The impact to online marketers
Now that we know a little more about the mechanics of how real-time search works, let's take a look at what websites can do to increase their chances of being included in these results.
The first important piece for publishers is to make sure that they are producing content with an emphasis on keywords. Since these results are skewed toward exact keyword matches, it is important that keywords are used in the headline and are in line with what people are typing in the search box. There are two tools you can use to get a better idea of how you should be forming your headlines: Google Keyword Suggest and the Google Trends Hot Topic feature. Both of these tools can be used to identify keywords in close to real-time.
Next, it is important to create a strong community within several social media sites. The followers and friends you accrue on these sites are the ones who will be sharing your content with their networks, and it is their comments that will likely be included in real-time results within Google's social media widget. Remember, the sites with content included in the widget are Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku, MySpace, and Identi.ca.
The last thing you can do to improve your site's chances is to focus on some basic fundamentals of SEO, such as making sure that your site can be easily crawled by the search engines and that you are being linked to by other sites on the web.
Sites that are well-optimized for SEO are typically going to be crawled faster and more frequently, which will increase your chances of getting visible placement within the real-time results.
Tips for getting included on real-time search results:
- Use keywords in your headlines.
- Create content based on timely events.
- Get involved in social media.
- Develop a good network of friends and followers in social media.
- Promote conversations in your online communities.
The future of real-time search
Real-time search is still in its infancy on the major search engines, but so far it appears to be improving the quality of results for timely events. Under the old results, a search for "Kurt Warner" right after his retirement announcement would have yielded results about his career, older news articles, and memorabilia websites. The new real-time results provide a search result page with breaking news articles, social media chatter, and blog postings along with other relevant information.
These enhanced search results are a big improvement for users and improve one of the major flaws in Google's algorithm. Real-time results also offer additional opportunities to websites and marketers by providing additional spots for timely results to appear in search results -- spots that were previously only available to certain sites.
The addition of news headlines and the social media widget have created two additional opportunities for sites to get a link on the first page of Google. This should afford new opportunities to sites savvy with their use of keywords and a good presence in social media, giving them more shelf space in search results whenever timely events take place.
In time, we may see these types of results become the norm for Google search results. In the near term, real-time results will only be used to resolve a significant flaw in the algorithm -- timely content getting buried beneath established results due to the heavy reliance of inbound links.
These results in their current format are still more susceptible to spam, so they will likely continue to be produced based on online chatter rather than as part of everyday results. As Google improves its algorithim and improves the relevance of real-time results, we should see the inclusion of latest results become more of the norm, rather than the exception.
Rick Egan is senior director of SEO and social media services for The Search Agency and a regular contributor to The Search Agents blog.
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