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.

1. Popular YouTube videos appear at the top of Google search results pages (SERPS) alongside standard website listings so it’s quite easy to understand that if you have a popular video in YouTube, titled with your relevant keywords, then it could get you an extra spot in Google search results alongside your main website. The downside is that this traffic will go straight to YouTube so you have the job of ensuring that the video viewer knows your website address and decides to go and visit it for more information. In a way this isn’t an SEO benefit to your site, more a way of grabbing an extra position and keeping a competitor off of the search results.

2. If you create several videos and your own keyword branded YouTube channel to house them all, then you can benefit from the placement of a back-link to your main website on your channel page (a little like the Twitter profile back-link benefit discussed in Part 1). However, creating YouTube videos just for the benefit of an extra back link to help your search engine optimisation probably isn’t a good use of your time and money unless you know you can create a fantastically popular video channel that everybody will link to – and boost the channel’s Google PageRank score.

3. Google likes YouTube embedded videos in content – don’t ask me why this is, but Google seems to give web pages that hold embedded video content a higher position in the results. Bizarrely this means that you don’t need to create the video but simply embed useful videos that you find relevant to your audience into your website. Of the three reasons for using YouTube with SEO in mind, this is probably the most effective and requires the least amount of effort. Of course the ideal is to combine all three ideas and embed your own YouTube videos into your web pages.

Optimising your videos within YouTube itself is something quite different but does impact on ‘1’ above – since only a popular video makes its way into the Google results. Therefore you need to consider the following factors when uploading a new video:

1. Make your video informative, interesting and snappy ( 5 minutes or less).
2. Give it an optimised title (using your target search terms and website name) e.g. How to save money on car rentals – car-rentals.co.uk.
3. Optimise your video description. Include keyword based informative content in the description (more info) of your video and link to your website from it – ideally do this in the first line – to appear in the main YouTube descriptor.
4. Ensure that your keyword tags are relevant and contain most of the search terms you used in your title and description. As with SEO try and avoid keyword stuffing.
5. On your main website aim to create hyperlinks to your YouTube video URL containing keyword-rich anchor text.
6. Watermark the video with your URL and use an interesting freeze frame shot.
7. Create and customize your own YouTube channel using search terms to create a keyword friendly URL. Consider the creation of multiple channels for multiple niches.
8. YouTube’s internal site search factors in other rules including the video’s rating, total views, how many times the video has been favourite. The age of the video is also a factor because new videos tend to appear more highly to keep YouTube looking fresh.
9. Ask all your friends to vote and view your video, share it on your Facebook profile page to help with video ranking.
10. Post your videos towards the end of the week, weekends are YouTube’s busiest days (for a B2C audience anyway).

That about covers search engine optimisation and YouTube, both the indirect benefits to your main SEO strategy and also the methods of optimising your videos within YouTube’s own search results. I’d really like to be selling the virtues of this hyped up video technology but personally I’ve only really found it useful for showing clips of the Oompa Loompas and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to my 2 year old daughter…

There’s rather a lot of Twitter rhetoric being bandied about in the Web marketing industry these days so naturally a common question that’s been coming from Firetop clients is “Would being on Twitter help our search engine positioning?” and my short answer on this is “Indirectly yes, but nothing momentous“.

In my opinion the biggest SEO benefit of Twitter is in providing a publishing vehicle that you can syndicate onto a website’s home page to provide an element of freshly updated daily content. We’ve known for years that Google weights pages that have daily content on them more favourably than those that stay static for long periods of time, so in this way one might argue that Twitter post syndication helps SEO. However, by the same token you could just as easily change your home page content daily through some other means like a Content Management System.

If you’ve already decided to seriously embrace Twitter for the benefit of marketing to that social medium then of course you may decide to use Tweets on your home page for SEO as it’s really not much extra work to implement (typically). Micro-blogging with 140 characters via Twitter takes almost no time at all versus full article blogging and if fresh content for SEO is your primary goal then it does the job. It’s important to remember though that saying something useful, on topic and of consequence is important on Twitter in order to drive followers who will be seeing your regular Tweets.

Your Twitter followers do provide a potential link building source if they like what you are saying and decide to investigate your main site as a consequence of your mini biog link (which incidentally is one extra back-link). If you are writing blogs you can promote each newly published blog entry via Twitter to your followers, which again means that you might more quickly generate back-links assuming followers are in a similar field and that what you have produced is useful content that they want to promote on their own blogs or ‘Retweet’.

Finally, in addition to the extra biog back-link already mentioned above, your personalised Twitter profile page does provide an opportunity to have an additional Google search result listing – separate to your main website’s. Remember that your Twitter profile name appears at the start of the page’s <title> tag (still the most important tag for SEO in my eyes) so it’s important to make use of the 20 or so <title> characters you use there… within reason! The more useful your Tweets, the more followers you will gain and the more links your profile page might gain – making the back-link you have there more valuable too.

To summarise, all of these small search engine optimisation gains from Twitter are indirect and in my opinion it’s really not worth considering Twitter for commercial gain unless you  intend to fully maximise Your Twitter experience…

DECEMBER 2009 > An update on this topic which all changed with Real Time Search Results!

Great Hitwise article on Twitter about the key uses of Twitter.

However, we eventually discovered the problem – although the site was returning a 404 status for all .php or extension-less URLs (folders) the .html extension was still returning a status 200 (the site doesn’t use .html but the Google Webmaster Tools validation file does). As the Webmaster Tools validation feature checks for both the presence of the Webmaster Tools HTML file (e.g. hghgjg576gjg.html) on the wesite root AND checks a random .html error to see the 404 response code this was why there was a temporary problem (it was seeing a 200 code).

Once corrected the site revalidated but I thought it was worth the post in case anybody else went around in the same circles as we did

Matt