Launched by Google in late 2009, Realtime Search is a great new way of staying in touch with your customers and keeping your brand top of mind. Designed to combine live updates from news services, blogs and social media sites like Facebook or Twitter Fan pages, Google’s Realtime Search is a great tool for web users to search for the most up-to-date and relevant content on their desired topic.

As a website owner, it provides you with a unique opportunity to reach customers with the information they are looking for at the time they need it. You can advise them of sales, special offers, free downloads, subscriptions, new website content or simply just remind them of the products and services you offer or provide authoritative commentary on hot topics in your industry. Most importantly, these real-time services can be used to drive customers back to your website and help you manage the reputation of your business!

5 tips for optimising your website content for Realtime Search

To make the most of Realtime Search, your primary website and its related media sites should be releasing new or updated content frequently. How can your web content be optimised for maximum benefit?

1. Great content: Present valuable or entertaining information in a timely manner and follow up any news releases with associated live updates. For example, you might release an announcement to a quality newswire. Once it has been properly indexed and released online by the newswire, you would then start releasing updates relating to this announcement on your business’ blog or Facebook page. The original announcement would, of course, reside on your primary website. Don’t forget to add related posts on Facebook, follow up comments on your blog post, include a mention and link to it in your newsletter and even link to it from your email footer.
2. Words are the key: Embed your business’ keywords and phrases into the content of each release or posting but be aware that more than a 5% keyword density is likely to get you penalised by the search engines. Don’t forget about your long tail keywords too, just focussing on your two or three main keywords could mean that you miss out on a stack of business.
3. Link it: Link your website to your business’ blog (ideally they should be integrated) and social media sites and ensure that all postings or releases include both internal and external links! Tweet about your latest blog post or most recent Facebook gallery, blog about your Facebook competition, write a Facebook post about a fantastic review on your website, post your Youtube videos on your Facebook wall.. keep them intertwined.
4. Think mobile: Make your postings and web content more mobile friendly! Remember that most people are now accessing realtime media via smartphones like the Apple iPhone or Android phones. Make sure you use cascading style sheets on your website where possible and reduce the amount of multimedia (like videos or large image files for example). It is also worthwhile checking that the code underlying your website is clean, uniform and optimised.
5. Maximise the meta: Ensure any meta data allowed for each of your linked sites contain keywords and descriptions that accurately reflect your business. Most blog sites like WordPress have fields where this kind of information can be entered. Each blog post you create should have its own meta title and description custom to the post content, this applies for both integrated or separate blog sites. Facebook pages should have a custom URL based on your most profitable keyword/ business name.

Encouraging your social media and blog fans to advocate your products and services is also a great strategy for ensuring you appear regularly in realtime searches. Not only are they linking to you, but any reviews or comments they make in their blogs, on their social pages or in their tweets are all going to increase your website’s visibility in realtime and boost the number of visitors.

The greatest tip for keeping your website content current with realtime searches is to get involved and have something to say about the hot topics within your industry. There are lots of quality websites that can help you monitor the hot topics online. Four good places to start include Google Trends, BlogPulse, Delicious and Trendistic.

Google Trends monitors current news and events on Google (you can even set up alerts to be sent to your email account), BlogPulse will advise you of the most popular blogs and top stories of the day, Delicious reports on social web trends and Trendistic identifies topic trends on Twitter and these trends can be viewed in hourly, weekly or monthly intervals. By staying on top of these social conversations, it will help you write content for your releases and postings that will add to these conversations and topic themes, and draw traffic back to your website.

The Internet is such a fast changing environment it can be difficult to get your head around new concepts, much less keep up with them all. If you need a little one-on-one coaching, you can call on us for help.