Back in July I wrote about the usefulness of Twitter for use in an SEO strategy… or rather the lack of usefulness – beyond creating a powerful profile back link. In the past week this has changed rather dramatically with the inclusion of real time tweets within Google’s search results. Now, on popular and ‘news-worthy’ Google search terms you (or your customers) may find that Google results are shared with the latest related postings from Twitter.

This of course suddenly adds much weight to the usefulness of Twitter for search engine positioning – and the timing is probably just as well because most reports I read in the past two months had suggested that the Twitter novelty factor probably wasn’t going to be enough to sustain traffic… enter Google!

You can see a really short demonstration of the real time Twitter results via the short video below or alternatively the only live example I could find today was on the topical keyword of Copenhagen. I’m glad to see that the position of the Twitter feed has been substantially dropped to the middle of the results page now, during the week I was finding the top location to be rather irritating.

If you’re really interested in Google real time search there’s also a chance to watch the full demonstration of this functionality and various other Google personalisation services including the impressive ‘voice recognition search’. I must admit I tried watching the full Google presentation live but it kept timing out (presumably due to popularity) – there are some interesting announcements in there on youtube now anyway.

Click for Social Bookmarks