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 returned positive results.
To get the most mileage out of your link tweets utilize text relevant to the link destination. Then, make sure to syndicate your Twitter stream on other networks and platforms.
Related and Relevant
Keyphrase targeting tweets that contain links to your website or blog just makes sense. Twitter and Google are not only indexing tweets with links, but are also analyzing the words and phrases within the tweeted link and destination page on your site or blog.
How to SEO Your Tweets
Step 1. Make sure your targeted keywords/phrases are in the text of the tweet that contain the link. Ideally, you want the text to be relevant to the link.
Step 2. Link to a blog post or web page in a tweet.
- Try to keep your URL short. If you need to shorten your URL, use Tweetburner or Bit.ly – which saves the original URL and text on the web and shares data with a number of other published resources.
You can authenticate bit.ly for use with other Twitter applications like Seesmic and TweetDeck. Hootsuite’s URL shortening service and social networking management platform is another viable option.
Step 3. Syndicate your Twitter feed/stream. This can be accomplished with a number of methods; Feedburner, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, RSS embedding, WordPress Plug-Ins, Widgets, social networking profiles and aggregation websites … for starters. Backlinks anyone? 🙂
- Remember, Twitter attaches the “nofollow” attribute to the link on your Twitter profile and all tweeted links in your social stream.
- Many syndicated links generally DO NOT have “nofollow” attribute tags, hence the elevated potential of increasing link juice to your website or blog.
Following the above 3 steps will increase the likelyhood of your Tweets acquiring backlinks by optimizing and syndicating your link tweets with keyphrases related to the promoted link.
You may or may not see immediate results. I’ve witnessed social backlinks juice immediately, then die-off after about a week only to resurface months later. FYI, there are a lot of variables in this scenario, and keep in mind that backlink accreditation can take time.
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Good post!
A lot of people seem to forget Twitter as a SEO tool, but I think it has good relevance already (i’ve gotten customers from it) and with the live searches becoming more and more popular I think it’s potential to be used as an effective tool are really good! Keep posting – we’ll keep reading!
Thanks for your comment! I agree, when leveraged correctly Twitter can just about whatever you make of it. Might GOOG has recently been discussing adding more weight to backlinks from Twitter and Facebook, so all those Tweeted links could get even more of a boost!