Commentary
Meerkat, Google SEO: Search Engine Rank For Savvy Marketers
- by Marty Weintraub , Op-Ed Contributor, July 27, 2015
Meerkat is a popular mobile app that enables users to broadcast live video streaming over the Web. Notably missing from the mix are obvious ways to quickly index in Google through search engine optimization. Let's look at some optimization techniques SEO that Meerkatapp.co provides, and some strategies that just may get your live feed into Google's index.
Meerkat is dabbling with live "Meerkat native SEO." You can search using Google's Web site: operator "site:meerkatapp.co" to find a list of people streaming
and use Google's search tools to restrict your query to the past hour sorted by date. You will see the most recent Meerkat.co content that Google has indexed.
The authority that Meerkat has in google.com results allows most pages to index quickly, linking to live feeds. Other Google results point to feeds that have ended recently. How Google prioritizes Meerkat query results needs further testing, but the point is that Meerkat is testing and trying to push out live, indexable pages for ongoing feeds.
If the user discovers a feed that has ended, it will begin to replay after a few seconds. Although it is not live, these indexed, archived feeds are of value to users and channel owners. Viewers may subscribe for later live feeds.
The title tags and Web page titles of these pages are all the same -- "Connect to Comment - Meerkat" -- which means that Meerkat does not customize these automatically generated pages based on each feed's content. Although it is clearly early in Meerkat's testing, when Meerkat begins to customize these pages to reflect actual content, the results may be useful to SEO practitioners.
Third-Party Site, Meerkat SEO
In a big way, Meerkat has ceded Google SEO for Meerkat live feeds to third-party Web site owners who are savvy enough to leverage their Meerkat data for SEO on their own Web site.
Meerkat.co has an embed function, which provides a Web page player for Meerkat
channel feed broadcasters to stream via normal webpages. So setting up a Meerkat embed player feed on a third-party Web page in an authoritative blog or site, immediately indexed by Google, can
yield short term SEO results. The more authoritative a Web page becomes, the faster it may index in google.com. A high-authority news Web site is an ideal place to embed a player to achieve SEO
ranking from Meerkat streams.
Consider setting up a blog post or Web page to serve as a gateway through Google to a page that is indexed through SEO for an embedded Meerkat feed player. Optimize the
Meerkat page semantics for "Live" + "Topic," link build to the page and develop it over time. Google searches make that it easy to discover that page. Some of the time the feed will actually be live.
Other times you can build audience for the next broadcast. Google searchers will find the feed live when it's actually live.
Twitter SEO For Google Searches
The Web site's authority ranking in Google helps Twitter profiles become indexed by the search engine within minutes, which makes the social site a great place to expand on using SEO for Meerkat streams. Google uses a fire hose from Twitter, as a result of their most recent Twitter/Google data deal.
Typing into Google "site:twitter.com" returns restricted
results since they have live streamed the past hour. You will see some tweets that occurred within minutes, with links that point to the Meerkat broadcast. In other words, Tweets that are about live
Meerkat broadcasts index in Google. This is perhaps the most real-time implementation of SEO for live Meerkat streams.
Meerkat's tight integration with
Twitter makes searching hashtags using Twitter's internal search engine easier. Anywhere we search can be considered a "Search Engine," and Twitter is no exception. New tweets are almost immediately
visible in Twitter so keep in mind that "SEO" for Meerkat also includes clever use of hot, active hashtags and other keywords.
Meerkat and other live feed apps are likely
here to stay. With Twitter's Periscope app release, Meerkat has already gone larger into Facebook integration. As the live feed app space evolves, look for how each app chooses to create mechanisms
integrating with search.
