Are you on Twitter? Do you run a blog or website? Do you tweet about it?

If you do, this tip will help tweak your tweets in an effort to increase the rank of your site or blog in the search engines based on targeted keywords and phrases. There’s no guarantee as to how much of an effect, if any, this will have. However, my personal tests have yield positive results.

How to Tweet the Long Tail

Step 1. Make sure your targeted keywords/phrases are in the text of the tweet that contain the link.

Step 2. When linking to a blog post or web page in a tweet:

• On the web: try to keep your URL short, you don’t want Twitter’s URL shortening service changing your link. If you need to shorten your URL, use Tweetburner - which saves the original URL and text on the web and is integrated with Summize.com.
• With a client application: use Twhirl’s built-in URL shortening service Twurl.nl, it saves the original URL to Tweetburner.

Also, avoid using auto-tweet services like TwitterFeed, or WordPress plugins that automatically post a tweet when you update your feed or blog. These services eat up valuable word real estate (waste characters) that could be used for keywords, and don’t engage as well as a personal tweet.

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