Friday 21 January 2011

How Can Twitter Improve Your SEO?

What do you do when you come across a social media site with over 190 million users and 65 million daily posts? Turn it into a website promotion tool, that's what.

Twitter links are nofollow, but that doesn't mean that you can't use the social network for website promotion. On the one hand, many SEO experts say that Twitter isn't a ranking factor. However, Twitter pages directly influence Google's SERPs and thus may be a major force in search engine visibility.

Whether or not Twitter directly affects the SERPs, here are Twitter SEO tactics that are worth checking out.


The Twitter Website Traffic Benefit

After creating new posts on your blog or site, it only makes sense to tweet about it. You'll be surprised to find how many users search Twitter for useful information or tips. Moreover, you can't expect to receive millions of site visitors simply by posting a link to your site. Choose interesting text for better website promotion. A boring title won't get you anywhere. Something like "10 Tips to Increase Twitter Followers" may generate more clicks.

This doesn't really affect your search engine rankings, but it's an effective Twitter website traffic strategy.


Using Twitter for Link Building

By having a large group of Twitter followers, more will see your new posts and announcements. Here's how to do your Twitter SEO.

First off, for effective website promotion it's imperative that you have a large group of followers. Follow people who share the same interests as you and those within your niche. Some 30% of the users you follow will follow back. Those who are convinced that you should be followed on Twitter are surely interested in your latest updates. Yes, Twitter is really a great PR and website promotion tool.

Furthermore, it's highly likely that your followers will write about your new content in their blogs. This translates to link building. Plus, did you know that Google doesn't index shortened URLs? Instead, they index the actual URLs. Thus, you get even more website promotion opportunities.

There's this useful Twitter SEO tool/website called TweetMeme that lets you check the number of users that have posted tweets with a link to your site. TweetMeme can also tell which of your posts have been picked up and retweeted by the general public.


Important Things to Remember

When doing your Twitter SEO strategies, remember that all your tweets shouldn't be about your own website and content. This is bad for your website promotion and would turn people off. No one wants to follow a conceited, I'm-so-great prima donna. Besides, if your tweets would be all about your products and services, they would look spammy. Post engaging and useful information, answer and ask questions, tweet interesting facts, and send messages that your followers will find valuable.


Optimize Your Twitter Page

This is another Twitter SEO tactic that'll help increase your followers and improve your brand reputation. The major search engines all include Twitter account pages on their SERPs. Here are website promotion tips on how to get your profile on the front page of search engine results.

1. Consider a username that's relevant to your niche or your business. Your username can affect your website promotion since its part of your page's URL and title tag.

2. Choose a relevant account name. This will further boost your Twitter website traffic, since the account name is also part of the page title. The account name should be different from the username.

3. Promote your Twitter profile page by building links to it. To boost Twitter website traffic, paste a link to your account on your site's footer or other prominent areas.

4. Since your bio serves as the meta description tag, choose your text wisely and keep website promotion in mind.

More importantly, Twitter provides benefits that are far different from the advantages of search engine optimization. So, before building your SEO campaign via this social network, make sure to achieve Twitter SEO benefits first.


Tweet Optimization

Optimizing your tweets also helps in website promotion. Your tweets help your profile, content and brand gain more exposure.

A tweet's title tag is made up of the username of the account sending out the tweet and the first 30 characters. Another Twitter SEO tip is to place the keywords in the post's first few words.

When retweeting, there are Twitter SEO techniques you can follow. For instance, it's better to place the "RT@username" at the end of the tweet so that you'll have plenty of room to place the keywords in the tweet. Also, limit your tweets to 120 characters so that there will be space when other users add the RT@username. Otherwise, some parts of your post might get chopped off.

Twitter SEO tactics can be easy to implement. This social media website has a lot of potential for search engine optimization. Explore its website promotion benefits, discover new website promotion methods, and make your own experiments.


Many thanks to Matt Hodgson of NeedMoreHits for the content of this article. If you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

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Have a great weekend!

4 comments:

  1. Hi Derek,

    Very insightful post about Twitter. I know for a fact that Social Media has some sort of affect to your Search Engine Rankings.

    I've found that sending tweets back and forth with people who have targeted followers get you quality traffic to the link posted on your profile.

    I will go research more on Matt Hodgson's stuff!

    Thanks for the tips!

    Yoichi

    ReplyDelete
  2. Although twitter gives nofollow backlinks. It helps to get the traffic & visitors. So always post the useful information & stay active on the social networking sites. It will help you to get benefits from the social networking sites like twitter, facebook etc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. These are basics of promoting content using twitter. In one of my recent posts I reviewed 5 application to manage tweets from desktop also I impressed by of friend of mine talking about: Use Twitter to better manage crisis.
    I think every newbie has to knew this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Twitter can help a lot in terms of SEO. It can be used for link building and also it can also benefit a website by providing traffic.

    ReplyDelete

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