SEO: The Twitter Tap of Little Search Bot Feet
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Written By Miguel Cancino | September 9, 2008 | Share This
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Let’s face it, we’re all vain to a certain extent. But sometimes you can learn from your own vanity. This was the case yesterday when I decided to perform a “vanity search” for my own name. After plugging my name into Google, much to my surprise, my most recent tweets made up 20% of the first page of the organic results. Granted, I’m not exactly an internet celebrity with tons of content out there mentioning me, but this was still unexpected. Intrigued, I spent some time browsing the web to learn more about what contributes to Twitter’s strong SEO results.
It appears to me that the single biggest factor contributing to Twitter’s impressive SEO is the fact that Twitter profiles/status pages are sub-directories of Twitter.com (i.e. http://twitter.com/searchviews), as opposed to sub-domains (http://searchviews.twitter.com). Whatever SEO benefits Twitter receives is passed to it’s sub-directories (this is not the case with sub-domains.) In other words, it’s Trickle Down Twitternomics.
Some of the recent controversy over “no follow” instructions in Twitter profiles shouldn’t diminish the real benefits of Twitter in getting found through organic search. The only thing that those search engine bots are avoiding are the links in the biographical information field — everything else is fair game.
From an SEO standpoint Twitter still has a lot of link value. Whenever I tweet something, this content is displayed on each of my followers pages. As a result, the more followers I have, the more inbound links there are pointing back towards the content I just posted, including links. Additionally posting a link on your feed makes it available to others to post on their blogs and to vote it up on sites like Digg as well as increasing traffic back to the landing page you are linking to. It can also be worthwhile to do some keyword research for your Twitter posts, like you would for a blog.
Remember - just because you have 140 characters doesn’t mean that you can’t tell your story and have it be optimized too.
Topics: Blogging, Google, SEO, Search: How-To, Twitter |
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I’ve noticed other sites duplicate Twitter updates and put your name out there even more! It seems like endless links.
@Nick Yes, I’ve noticed the same thing. There are a number of sites that syndicate twitter updates. All the more reason to get a strong following so people have more reason to syndicate and “retweet” your tweets.
Wow, Great article. i am curious if anyone has any resources or ideas for using twitter as a business tool for just this type of thing. i need to invite all my friends to join twitter now so that i can hopefully build some link value…
now just for that whole “being more interesting so that people will actually want to know what i am doing” thing…
Great post, thanks again.
-Kellen Chase
http://graphicFusionDesign.com
@Kellen Thanks for the compliments. There are a number of company’s out there doing a good job of using Twitter as a business tool. One example is Firefox (http://twitter.com/firefox_answers) and another is Comcast (http://twitter.com/comcastcares). Both use Twitter to respond to customers and do a pretty good job of it.
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get a huge following right away. Just start following influential people in your space and contribute useful or interesting content when you have something to share.
[…] SEO: The Twitter Tap of Little Search Bot Feet […]
your links in tweets can bring social aware and to get inlinks you need to avoid shorten url for your site(s) / page(s)