Google’s Realtime Search

Dec 11, 2009 by Justin McCall    1 Comment     Posted under: Online Media

On Monday, Google announced the launch of their new Realtime search results.

First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

It seems now that we are no longer fighting for a position on the Google SERP’s pages alone, now we need to fight for some “airtime” on Google’s live results.  This changes the ballgame just a little.  It’s not a matter of what can we do with SEO to reamin #1, we now need to think along the lines of how quickly, and frequently can we publish messages to Twitter and/or friendfeed so that we get our window on search trends in the Google Live Results.

This will definitely up the game in terms of people using Twitter to promote business.  In some cases, we have seen the live results appear before the first search result.  Clearly one needs to be in the live results frame, and somehow stay there.

And the one and only thing that will get you in those results is very frequently published statuses on Twitter.  Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Link your Blog RSS feed to your Twitter account and include keywords in that tweet, with a link back to your blog of course.
2. Link your Facebook Fan Page to your Twitter account. All your status updates on the Fan Page will appear in your Twitter feed, along with links back to your fan page.
3. Tweet regularly about new products, specials or services you offer.
4. Find trending topics on Google using Google Insights for Search and Google Trends.  Study the trends of your particular search keyword term, and time your Tweets appropriately.  When people are searching for that term, you want to be there when they do.

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