Google has just announced that it is teaming up with Twitter so that Tweets will be shown alongside search results on keyword searches in Google.

The idea is to provide Google users with up to date and relevant information about their search topic, from individuals, or even friends, who have experience of the same topic.

For example, if you were to search “theme parks in Spain”, Google will pull Tweets from Twitter where users have made relevant comments perhaps naming the best Spanish theme parks, or maybe comments about specific theme parks or perhaps just locations of theme parks. The key benefit of this is that due to the nature of Twitter and the fact that people are constantly making comments, the Tweets may be more up to date than any other source of information on the net, and as they may come from a user’s friends, can be more personal and likely have more impact.

Google’s “Social Search” is another new product which will scan a user’s social profile i.e. the social networking sites they use, for relevant information that will then be displayed at the bottom of search results. Similar to the inclusion of Tweets, this will help give users a personalized and more relevant search experience. The only downside to this at present is that it will only be able to draw information from social networking sites which have open access to their networks i.e. not Facebook. Social search is being rolled out in “Google Labs” during the next two weeks.

Google has also been working on it’s new search engine algorithm update, Google Caffeine, which aims to improve the speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of Google search. Although it hasn’t yet been officially integrated, the developer pre-beta version is available to use and test. Try Google caffeine here.

Here are the findings of a recent test which was designed to see how it faired in three specific areas:

1) SPEED
We ran 10 random keyword searches including “last minute holidays”, “car repairs Norwich” and “Halloween costumes” side-by-side in the old version of Google and Google Caffeine. Out of these 10, only 2 of the searches were quicker on Caffeine. Caffeine’s average search time was 0.216 seconds, but the old version was 0.183. In reality, the time taken for search results was not noticeably different.

2) ACCURACY
On “car repairs Norwich” the search results were identical, except for the inclusion of Google Maps as the first result in “Caffeine”. On a search for “best Christmas bargains” there seemed to be more of a noticeable difference in the results, with “Caffeine” seeming to prioritize results from sites focusing on actually helping to find Christmas bargains, rather than those trying to sell Christmas bargains. Again it was hard to find any big differences overall, but “Caffeine” does seem to place the results you would most likely be interested in at the top of the search results which is the general idea!

3) VOLUME
The number of results returned by each version was very different. For example, a search on the word “aliens” returns 5,550,000 results on old Google, but 43,300,000 on Caffeine.

To conclude, only very subtle changes, but perhaps as time progresses the difference will be more marked. Here is a really easy SEO tool to compare caffeine results yourself.

Gary Collins, CEO at Status Media, a specialist online advertising agency, based in Norwich, UK, commented, “We’ve noticed quite a few changes in Google organic rankings recently with sites regularly changing positions of late. Usually these changes are in favour of our clients because we are using highly relevant link building and content building strategies which seem to work in harmony with the Google algorithm.”

Clearly, search engine optimisation and organic ranking strategy are much debated subjects with SEO professionals closely watching Google’s every move. It seems that most people in the industry agree on a few things;

1) Try to gain good quality, relevant inbound links
2) Make your content useful, relevant, search engine friendly and interesting and make lots of it! – There’s a good chance people will link to good quality content and after all Google’s job is to return useful content to the user.

Of course, as well as search engine marketing, there are other online advertising channels such as CPA networks which often use banner advertising, sub-sites, email marketing and co-registration techniques to generate sales and online enquiries. Due to the variety of different options available a specialist digital agency such as Status Media can be useful in building an online strategy that delivers the desired results.

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