Four Tips for Real-Time Search Optimization

Khrysti Nazzaro - February 1, 2010

As the occurrence of Universal & Blended Search results become more frequent for a larger variety of queries, it’s imperative that   business owners and marketing managers craft content creation strategies above and beyond traditional website content. For those sites whose content / industry lends itself to frequent breaking news, updates, and time-sensitive occurrences, presence within real-time search could be particularly beneficial. Following are four tips for improving your real-time search optimization strategy:

1. Blogging. Publish frequent, keyword-rich blog posts. Build a readership. Syndicate your blog via feeds.
2. Use Twitter. Tweet regularly, utilizing keywords that people are looking for. Keep an eye on building your follower base with highly relevant folks on Twitter, so that your tweets garner more authority. Think of your followers almost as you would inbound linkers — demonstrate the quality of your content to the search engines via the quality and relevance of your followers.
3. Press Releases. Distribute well-optimized online press releases. Use keywords, links, and any available multimedia collateral (images, video embeds, etc.), to make the release as robust and content-rich as possible.
4. Local Listings. Don’t forget about local search. Visit the Google Local Business Center to learn more about adding real-time updates to your Google Maps Place Page(s) www.google.com/lbc.

Real-time content is exploding across the Internet, but given its time-sensitivity, its reach is at once both impactful and fleeting. The benefits of creating and ranking for relevant real-time content are clear in that they present your company to people at the very moment of need and urgency. At the same time, maintaining a real-time research optimization strategy takes consistent maintenance and care; first, because it can be difficult to create content on a regular basis and second, because those difficulties are compounded by the challenge of creating content of value to readers. Those companies that do this well have a definite leg-up on their competition relative to the amount of real estate they will be able to garner in the SERPs and the potential for quality leads and business they will be able to generate though that presence.