Is "Texting" Making Its Way Into SEO?

[Allen Graves]

I study website statistics for a couple of hours every single day.

Lately I have noticed that there are a lot of searches for terms that are normally reserved for text messages.

For instance, I just saw a search for, "How 2 Get Ur BF Back."

Amazingly, Google appears to have understood what the searcher was looking for because they took her to a page entitled, "How to Get Your Boyfriend Back - 5 Steps to Get Him Back"

Is it time to start optimizing our pages for the "text generation?"

AL

[dsmpublishing]

I think it might just be. When i was doing some research recently for some niches that i had planned i noticed the same thing. I was considering doing the same with my websites. let me know if you do it and how successful it is.

[Alican Yenidogan]

Allen,

You are %100 right. Google keeps records of most used abbreviations and parse the search term to understand if that search term fits the abbreviation.

The point here is, you will not need to optimize your page for this if you don't have abbreviations in your website like bf or gf etc..

Google gets more clever every single day. Hard to keep track of everything..

This will help webmasters in many ways:

Spam websites that use abbreviations to receive hits will no longer benefit from Google.

A website that doesn't contain any abbreviation will be ranking in the same spot as they used to be for the full word search term.

Alican

[Thomas]

Originally Posted by Allen Graves

Is it time to start optimizing our pages for the "text generation?"

God help the English language!

[Michael Taylor]

Isn't latent semantic indexing a wonderful thing?

Latent semantic analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Phil Weslow]

Thanks for the share. I would have never guessed to consider txt style abrv's in my keywrd analysis!

[Davegfx]

definitely a very interesting point, especially if you're marketing to the tweeny-early 20's set I'd imagine.

[matthewd]

Wow, that's pretty crazy.

It makes sense that some people would search like
this although I never would have thought of it... I
don't even text like that though.

I might have to experiment a bit and see what I can
do with some "text" type phrases though.

[Allen Graves]

LOL, Chris.

Another term I am seeing a lot lately in our article page hit search terms is "ur" (your).

AL

[laurelwachtel]

Interesting point, I'm hoping that Google has been optimized to cater to such abbreviations now so that when your purchasing your long tailed keywords for PPC, google automatically finds the abbreviation to fit with the keywords you've purchased.
I wouldn't think that you'd need to optimize your pages for this even if abbreviations relating to texting are not listed in your tags for your SEO. Nice post!

[Jared Alberghini]

Very interesting observation AL,

Similar to misspelled keywords, however these terms are misspelled ON PURPOSE.

Anyone have any links to some research about results for these text keywords?

[Allen Graves]

Here are the results of what I have been seeing:

You do not need to change your keywords for these phrases. Google will automatically do it for you!

For instance, take a look at these two search result pages:

is my bf cheating? - Google Search

is my boyfriend cheating? - Google Search

You'll see that the results are very similar on both of these pages, but one thing that you realize immediately is that "bf" is nowhere to be found on either of these results pages.

This is similar across all of the popular abbreviated terms, and as someone mentioned above, this will help the teenage/young adult websites tremendously!

SO - If you have one of these sites and have been doing SEO for the abbreviated terms however, this may hurt you and you should think about doing some tests to see if you should make some changes to your web page keywords.

The initial looks of things seem to point to NOT using the abbreviations in your webpages - at least not in the title and the main key points on your pages.

But as we always say, test, test, test. You never know for sure until you test it out for yourself. And then keep testing as things are changing quickly (and for the better) in the search engines lately.

I don't believe these are being searched on a phone too much, at least not the ones coming through to my sites...none of which are teen/young adult related.

Allen Graves

[Roy Carter]

Allen

Very interesting. So will we (and should we) soon be seeing PPC ads using txt type abbreviations? Hmmm!

[MikeWords]

OMG! gr8 observation that every SEO'r should be considering.

[Allen Graves]

Originally Posted by Roy Carter

Allen

Very interesting. So will we (and should we) soon be seeing PPC ads using txt type abbreviations? Hmmm!

I don't think so - it seems like (right now, at least, Google is converting them frm abbreviations to real words and not the other way around.

Hmmm...if theres a PPC person out there that wants to check on bid prices and maybe a quick, preliminary test, that'd be great!

Suggestions:

bf - boyfriend
gf - girlfriend
ur - your, you're or you are

[Traffic-Bug]

Good find! Never thought of it myself!

[hotlinkz]

IMHO...

The marriage of text messaging and Internet is ready to go into "honeymoon mode"!

Check out these survey findings.

A recent Forrester Research states that 35% of all cellphone users send or receive text messages. The 18 to 24 year old market represents 76% of the users.

Popularity of textmessaging is so pervasive in the US, that it resulted in more than 158 billion messages sent in 2006, a huge 95% increase over 2005, according to a survey by CTIA.

Increasingly, adults and businesses are doing more and more texting. Airlines, brand marketers, retailers and financial institutions are already using text messaging for business communications as well as in mobile marketing campaigns.

Invariably, this will begin to spill over onto the Internet in the form of services and applications.

Excellent opportunities ahead for those willing to ride a cutting-edge trend.

[metaphors]

It definately is i just saw a wso earlier this week that was selling a marketing method that revolved solely around this trend. I just don't remember who the OP was.

[George Wright]

Originally Posted by Thomas

God help the English language!

Thomas, Don't you mean, "OMG SOS Eng Lang?"

GW

[Sandor Verebi]

Hi Allen,

Your observation is interesting. Thanks for sharing.

You wrote: "But as we always say, test, test, test. You never know for sure until you test it out for yourself. And then keep testing as things are changing quickly (and for the better) in the search engines lately."

You are right, we do not can afford to ourselves not to test everything. And as we may see Google will be wiser and wiser everyday.

Maybe we can profit from this kind of changing, if we keep our hands on Google's artery.

Take care,

Sandor

[Buildingfutures]

Its not just 'the texting generation' but the entire generation of new myspace users, and people with just poor poor grammar skills.

I think its amazing most kids nowadays don't have a grasp on how to write and type properly, mainly because they just use 'text' and 'chat' speak, since its so much easier on their little brains.

[Nathan Hangen]

Shhhhh, don't tell anyone!