Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone reported that Twitter’s search volume has increased by 33% since April 2010 growing from 19 billion to 24 billion searches per month in June 2010.

Most of this traffic however, does not occur on the Twitter.com property itself, but rather through API requests from Twitter clients such as TweetDeck and Seesmic.  No one 3rd party delivers the main share of API calls.

In April 2010, Danny Sullivan spoke with Twitter’s director of search, Doug Cook, who said that at times, queries per day read 750 millions, and expects Twitter to have 1 billion searches per day in the coming months.

Walter Isaacson interviewed both Biz Stone and Evan Williams, founders of Twitter during the Aspen Ideas Festival, July 2010.

They stated the following metrics for Twitter are:

• 130 million registered users
• 70 million tweets per day
• 200 million users visit the site every day
• 800 million search queries a day

Biz describes Twitter as an “information network, to get information needed now”, rather than a social network.  Their positioning statement “what are you doing now” has changed over time to “what’s happening”.

Evan says that Twitter Search is still in its infancy.  Twitter messages are provided to Google, Bing and Yahoo to display within their search results, however even they say it’s a search problem that is yet to be solved.  Essentially search engines like Google use “freshness” as one of their signals to find the most relevant information, however since it is real time information, there is no history for the document so it is currently very difficult to deliver the best answer.

New functionality on Twitter allows users to tag tweets with location meta data such as venue name, neighbourhood or city.  The exciting thing about this aspect of Twitter if it is used widely enough is that it can provide users with extended search capability to find out what is happening around them.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land comments on search engines being accused of stealing content. It doesn’t make sense for any publisher to block Google or other search engines indexing website content.  The debate over Google showing content to users for free is negated by using the mechanisms in place to force audiences to register to access the full piece of content.

If you have good exclusive content, people are likely to pay for it.  Expecting people to pay for a news summary that is also on 20 other websites is a bad business model.

Danny also discusses the usefulness of real-time search results and the convergence of mobile and search.

Google has updated its News interface today, allowing many personalization features and sharing tools than previously including the ability to create your own news stream and allow others to subscribe to it.

Users are also able to choose more from one source of news provider and less from others by typing in the name of the provider.

So you think that being Google would mean you would have optimized websites for search engines?  Actually, no.  Unfortunately Google itself does not always follow SEO best practice and their own organic search listings suffer because of it.

Matt Cutts presents his own SEO Report Card on Google websites at SMX West.

Many new comers to SEO still have the belief that the Meta Keywords tag is important to search engine optimization and by entering your keywords in this tag, it helps with ranking in Google.  Essentially, Google completely ignores the Meta Keywords tag, so you do not need to worry about this tag.  Although, we often use the keyword meta tag for internal purposes only to record our chosen keyword for that page.  Some SEO professionals may ignore this tag altogether as they do not want to let the competition know what keywords they are aiming to rank well for.

Greg Grothaus, a Software Engineer from Google, explains why the duplicate content “penalty” is a myth.  When Google displays a message “in order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed”, it does not mean that your site has had a penalty applied against it. 

Penalties are only applied to those websites that are spamming search engines.  People that do such things usually have an intent to manipulate rankings and deceive users.

The majority of website owners however, do not have this intent and they accidently have duplicate content on their sites.  Duplicate content in itself is not search engine spam, but it can affect the rankings of your website within search engines.

Duplicate content can lead to PageRank dilution and inefficient crawling by search spiders.  Search spiders will go through the site and go “oh, there seems to be much of the same content here, so I’ll leave”.  Spiders will stop their crawling and indexing of the site  which means that lower level pages of the website often get missed by the spider.

Greg offers some suggestions on how to remove duplicate content including 301 Redirects and rel=canonical meta tag.  He also discusses the impact of the same content that is published across multiple domains.

When I speak with some clients, they are aware that Google and other search engines pay attention to the frequency in which a website or blog is being updated. Regular updates on a website is a signal to Google that a website is active, however, ultimately the search engine appreciates original, unique content that offers a different perspective to a topic, rather than content being a regurgitation. With this in mind, it is important to create content that adds value to people by solving a problem or providing new insight.  You do not need to jump on the content duplication bandwagon, just to reach a number of posts or articles per day (unless that is the business model you are seeking).

Not specifically about SEO, Micheal Arrington (TechCrunch) and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media) discuss the ongoing battle between web corporates such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing and Facebook and Twitter.  The real discussion is about visionary innovation versus me-too products and services.  Tim’s mantra at O’Reilly is “create more value than you capture” which ultimately creates loyal customers and profitable businesses.

Barry Schwartz from Rusty Brick, a web development company, delivers an update about Google’s Caffeine Indexing Infrastructure, changes to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing launching social search features and more.

There are so many ways that an audience searches for information.  Vanessa Fox is an expert in acquiring customers through the organic search channel.  She provides some tips on how businesses can be found within local and international search media.