SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

There is some talk around about how Twitter has the potential to claim some of Google’s pie in the realm of real-time search. The ability to search for information via Twitter has the distinct and differentiated advantage over Google where the information is being presented real-time and comes direct from the user. For this reason some believe that Twitter is better than Google for researching companies, products and services for real customer feedback, breaking news and live events/conference updates.

The speed at which users can post information via Twitter and for this information to be made searchable instantaneously is an advantage over the slower process Google takes to crawl and list website information. The most common tweet is a link and a small insight.  The value of this link and the insight is quickly voted on as people respond and retweet. Relevance would then be determined by the amounts of these votes, making it a human powered search with the potential to provide very fresh and valid information.

Google Search results example for term ‘google translation’

Twitter search results example for term ‘google translation’

What does this mean for SEO?

Any switched on SEO practitioner will tell you all about the importance of links and its ability to impact your websites rankings. An easy way to generate a good amount of links can be achieved via blog posts. The theory goes that the tweet is the new blog post. In the past, the insight and the associated links were most favourably passed by on through blogs but as Twitter’s already impressive popularity increases, the amount of people posting on blogs will, in theory, decline. With a decline in these ‘votes’ will Google alter their algorithm to balance things out?

What does this mean for Google?

Twitter is differentiaed from Google by the potential to provide relavant and popular information through it’s millions of users. A search tool which provides information direct from a person who has purchased a particular product, viewed a film or used a service you are interested would be of interest to me, how about you?

It could simply be a matter of time before Twitter figures out a way to capatilise on this and claim search market share from Google. Ultimately, I believe it will be the users who decide the vailidity of this assumption. Either way it will be interesting to see how this play out. How will Twitter evolve in the coming year and what will happen with the potential rarefying of the inbound link and what impact will this have on the Google algorithm?

For more information on this endangered link theory, check out James Duthie’s post here.

Back in late November I blogged about the direction of online search and where would it go from here, and as a testament to how rapidly things change in the online world we already have an answer from Google about where they want to take things.

Google Goggles is a new search service offered on mobile phones running Google’s phone operating system, Android. Google Goggles allows the user to take a photo of an object and retrieve information from the web on it. Current requirements to be able to utilise Google Goggles:

* An Android device running Android 1.6 or above
* A QVGA screen
* A camera with autofocus

There are many uses for the service that will change how you search for information:

* Get information instantly by taking photos of:

• Landmarks
• Books
• Artwork
• Products
• Logos
• Wines

* Using the phones internal compass, the camera display can show information about locations such as restaurants relevant to your location and the direction that you point your camera. You’re then able to bring up information on the location (i.e. ratings and comments on restaurants)
* The service can recognise text and using this feature, users are able to scan in information off business cards and save them as contacts directly to the phone

This service is still in development and is not yet able to deliver results as relevant as you would expect via a normal keyword search, however its capabilities will advance through user feedback on the relevancy of their searches and as Google grows their database. Future plans for Google Goggles are to connect it with live updates from social networking sites such as Facebook status posts and Twitter feeds, as well as adding Google’s facial recognition technology (left out of initial release due to its currently limited functionality).

This new technology springs to mind some interesting questions; What will this new technology mean for online marketing? How does Google determine the relevancy of results and analyse images specific to certain topics? How will businesses optimise to generate exposure via this new medium?

From a social perspective, with the potential introduction of facial recognition, what will this mean for privacy? By simply entering a photo you took of someone into the search, will you be able to pull up of online data related to that person from their social networking pages to images to contact details to employment information? Will we have the choice whether or not to be ‘searchable’ online or what information comes up for searches?

This certainly is a space we will be keeping a close eye on.

Official Google Video on Goggles

Visual Demo of Google Goggles Functionality

Microsoft has announced the signed deal with Twitter and Facebook to effectively integrate status updates into the Bing search results. This will definitely move it closer to providing real-time search capabilities. Although search engine giants, Google are already showing Twitter and Facebook results, Bing will be stepping up and offering the entire public Twitter stream.

So how will the Twitter search results work on Bing? Here is an overview of what to expect:

•Tweets updated in real-time: View all tweets “roll in” in real-time by watching the “tweet SERP” update. To view more tweets than what’s displayed on the first page of search results, click “See more tweets about…”
•Results ranked by tweeter’s influence and uniqueness of the tweet: According to Microsoft, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other tweets, it will get ranked lower.”
•Private tweets remain private: Tweets by users who have private or protected Twitter pages will not be indexed.
•Real-time only lasts so long: Tweets will only be indexed in Bing for 7 days, further indication that Bing intends to use the Twitter integration as a way to capitalize on real-time events and searcher interests. There’s no indication that Bing intends to index and provide a historical record of tweets.

