I’m taking the time to do a bit of research here because you offered that you’re learning. The good news is that what I’m about to describe can be fixed with good ol’ fashioned demographic research and SEO.

In that spirit I do have one question, from one SEO person to another. Ranking #1 for “sleep performance research” is cool. However the query has statistically insignificant search worldwide, with no exact match searches. Only approximately 16 searches from around the world occurred at broad match and none from the USA.

I understand that this combination of words is highly focused to the institution’s mission, and therefore very valuable, with little or no associated volume (in the form of actual traffic to your site) and probably a high conversion rate for the few folks that show up on the site for this KW. Ranking for “sleep performance research” is also a very easy SEO thing to do, because nobody uses these words. There is little algorithmic competition. The #3 result (again make sure you’re searching with personalized search turned off) is from is from 2005. Users just don’t search much for “sleep performance research center” or even “sleep performance research.”

Many more folks search for terms like “sleep research,” over 12K in the US alone last December in just Google, or “sleep study,” 8100 in the USA last month. “sleep disorder research” clocked 140 USA searches. Since few searchers know to add the word “performance” to their queries, it is reasonable to assume that the “performance” variable is embodied in these slightly more general searches.

Washington State University Spokane does not rank, unpersonalized, for these higher-inventory searches, as your site is up against semi-formidable SEO competition like http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/sleep. HOWEVER your site SHOULD have the authority to rank well and drive traffic for some of these more competitive terms and would do so with some basic SEO fixes.

Washington State, especially given that it’s part of a trusted .edu, should be an 800 LB gorilla in the sleep research space, using the words that searchers actually levy, and the site has not claimed its birthright for un-targeted SEO. Again, this would be easy to remedy.

Thank you again for stopping by. I could not help myself as we have experience in the medical industry KW space, and we’ve seen a number of instances where the institution, to the chagrin of the SEO team, chose words to represent their mission which are not advised by how users really search.

More value will be derived, I think, from the things that will be build atop real-time streams. Goetagged earthquake data that I came across today is a good example.

Plain ol’ data mining, is sure to fizzle out

I have specific content/identity goals for the @WSUSpokane account I manage that are reflected in the words I use in the tweets.

Running an incognito Google search on the words sleep performance research (because we have one of the top research centers on sleep and human performance, particularly how fatigue affects human decision making in regular folks who don’t have some kind of sleep disorder), I get one of our tweets in the first page of results. It’s at the bottom of the page, but still in the top 10. Our research center is the #1 result. Another tweet shows up on page 2.

I don’t know what this means–just thought I’d share since it’s content that is outside the SEO world.

Since tweet streams are more and more often being fed to web pages that are themselves cached and available, I see tweet content driving search results one way or another.

Google will come back and say that “it’s a result of this” or “result of that.” At the end of all the PR motivated chatter Twitter is “influencing” non-paid SERPs. I don’t much care what mashup of algorithmic stew caused this. It’s just a howl any way one thin-slices it . Google made that decision when they placed that realtime junk at the top of some SERPs. Funny how the much vanuted “realtime web” isn’t allowed to be quite so real-time when the KW has lots of competition in adwords.

I think placing tweets towards the top of most Google SERPs (I personally seek as a user) doesn’t do much for me. I wonder what the data says regarding who gives a rat. Suggestions at the bottom…well, OK. I could see laying tasty tidbits of ongoing conversations in the space, might provide insight…or at least entertainment to users. There might even be a separate way to monetize conversation-detail separately.

Whether this is a temporary quirk, test, whatever…Google gets to be like the rest of us no matter how rich, mighty or powerful they’ve become: Sometimes throwing shit at the wall (on purpose or by accident) yields brilliant innovation or crap-ass walls.

Thanks for stopping by James. Always good to see you because we know you lurk. I will say this: If Google keeps this up, tools like @SEOSnack will be at the forefront of affiliate-hacks (you know who you are) moving from sticky seam to shining seam, looking for holes in the algo to spooge.

“or does Google know that SEOSnack is a rebroadcast engine or simply that it always rebroadcasts aimClear or that it always indexes aimClear associated with SEOSnack. Either way, is it still Google being influenced by Twitter in suggestions?” ~Marty

In this particular instance, I think so. There are several results on SEO Snack’s timeline for @aimclear. Also, I rebroadcast the twitter stream on the site. Granted, it’s js rendering, but… it’s pretty often that “via @aimclear” is in the account’s timeline and it’s indexed frequently.

I do agree that suggest is still a bit buggy, though. I’ve seen some very odd suggestions. I’m doing some playing around now to try to find some patterns, but none so far. We’ll see…

~James

That’s a good point, I’m not sure how it handles the historical data, but I presume it will remain indexed.

Twitter is still very basic in terms of the settings (and certainly privacy options), so I’m sure they will be improving the way things are done in the near future. The option that you suggested would just work the same way as the current Twitter ‘private tweets’ function would work in theory, because search engines would still have the historical data indexed. They would have to notify the search engines when you turned the option on, so your data was excluded I presume. Will be interesting to see how it is handled.