brand marketing blog

The recent introduction by Google of real-time indexing and presentation in search results of Twitter, FaceBook and blog posts presents some interesting, albeit fleeting search engine marketing opportunities.

For instance, Twitter tweets are now being indexed by Google in much the same way as other web content. However, a major difference compared to the indexing and presentation of traditional web content, is that a tweet SERP result will only be visible for a short period of time, until it is replaced by fresher content. Considering the staggering volume of social media content being published, this won’t take very long.

The small opportunity that exists is for tweeters to craft their tweets more closely around keywords associated with their area of expertise or interest. This could provide them with an additional, but limited source of indexable content.

Some SEO pundits are talking as though real-time indexing is the best thing since sliced hi-fibre, low GI brown bread, but it’s really just another small piece of the keyword marketing puzzle, and should be treated that way. On it’s own it virtually worthless.

Consider the keyphrase ‘website optimisation’. It gets approximately 480 searched per month in New Zealand. Over a 30 day month it’s searched on only 16 times per day. Under normal circumstances, even if you appeared #1 in Google search results for this keyphrase, you would only get a small percentage of click throughs to your website (that’s just how the dynamics of search work).

If you got a 25% click through on the keyphrase, it would give you 4 page visits over a 14 hour period (assuming people don’t search in their sleep). If your real-time indexed tweet has a lifespan of only 10 - 20 minutes (probably even less), your chances of being seen and clicked on are very small indeed.

There’s no harm in trying to keyword-optimise your tweets, but I wouldn’t suggest you spend too much time and effort doing it. You’d be better off to focus on other keyword targeted mediums that deliver more sustained listings in the search results, such as web pages, articles and blog posts.