The implications for marketers is that it will provide real-time social data within search result and encourage brands to embrace and try and keep up to the changing consumer search habits as they change. For example, a searcher seeking information on where the latest brand name sale is on, or the waiting time for an up and coming concert. Although the search engines cannot generate results as events are happening, user generated content from Facebook and Twitter may be able to address this.

The key takeouts from this news:
•Big opportunities for companies to
•Marketers who currently use Twitter and Facebook will experience greater importance and potentially traffic. However it will act as a double edged word in that brands will need to closely monitor any negative conversations that come up.
•From an SEO perspective, certain brands and industries may lose potential traffic and opportunity if they have not already taken up social media.
•Social media will continue to grow with search engines as it continues to move towards social commentary to determine data relevance.

Recent sources have confirmed talk that both Yahoo and Google are now looking into striking up deals with Twitter. These sorts of deals are big news because if undertaken would greatly improve the versatility of the results the search engines serve.

Twitters last reported monthly user volumes of 54 million that generates an excess of a billion tweets. This large amount of fresh user generated data produced on a daily basis could be hugely beneficial to the search engines in that recent and relevant tweets can be integrated into a search result. These listing would play a big part in generating more related, relevant and most importantly up to date results for its users.

This deal if swayed in the direction of Microsoft would most certainly assist its search engine Bing to further increase much needed ground on its main competitor Google.

Though these types of changes would be sure to benefit both search engines and Twitter alike it appears that the social media giant Twitter is in no hurry to make a decision on the matter or to reveal precisely how much data it is willing to release. With recent valuation figures of around the 1 billion dollars it is understandable that they would be in no hurry, they always have the option of investing in their own search engine and taking on the current big players.

According to some reports, Apple is offering Twitter USD $700m for the takeover deal. Sources revealed Apple is in advanced negotiations with Twitter and hope to close the deal by early June. Apple is waving USD $700m in cash in order to compete against Google and Microsoft who are also interested in this micro-blogging website.

Late last year, Twitter has turned down Facebook’s US $500m deal, in which the deal composed of Facebook stock.

In the world of Search, Google is undoubtedly king. However, the time may have arrived where there is a valiant competitor ready to knock Google off its perch.
Intrigued? I’m talking about the new social media craze - Twitter of course.

The brilliance of Twitter is that online conversations happen in real-time and so this has the opportunity to present users with a more relevant and compelling search experience.
However, at this stage Twitter is still very much in its infancy and cannot answer the vast number of queries like a search engine can presently. Will this change as more and more users log on and infiltrate Twitter?
As this social media marketing tool collects data, it may become more sophisticated in nature and become a new force in search.

Tapping into the mind of search marketing guru, Rand Fishkin (CEO of SEOmoz.com) he believes that the limitiation of Twitter in toppling Google is this:

Google answers an inherent need that has existed since the web’s inception: users must navigate to web sites and pages that contain desired information. Twitter cannot achieve this function and therefore cannot be a replacement for Google in search.”

With this in mind, where does Twitter sit in amongst the search market - and is this really the question to be asking at all?
At this stage Twitter cannot cover all of the topics that Google can, so this blogger will continue to use Twitter as a reference point to gain further information from search results uncovered in Google.

There has been plenty of talk go into Twitter of late: much of this talk being about the amazing growth rate that has been going on over the last two months. The biggest issue facing the blue bird is now keeping the new members, and initial reports indicate that all is not well in Twitterland.
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Social networking sites are massively growing and so has the micro-blogging site, Twitter.

From a reliable source, CommScore, they found that the number of visitors using twitter has increased from 5 million to 9.3 million in February. A total increase of 131%. Rumors are surfacing around, claiming that it will be soon Twitter will surpass other social network giants such as Facebook and MySpace.

A ComScore’s industry analyst claims that Twitter’s growth rate is mainly contributed by media attention:

“There may certainly be some merit to that,” he said. “It seems you can’t get through a typical newscast anymore without some mention of Twitter.”

The  founders of the VOIP system Skype have made a bid to buy back the system which they sold to eBay for $2.6 billions dollars back in 2005. The current value of Skype? A paltry $1.1 billion.

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Google has been discussing with Twitter about potential acquisitions and recently News Corp walked into the picture, becoming the potential acquirer. The discussion is said to be in the finalizing stage.

Just got confirmation from a very reliable source that News Corp…has closed a definitive purchase of Twitter for ‘at least $750 million in cash

Rumours has been spreading around and everyone, even columnist writers are discussing whom should be the winner. Michael Wolff, a columnist writer for Vanity Fair believes that it makes sense for News Corp to purchase Twitter.

Who will it be?