Perhaps the best examples of real-time content are Twitter and Facebook. Think of it: every tweet, retweet and post is content that you are authoring and sharing in real time. You share an opinion or post a question to your friends and followers and often, you’ve got a response even before you can hit “refresh.” These real-time conversations produce real-time content. But in and of itself, the conversations on Twitter and many other social networks are not innately SEO-friendly.
Here are a couple of quick ways to help you optimize this kind of content.
- Add hashtags and keywords to your tweets and updates. Using hashtags (the “#” on Twitter) is a smart strategy. Hashtags organize your tweets into groups or strings, and gather the content associated with that hashtag into one conversation, allowing people to follow a particular discussion, event, or topic (i.e., #smmeasure). You can optimize your tweets by adding relevant keywords, just as you would to other online content. For example, I would add the hashtag #seo for a tweet about SEO, or #pr for a tweet about public relations or press releases. (Note: Be cautious of how you use a hashtag in your tweet; make sure it’s relevant to your tweet and/or industry.)
- Collect your content and republish it into a blog post, or to a relevant page on your website. Don’t let great conversations live only on Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, for example, you should take note of well-received tweets and replies about your company and your brand. Then take those tweets and use them in a blog post. Or, use those tweets or Facebook comments as testimonials on various pages of your corporate website. Repurposing your content makes it more visible, more shareable, and helps greatly in your SEO efforts.
Whatever content you publish, you want it to be searchable on search engines, and turning real-time content into searchable content on search engines takes outside-the-box thinking. If you have additional ideas, please comment below or tweet me @Marketwire or via Facebook. And be sure to join OUR real-time conversation every week during our #smmeasure chat, Thursdays at noon ET.
