So as many bloggers have noted Google have now announced that they will incorporate tweets in real time into their searches. I guess they were never going to leave it all up to Microsoft who earlier announced the same deal for the Bing search engine.

It will be very interesting to see exactly how the tweets will be incorporated – and particularly how it will compare to Twitter’s own search facility. Presumably Google will be cross-referencing as much data as possible to show results that are relevant from a wider perspective ? Microsoft have the head start and it will be very interesting indeed to see how the two giants compare.

This could really change the face of “search” – since with Twitter there is a lot of “signal velocity” and there should be enough signals to make out a meaningful melody amongst the noise (ah tweeting was such a good term for it!) The search engines will start to pick out the landing domains and URL’s in people tweets which gives us yet more reasons to be chirping.

Better start tweet-deck up… happy tweeting everyone.

We’ve been offering Search Engine Optimization to our clients for more than 12 months now, with some pretty good results (e.g. ‘holiday accommodation in Sitges’ for Outlet4Spain). So Simon and I thought it was about time we applied some of our new-found SEO mojo to our own site. And that’s where the trouble started, because there’s no easy way to optimize for ‘joined up thinking’. Let me explain…

When a client comes to us for help with SEO, we ask about their business. Once we know what they do, it’s usually pretty easy for us to build a list of key words and phrases to target. But, when we started keyword analysis for our own business it became pretty obvious things weren’t so clear cut.

In the olden days (somewhere about 1995) it would have been easy – we would have been optimized our site for the search term ‘web designers’. But the explosive growth of the sector and the desire for companies to carve out their own niche within it  has muddied the waters immensely.

Whilst we still call ourselves ‘web designers’, optimizing for the term increasingly seems to be bringing in the sub-£2000 first-time site brigade. It also misses the core of what we do – working with a company to shape, build, maintain and develop their web presence over the long term. We’re web strategists, we’re user-experience experts, we’re SEO specialists, email marketeers and UNIX hosting gurus. Optimizing for any one of these dilutes the  big picture – and devalues the ‘one stop shop’ approach we believe is so vitally important to making the most out of the web.

So, if anyone knows how to optimize for ‘joined up thinking in web development’ we’d love to hear from you. Until then we’ll just have to press on with the keyword-rich blog entries