Is your SEO glass half full, or half empty? | Actionable Insights

Is your SEO glass half full or half empty?

by Pete Dudchenko | October 22, 2009

seo_glass_full Last week, Twitter announced that it is in advanced talks with both Microsoft and Google to help incorporate Tweeter data into search results pages. The announcement seems to be tied to the push by major search engines to incorporate real-time results into their search pages. As an end user, I think this is great. This is another step in Universal Search results and having only one place to go to find the information I want only makes it faster to find what I’m looking for (who here has found information on some breaking news announcement through Twitter?).

As an SEO Manager though, this can be met with mixed emotions and here’s where you get to find out if you are an optimist or pessimist when it comes to SEO. Let’s start with the bad news first for all you pessimists out there (I’d like to think of myself in the other group). That page you’re trying to optimize just added some new competition to battle with for rank. Any tweet using your keywords now has potential to out rank your webpage. If the algorithm logic for the search engines is anything like recent changes to search.twitter.com then the search engines will take into consideration the tweet relevancy, the authoritative rank of the tweeter and perhaps even the relevancy of any pages that are linked to in the tweet to help determine ranking. That’s a tough blow to be out ranked by 140 characters for a business critical term.

So where’s the silver lining you ask? Simple, the optimistic (or perhaps opportunistic) SEO Managers asks, “Why can’t I be that tweeter?” This is actually a great opportunity for your organization. Let’s assume for a second that you’re optimizing perfectly for a critical non-branded term. In many cases, the best you’ll rank is position one and possibly position two for that term. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s a great place to be but there are still eight other rank positions that appear on the first page of the SERP which can steal traffic from your results. The reasoning being that search engines like to provide variety with their results so having multiple domains appear for a term is in the end user’s best interest. Measuring how many positions you hold on the first page of a results page is what we call shelf space and the more of it you can obtain, the higher amount of traffic you can guide to your pages and the less your competition can guide to their pages.

Having your twitter results appear in the SERPs is another opportunity to establish more presence or shelf space for critical terms. The same concept works for Facebook or YouTube. Imagine one of your important unbranded company terms having the first two results from your website, then a mention or two on Twitter, then a YouTube video and a Facebook fan page, all owned by your company? That’s total domination on the Shelf Space for that results page.

In the end, it’s still a bit unclear on how all of this will play out but that doesn’t mean now’s not the time to start planning for the future. Of course, I could just be optimistically speaking.

Actionable Insight: Search Engine Optimization is no longer limited to just pages on your domain. As companies begin to expand their presence across other sites, be it social or micro sites, proper optimization across all areas of ownership will help increase shelf space for critical terms.