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 shares data with a number of other published resources.
- With a client application: use Twhirl’s built-in URL shortening service Twurl.nl, it saves the original URL to Tweetburner.
Step 3. Syndicate your Twitter feed/stream. This can be accomplished a number of ways; FriendFeed, Jaiku, RSS embedding, WordPress Plug-Ins, Widgets and social networking profiles … for starters.
Note: While Twitter attaches the “nofollow” attribute to links posted directly to a Twitter profile, syndicated links generally DO NOT have “nofollow” attribute tags, hence the elevated potential of increasing link juice.
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Originally Published June 15, 2008
Dugg it! Great tips! 🙂
Because Twitter applies the rel=”nofollow” anchor tag attribute, intended to prevent search engines from being gamed for SEO in this way, trying to use Twitter for search engine ranking may have limited results. (See the “Interpretation by the individual search engines” section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow for more info on this.)
That of course does not to undermine the biggest value of Twitter for “ranking” – making connections with real people, without search engine mediation. Posting a link to a blog post on Twitter not only trots that content (or at least the link) in front of eyes that are likely to care, it also encourages discussion via the venue of Twitter – thus rippling outward, putting the post in front of even more eyes.
The tips in step 2 are great for URL-based brand recognition. Thanks for sharing!
mlsamuelson
mlsamuelson,
Thank you for the comment. Twitter does apply the ‘nofollow’ tag, that’s why the tip indicates to use Tweetburner and Summize. Even without, I’ve seen tweets add leverage to keyphrase targets for a couple days immediately after the tweet.
And yes, Twitter is great for connecting with people in a social networking environment. One of my favorites for sure.
Most definitely, utilizing keyphrase targets in the text of your link (anchor text) gives more weight to your link marketing-wise. Nice catch!
Also, think about the ‘clickability’ of the link once it’s been syndicated. For example:
– Tweets syndicated to a blog, tumblelog, aggregation service (FriendFeed, MyBlogLog) that contain the keyphrase target are definitely more clickable (in regard to your target audience).
It is important to remember that syndicated tweets often get indexed by search engines, and provide content that reinforces keyphrase targets and related content objectives. Referential integrity is key.
Ahh. Okay, I follow now. Good stuff to know!
Thanks for sharing your expertise Joshua.
mlsamuelson
It’s really nice to see a post on a topic like this. After getting frustrated with soooooo many wimpy Twitter tips, I finally created the best Twitter tips list on the planet. It’s called: Twittin’ Secrets” The 100 World’s Greatest Twitter Tips and Twitter Secrets.
See if you agree.
http://twittinsecrets.com
FYI, Summize was acquired by Twitter, which just means Summize is now Twitter Search.
What is a recommeded twitter plugin for WordPress?
Hi Pete, I currently am using Twitter Tools by Alex King.
Hm, you know, I’ve read a lot of topics and posts in forums/blogs and all these other sites about Twitter, but I never gave much thought about it until I read this post.
I think I’ll give it a try, it might give me some leverage.
Dugg it! Thanks for the twitter tip – I will try it.
Wow. Great post. Didn’t know all of this before, especially the syndication part. Thank you for the tip.
What an excellent post! Thank you.
Good tweeter tip. I have been trying to figure out how to optimize tweeter to give the best results, and knowing about the lack of the no follow is helpful.