress in ranking on these keywords and add them to the comments periodically, so stay tuned.
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