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Google Buzz and SEO - Search Engine Optimization via Google Buzz?
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Google Buzz is new from Google. It's sort of Twitter meets Gmail. If you use Gmail (or even if you don't), Google Buzz is not just another social media platform. It also might be a great way to influence your SEO rank on Google. Here is a quick blog post on Google Buzz and some thoughts about its implications for effective SEO.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: February 10, 2010
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Contents:
Google Buzz: What is It?
Google Buzz is both the latest addition to Google's Gmail product as well as a new social networking platform. Announced to great fanfare on the Google blog (post, here), Google buzz aims to do a number of things. There were five in the official announcement:
- Autobuzz - rather than manually having to follow people, Google Buzz will automatically suggest people to follow (and for people to follow you) from your Gmail account (most frequent email partners).
- Videos / multimedia integration - easy-to-use URL posting and video or picture integration.
- Public / private sharing - if posts are shared publicly, Google promises that they will also be indexed in real-time on the Google search engine.
- Inbox integration. Quick and easy integration with the Google inbox.
For SEO practitioners, the most interesting aspects are 1) the 'auto-following' - this suggests that you might be able to leverage Gmail to grow your social network more rapidly than you can with Twitter, since Google Buzz has a built-in viral characteristic because it allows autofollowing, and 2) the implicit priority that Google Buzz will receive on the Google search engine. Twitter already has had to fight a war against Twitter Spam, and Google Buzz will no doubt have a similar problem. But used well, you may be able to use Google Buzz to enhance your presence across important search engine terms that matter to you. Just don't be a spammer!
In sum, just as with most SEO, figure out your target keywords and 'embed' them in your Buzz posts.
Real-time Google Buzz: SEO Opportunities
For the past several years, Google has been moving towards 'blended' or 'real-time' search. This means that the search results page can have not only paid AdWords ads and organic / free results but also images, videos, and now Twitter and news posts. News and Twitter posts present big SEO opportunities:
- People may read your Twitter and/or news posts and thereby go directly to your website and/or get interested in you and your company;
- Google may interpret links from these posts to your website as having some marginal impact on your PageRank.
- The posts themselves may show up on Google searches and at least temporarily give you some SEO visibility, for free, for your target keywords.
Buzz becomes another vehicle to get your word out, and as with news, a quick way to climb to the top of your target keywords. But as is always true think 'good content' that real people will really want to use as well as 'keyword content' that can get you to the top by keywords.
Will Google Favor Google Buzz for SEO?
Google is in many ways the Microsoft of today. It's near monopoly in search and its huge profits give it the power to link products into very attractive packages plus the deep pockets necessary to give products away for free. So Buzz is linked to Gmail, and Google frankly acknowledges that public Buzz posts will be indexed on the Google search engine. That certainly encourages one to use Buzz even if (at least for now) Google is also indexing Twitter posts.
But take a look at video. Youtube video posts are already heavily favored on Google searches (another SEO opportunity), and favored over alternative video services. So a cynic might predict that over time, Buzz will out rank Twitter in terms of real-time search. All the more reason to Buzz if you want to dominate Google for SEO.
There are some neat features in Buzz - especially the auto-following - which might make it a more useful business platform than Twitter. Buzz is certainly an SEO opportunity that is worth a look. So start buzzing!
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