As promised, Google is starting to roll out “Real-Time” Search from sources like Twitter, News articles, fresh web pages, Yahoo Answers, etc… and is integrating them into their search results (Facebook and MySpace will soon be joining as Google has inked deals with both). Results will be displayed at the top of Page 1 in a block titled, “Latest Results from keyword phrase“.

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By now you have been told countless times that you need to have your business on Facebook and Twitter. That’s where the people are. And maybe you have been told that pages and entries on social community sites have slowly crawled into listings on search engine results pages.

And maybe you have put off signing up for an account, or building a fan base, because you were ‘waiting to see what happens.’ Well, it just happened.

Both Google and Microsoft have recently come to agreements with Twitter, while Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook as well (you know Google can’t be too far behind there). These agreements will allow the search engines to integrate updates on the social media sites right onto the SERPs.

You can read more about these deals here.

So what does this mean for you? If you have been at the forefront of social media, and have accounts on Twitter and Facebook with lots of fans and followers, then you are in a good position to gain more exposure (and hopefully traffic) from these deals.

If you have accounts but have not kept them up to date, or if you don’t have any accounts at all, there’s still time but you have some work ahead of you. These deals are about real-time search, so it’s not necessarily what you have done in the past that will count (although having more fans and followers will probably be a plus, so you’ll want to increase those numbers). You can position yourself for real-time search by:

• Opening or updating your account
• Building up more fans or followers
• Starting conversations on current topics
• Respond to comments and other posts on topics you are an expert in

So what type of situation are you in? Are you ready to take advantage of real-time search?

Recently I was surfing some SEO blogs when I came across a post on a search marketing conference. I like to see what the other leaders in online marketing are saying these days, so I was anxious to read the entire post, and was well on my way until I came across #13 in their list of top 20 quotes from the conference. It reads:

13. Don’t worry too much about duplicate content.
(Luisella Mazza, Google) (more…)

Bingo…I mean Bing is the latest edition claimed to be the newest, greatest…next best search engine to rival the undeniable king, Google. Bing.com is on scheduled to replace Live.

Have you checked this new search engine out yet? Do you like it? Let us know what you think of this latest search platform. I was pleasantly surprised, actually, and plan on investigating it further. Bing offers us searchers categorized listings and if you hover over certain links, you will see ‘more info’. Streamlined and quite nice! (more…)

One thing we glance over in some of our posts (most recently in our post on cracking the Google Ten Pack), and hardly ever dedicate an entire post to, is the importance of keywords in your online marketing campaign. This isn’t to say that they aren’t important. Quite the opposite – keywords are one of the main building blocks for any successful SEO campaign. (more…)