Using Twitter to Improve SEO
Of course you'd have to have been living under a rock for the last few years to not have heard of Twitter. While not quite as popular as Facebook it's certainly made a huge global impact. Nowadays practically anyone who has a business or wants to sell or promote something is already on Twitter and tweeting up a storm.
And doing so definitely helps. Google, Yahoo and Bing do certainly take your activity on social networks into account. So, a lot of activity on Twitter does result in slightly higher search engine rankings. This is what some highly regarded search engine gurus say. I've also had personal experience of this recently with one of my blogs. Even though I hadn't updated it for a long time, I noticed that I was getting a bit more search engine traffic to it. I suspect that this was due to my increased activity on my Twitter account linked to that blog URL.
As well as this direct effect, Twitter can confer other benefits for your site's SEO. Remember that improving your off-page SEO is all about getting links, preferably from highly ranked websites and blogs. And Twitter is a great way to connect with the owners of those sites. (It's probably the best, most targeted way of connecting with other people according to interests, location and other criteria, after all.)
Pretty much everyone with a successful blog has now joined Twitter. Merely by typing the niche keywords you're interested in into the search box you can find these people and follow them. Quite often they will follow you back. (You can get an idea if they will do so in advance by looking at the relative numbers of those they follow compared to those following them. If the ratio is about 1:1, they're likely to reciprocate.)
As well as following them, you can also comment on their blogs. Commenting is a good idea because it gets your site seen by lots of bloggers, even if it doesn't give you direct SEO benefit. Similarly, by tweeting about your subject of interest bloggers and webmasters will find and follow you. And having them comment on your blog is also good for SEO.
One phrase that is often repeated by SEO gurus is "content is king". This applies to Twitter also. So, when tweeting, keep offering up good content. Don't just use it to announce your blog posts, new pages and offers. It is a micro-blogging service, after all. So, try to write tweets that are catchy, informative and insightful in their own right.
And use keywords in your tweets whenever possible. Not only are people searching for keywords in Twitter like they do in Google, but the search giant itself is indexing your tweets. So you might get some visitors directly from there. And some of those may click on to your blogs and sites.
Remember that interacting, communicating and reciprocating are what Twitter is all about. You can build up a rapport with the people you're following and help promote their sites by retweeting their tweets. And they will often return the favour. So, you help each other get your blogs and sites seen by more and more people. Just the number of clicks off tweets and retweets should help lift your rankings a little since Google is factoring this information into its calculation of the quality of your site.
It is also taking note of your visitors' locations. So, if you get a lot of Twitter traffic from a particular city, then that should result in improved local search engine rankings. That's why when choosing people to follow you should keep searching for tweeps in your city. Add a hashtag as well. People tweet about their locations frequently, so the results are constantly changing.
For example if you search for #Perth, you see new tweets appearing every few minutes. Sure, a fair proportion of these are from radio stations and media organizations and the like, but many are from individuals. Say you are a Perth business looking for new customers. Regular searching and following of local tweeps could result in hundreds of highly geo-targeted website hits before too long.
And doing so definitely helps. Google, Yahoo and Bing do certainly take your activity on social networks into account. So, a lot of activity on Twitter does result in slightly higher search engine rankings. This is what some highly regarded search engine gurus say. I've also had personal experience of this recently with one of my blogs. Even though I hadn't updated it for a long time, I noticed that I was getting a bit more search engine traffic to it. I suspect that this was due to my increased activity on my Twitter account linked to that blog URL.
As well as this direct effect, Twitter can confer other benefits for your site's SEO. Remember that improving your off-page SEO is all about getting links, preferably from highly ranked websites and blogs. And Twitter is a great way to connect with the owners of those sites. (It's probably the best, most targeted way of connecting with other people according to interests, location and other criteria, after all.)
Pretty much everyone with a successful blog has now joined Twitter. Merely by typing the niche keywords you're interested in into the search box you can find these people and follow them. Quite often they will follow you back. (You can get an idea if they will do so in advance by looking at the relative numbers of those they follow compared to those following them. If the ratio is about 1:1, they're likely to reciprocate.)
As well as following them, you can also comment on their blogs. Commenting is a good idea because it gets your site seen by lots of bloggers, even if it doesn't give you direct SEO benefit. Similarly, by tweeting about your subject of interest bloggers and webmasters will find and follow you. And having them comment on your blog is also good for SEO.
One phrase that is often repeated by SEO gurus is "content is king". This applies to Twitter also. So, when tweeting, keep offering up good content. Don't just use it to announce your blog posts, new pages and offers. It is a micro-blogging service, after all. So, try to write tweets that are catchy, informative and insightful in their own right.
And use keywords in your tweets whenever possible. Not only are people searching for keywords in Twitter like they do in Google, but the search giant itself is indexing your tweets. So you might get some visitors directly from there. And some of those may click on to your blogs and sites.
Remember that interacting, communicating and reciprocating are what Twitter is all about. You can build up a rapport with the people you're following and help promote their sites by retweeting their tweets. And they will often return the favour. So, you help each other get your blogs and sites seen by more and more people. Just the number of clicks off tweets and retweets should help lift your rankings a little since Google is factoring this information into its calculation of the quality of your site.
It is also taking note of your visitors' locations. So, if you get a lot of Twitter traffic from a particular city, then that should result in improved local search engine rankings. That's why when choosing people to follow you should keep searching for tweeps in your city. Add a hashtag as well. People tweet about their locations frequently, so the results are constantly changing.
For example if you search for #Perth, you see new tweets appearing every few minutes. Sure, a fair proportion of these are from radio stations and media organizations and the like, but many are from individuals. Say you are a Perth business looking for new customers. Regular searching and following of local tweeps could result in hundreds of highly geo-targeted website hits before too long.