First came the news of Bing’s deal with Twitter. Then Google announced a similar deal. $100 million in Twitter’s bank account later and we’ve got an interesting direction change in search engines.

The new rage is real-time searches. This is one of the effects caused by the Twitter storm. No other site can reveal what everyone’s talking about, in real time.

But how are Bing and Google going to integrate Twitter content into their searches? And how are 140 character bits going to become valuable results for users?

Today there are over 5 billion tweets, and steadily growing. So if you think SEO is hard…getting your tweet to the top of search engines is not going to be any easier. It will all come down to retweets, mentions, and the # symbol. If these terms don’t mean anything to you, they soon will. You may need to go ahead and pull out Twitter for Dummies. (Or check out Twitter’s Getting Started Guide.)

This deal with the search engines kills the notion that Twitter is a trend. It is already a powerful tool for businesses, and in time it will become even more so. "How’s your SEO" and "Are you tweeting enough" will become synonymous. For customers, this is a great thing.

Twitter requires interactment. It requires conversation. It requires the human touch. A tweet needs retweets, and to get retweeted needs followers. And followers (most followers) are real people with thoughts, needs, and interests. Unless you’re satisfying your followers, don’t expect to show up high in tweet searches.