Sure, you use Twitter as a social media tool, but have you ever considered it as an SEO research tool? No? Well watch and learn this week to find out how you can harness it in a whole new way.

Now that social signals (particularly Twitter) are becoming more important in the engines, they can help you pinpoint when a keyword is going to trip the 'Query Deserves Freshness' switch. If you can figure that out, you can gain a big competitive advantage by publishing fresh content in a targeted, timely manner.

Rand mentions a couple of tools for using Twitter to target and time your content. One is Trendistic, which helps you see trends in Twitter; another is our very own Blogscape Social Media Monitoring prototype (inside PRO Labs), which monitors and analyzes a few million key content providers across the fresh web, including over 250,000 influential Twitter accounts.