Date: 22 Oct 2009 Comments: 1

Real-Time Search

I’m not sure how many of you are fans of the HBO TV series The Wire.  It had a brilliant 5-season run on the cable network that used the streets of Baltimore to convey how the rot of a major American city spreads to from the street level, to government, to our schools and throughout the people we entrust to protect us.  Needless to say, I’m a huge fan of the series and when it was announced yesterday that Bing is launching a Twitter Search Engine and Google is planning on a Social Search in the near future, an exchange from The Wire immediately jumped to mind.

Cutty:  The game done changed.

Slim Charles:  Game’s the same, just got more fierce.

This perfectly explains what was going through the mind of any SEO upon reading these announcements.  Static websites are closer to becoming irrelevant at this point in time than ever before.  Real time search, websites that are continually feeding new info to visitors and micro-blogging are officially moving up the priority list.

Is Static Content Really Dead?

Let’s not jump to conclusions too fast though.  None of us know how effective real-time search is going to be.  Bing’s Twitter Search could either revolutionize the way people gather information or simply serve as an easy way to keep track of the next Balloon Boy-esque story or celebrity meltdown.  In that same vein, we don’t know what exactly Google’s Social Search is going to encompass.  We have an idea but nothing is promised at this point.

What I would surmise though is the popularity of Twitter and Facebook combined with the rise in credibility lent to bloggers has caused a major shift in thinking about how to provide user’s information by the search engines.  No longer are pages that contain a wealth of information related to a subject good enough to maintain a top ranking.  The next step is going to be relevancy and freshness of content.  Strategically, some will argue companies are going to hire interns to refresh pages all day long to build rankings.  It won’t be that simple.

Change in SEO Thinking Required

All the fundamentals of SEO are going to remain the same.  Link importance cannot change at this point.  Keywords in the title tags and URLs along with strong content will always be mandatory.  But you can no longer demand on launching a website, throwing some Social Media links on the top of every page and expect great things to happen.  Now, an interaction with the visitor is going to be required.  More than on-page relevancy, great online PR is going to be needed.  If people are not talking about you on other sites then you’re not going to be viewed as relevant to the engines.

This not entirely different from needing a strong link strategy, but your online PR is going to have to be more aggressive.  Any SEO walking into a client’s office from now on that does not have a handle on how to use real-time search to their advantage is going to lose out.  Google and Bing have completely changed the way people are going to look at their websites.

The search game has not changed in that people still rely on the engines to grow their business and increase revenue.  But take the amount of work you’ve been doing previously and triple it.  Because things have gotten a hell of a lot more fierce.