Web indexing has come a long way since its birth, but the most rapid change has occurred recently with the global need for instant news and content relevant to the moment. Sites like Digg and Twitter are complete products of this. They emerged out of a mess of content attempting to display information on trending topics in real time. Their usefulness is directly a result of their ability to perform this. The demand for content sorted and displayed according to “the now.” Will only become more widespread. We saw it happen with the demand for location based search results and it is happening again with real time news.
What does this mean for those of us who feed our families by ranking websites? It means now more than ever we should be on our game. One thing you should be doing every single day is watching the trend sites like Digg, and Twitter. See what people are saying within your industry. Read the brand new articles pertaining to your content online. Look for emerging nuances, themes, and terms that could start to trend within search results.
Yahoo recently published an article saying that the hit song “Like a G6″ by hip hop band Far East Movement had produced a surge in search results related to finding out what a G6 was. The truth is a G6 doesn’t exist. G4 personal jets have become a major status symbol in Holywood and when coming up with lyrics for their song the band decided to use the term G6 because by their thinking, if a G6 existed it would be the only thing cooler than a G4.
Those who recognized this strange but major search trend immediately enjoyed traffic as a result of carefully catering content to those looking to find out what the heck a G6 was.
So next time you’re sitting up late at night thinking about how to blow up your sites with unique visitors…. remember the G6.
