Do you follow businesses on Twitter? Or are you a business on Twitter? Either way, you follow your favorite businesses to get real-time notifications about the latest hapennings and special offers or you promote your own business to connect with supporters and share news. We have talked about the positive role Twitter plays in search engines’ algorthims, which determine what websites are the most relevant – meaning, in large part, which sites are most liked by fellow internet users (people searching and shopping on the internet).

MG Siegler of TechCrunch talked to Twitter’s Adam Bain about newly promoted tweets:

“It turns out that on Twitter, users are already interacting with ads on a level that most would be surprised by,” Bain says. He notes that while traditional online display ads only get a click-through rate of something like 0.05 percent, some Promoted Tweets are seeing engagement in the double-digit percentages. “Engagement matters,” Bain says.

“Users want to be updated when brands have updates or exclusive content. The one problem we’ve heard from users is that when there is exclusive content or deals, there’s a chance they might miss them,” he says. “If the brand tweets at 9 AM, and the person comes in at 9:15 AM, they’ll miss them.”

“Resonance is also really important to us. This is about the realtime opportunity. And that expires fairly quickly,” Bain goes on, saying that in the ideal scenario, the things brands tweet will be “good, not loud”.

Bain says that the realtime aspect of the product is also vital to how Twitter places them. Because hot topics that people are Tweeting about can happen at any time, Twitter needs to be able to talk to a brand and quickly place an appropriate Tweet. “It’s realtime marketing at scale,” he says. “That’s the whole value proposition of the platform.”

We know positive reviews help local businesses by acting as recommendations or referrals for internet users considering purchasing a product or service. The more positive reviews a business gets, the easier it becomes for search engines to notice that business and consider it a relevant search result for users (consumers). Click on this link to read up on how reviews effect your marketing strategy. The post also discusses the impact fake reviews made by a competitor in the moving industry had on a number of moving companies. Read up on that story here.

Search engines like accurate, thorough content and they like fresh content. Beyond meta data, the more indicators that point to your business (outside links, reviews, “likes”, tweets, regularly updated content) the more important and valid search engines consider you to be and therefore the more likely you will have a strong internet presence in organic search. So vehicles like your website, blog and social media where you can endlessly update your site and/or profiles as often as possible are a great way to reach potential customers vis a vis search engine results and customers directly if they keep up with your sites on their own.

All that being said, you can see how Twitter plays an important role in “talking” to the search engines. It’s a place where new content appears in real time. The more, the merrier! Check out this blog post that walks you through the steps of a basic Twitter strategy for your business. Recently, an app called Breath Bird for Twitter was released for people who cannot use their fingers and who have problems speaking. I haven’t used it but I think the concept is great and there should probably be more apps created for handicapped people. Learn more about the app here.

Google held their annual I/O Developer Conference last week in San Francisco. I previously mentioned in another post that they paired up with Foursquare to test NFC technology. They also unveiled the Chromebook — the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. Chrome OS is set to be delivered to the masses this summer when the first Chromebooks become available.

The Chromebook is Google’s second attempt at a notebook, which will undoubtedly be compared and contrasted to the Macbook and lest we fail to mention – Microsoft. MG Siegler says in his post on TechCrunch

Make no mistake, Chromebooks are a direct attack on Microsoft. Thanks to Chrome, Google Search, Gmail, etc, Google has all the data they need to know that people spend the vast majority of their time on computers these days in the web browser. So why not just cut out the middle man? Microsoft.

The cost of the Chromebook will be $429 or $499 depending on if you get WiFi-only or WiFi/3G.

Google says that “Chromebooks are built and optimized for the web … So you get a faster, simpler and more secure experience”.

Some of the Chromebook features:

Structured markup, also known as semantic HTML, is a way of using HTML markup to present more details about the nature of elements present within a website. If this sounds confusing, let me explain plainly how it applies to your business.

Structured markup is an extension of standard HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). HTML contains information about your website that tells a browser (like IE or Firefox) how to show it to a user. It tells a browser what text will look like, where the text will go, what size an image will be, how links will function, etc.

Semantic HTML uses the same language to assign more meaning to the attributes of a website. Using “tags”, a web designer can categorize pieces of content as addresses, recipes, product information, and much, much more. Google uses information from some of these tags when presenting search results to users who are looking for products or businesses. The conversation goes something like this:

Website: Hey Googlebot, this is L’Amourita Pizza. Our address is 123 Main St, Albuquerque, NM. Our phone number is 206-555-1234.

Googlebot: Thanks, website. I’ll make sure that information is stored in my database correctly and shown to searchers.

It is important to note that Google’s official stance is that structured markup will not boost your rankings. However, it will help your CTR (Clickthrough Rate). Those familiar with PPC will understand this metric, which is how often users will click on the link to your site when it appears in their search results. Sites with richer, correctly displayed information will receive more clicks and more business.

I had the pleasure of attending an Austin Internet Marketing Meetup on the subject hosted by Homeaway. I can’t say enough about what a great host Homeaway was, not only for letting us use their attractive space for a free event, but especially for the great beer and appetizers they provided attendees. The speaker was Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer for BestBuy.com, who gave a really great presentation and explained how the semantic web is especially powerful for those who sell products online.

E-Commerce websites can take advantage of Google’s Custom Search technology, which allows website owners to tailor a user’s search experience within their own website. You can create higher-level classifications for product information, including reviews and pricing. An example is shown below: