Twitter Trending Topics are a very cool thing and it is interesting to see how information spreads through Twitter.  An example that’s relevant today is the #IranElection.  But if you look at the current results (and since Twitter search is real time you may or may not see it) there are quite a number of ReTweets very often.

So It makes me think about how much is something really a “trend”.  So that means you need to define trend or at least define it for yourself or the twitterverse.  For me I’m more interested in seeing real content that is relevant to me.  So that means true conversations and discussion of a topic.  And a retweet as helpful and nice as they are, are not nessecarily real content when they reach a mass large enough to be a trend.  So I would like to see an option to the Trending Topic search that removes retweeting from the results.

Since retweets are not standard I’m sure it wouldn’t be perfect but I figure that by removing tweet results that start with “RT ” or “retweet ” or ones that have ” via @” near the tail of the tweet could constitute a retweet.  I’m sure there are a few others as odd apps like to come up with their stnadards (like “RT:”)  So another means either in conjunction or by itself is to remove tweets that are 95% similar to other tweets.  If you said the same thing as someone else then that data is not nessecarily as important in most cases.

Now I don’t propose that this option be a default unless it’s perfected but that like I’ve said that it is at least an option to help weed out the results to get decent content.  Since in the end the real reason to search is to find.

Previously I spoke about the importance of proper site navigation and touched on the usefulness of search with respect to your own site. A very key piece to search is website content. If you don’t have proper copy on your pages, useful alt and title attributes on images and links you won’t be receiving much traffic. Along with all the copy you have, you really need to be concerned about what you say and how it is said. What keywords are you using? Are you using the words and terminology of your audience?

I often see sites that use keywords that they use themselves, and are not of the language used by their consumers. But one clear important rule is to find out what vocabulary your visitors use find your product or site. Whatever product you are selling there are a plethora of words that surround any niche any many that are different between the novice and experienced customers. Learning how someone might first try to find information about your product or what they might mistake it for or even different ways that they use it that are not exactly the ways it was sold for can be searched when they are not specifically searching for your exact product. A prime example of this is dryer sheets, I found by accident when trying to figure out how to clean up animal fur (I have a cat and two rabbits) that dryer sheets can be used to remedy the problem. Then along the way I found that Bounce had jumped on this concept and has this type of content in their site now (but it’s in flash so it’s very hard to find unfortunately.) These additional uses play into how your audience sees your product, how they search for it specifically or stumble upon it on accident.

Proper keywords need to be flowed with care into your copy so that it feels natural and without force so the user will get the picture naturally. They can exist in titles, paragraph descriptions, tag attributes, headers (your H1 and H2 tags). if you don’t know enough about these, learn a bit or find someone to help you out.

Please don’t just start jamming synonyms willy-nilly into your pages, think about your language, how it sounds aloud, how it appears next to other imagery and copy. Don’t forget you’re trying to get someone interested in what you have to say and sell.

In this post I used different words for keywords: vocabulary, copy, words, terminology, content, language
As well as different words for visitors: audience, users, customers, consumers
Along with other keywords that will drive users to this post: synonyms, traffic, website, site, links, search
These were all thought about to provide enough searchable copy that will drive consumers to this post.