Getting to (Near) Real-time with Your SEO

Real-time search engine optimization is not about trying to rank in what are known as the niche “real-time search engines” (e.g. Twitter Search, Scoopler, Tweetmeme), since these engines command such a small silver of the total market share for search. Thus, when practicing “real-time” SEO, one’s attention must be placed squarely on Google (and secondarily on Yahoo and Bing of course).

Trying to get to real-time with your Google SEO efforts is an elusive goal to say the least. True, Google has advanced to the point that it can index and rank a new page in minutes, but this cannot (and should not) be relied upon, nor can the resulting rank be expected to be stable. Google often folds Google News and/or Google Blog Search results into its web search results via a “onebox”—providing yet another, “back door” way of getting into Google’s main web results fast. But for a vast number of queries, such oneboxes do not appear.

Here’s the rub: you have to run your experiments serially. After all, there is only one Google and you must wait for your website changes or additions to appear in the search results. Thus, there can be no “multivariate testing” with SEO. Your web pages must be crawled, indexed, and evaluated—and it must be done before the content can rank. And all this takes time. That’s not to say you shouldn’t strive for as real-time as possible.

With the help of large scale automation, rapid feedback and numerous iterations—you can get to NEAR real-time with your optimization efforts. Learn how.

• Making your CMS malleable and your internal linking structure fluid—to drive continuous improvement through your website
• Using past performance as a predictor of future performance
• Leveraging third-party tools and tools supplied by the search engines themselves for rapid feedback
• Applying data from one engine to inform decisions on actions to take with regards to another engine
• Crawler activity as a bellwether before your SEO work is reflected in the results
• Anticipating which keywords are high performers before you have the tracking data to back it up
• Feeding your Long Tail SEO keyword list fast—by utilizing Google AdWords “broad match” and the 10,000 per campaign maximum for negative keywords
• Automating the evaluation of your SEO and the application of optimizations—to scale across even the largest of sites