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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Twitter: Thoughts and Tips
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Twitter is both amazing and annoying. It seems that many companies and people Tweet just for the heck of it... with few real followers, and little to say of importance. Other companies seem to Tweet effectively. One of the most important SEO issues for Twitter is does Twitter impact SEO? If your links are Tweeted in Twitter does it impact Google? No one really knows, but the mixture of Social Media Marketing and SEO must be happening - you can bet there are teams at Google and Bing investigating Social Search, not the least of which is Twitter and SEO.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: October 15, 2010
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Contents:
Keywords and Hashtags: Identifying Topics on Twitter
Keywords, as we know, are central to SEO. You must first identify your customer centric keywords and then strategically weave these keywords into your appropriate HTML page tags. The TITLE tag, as we know, is absolutely critical to SEO success, beginning with the all-important home page TITLE tag. So assuming you know your keywords in order of value to you, search volume, and relationship of one to each other (keyword families)...
You can proceed to investigate your keywords beyond Google. Your keywords for SEO become the hashtags on Twitter. Twitter, as we teach in our class on social media marketing is an amazing venue for certain specific marketing applications - namely coupons, and industry news. A hashtag on Twitter indicates a topic of discussion. Think of Twitter as a giant party, where some groups discuss baseball and others discuss Lady Gaga. Which discussions do you wish - as a marketer - to join?
Your first task, therefore, is to search Twitter to see who is talking about what. Twitter Hashtags are key... Here are some easy ways to identify Hashtags on twitter.
- http://search.twitter.com/ - input your keywords into the Twitter search engine, and then look for Hashtags (#) in front of your keywords. For example, here is a typical search - organic food which identifies the hashtags - #organic and #farming... So the process is -
- Identify your keywords
- Search Twitter.com
- Identify 'hashtags' - these are Twitter markers for the 'conversations' going on about your topics / keywords of interest
- Hashtags.org - this nifty service tracks hashtags in a similar way... So input your keywords, and identify hashtags. Then go back to Twitter.com and plug them in
So at the end of this process, you have identified the keywords and hashtags. Now look for URL's being Tweeted. You can also do a search for your own company name to find if / where you are being Tweeted - again 'as if' it were an SEO-friendly link.
URLs Tweeted on Twitter - Windows into Bing and Google
Another way to investigate Twitter is to use Bing and/or Google to identify topics of interest that are being Tweeted. Both of the search giants now do a pretty good job of indexing Twitter content. Again, you are looking for either your target keywords or your company name. Then, you are looking for Url's that are being Tweeted...
Similar to the #hashtags above, you are looking to search by keywords and/or your company (product) names. Really you are seeing if anyone is talking about your themes or your company, with the understanding that being talked about - especially (!) - with URL's is probably a very good thing for your SEO!
Twitter as a Link-building System
Does Twitter count as a link-building system for SEO? First and foremost, we know that Twitter is ephemeral... the links don't last... But, that said, since both Google and Bing are indexing Twitter content it stands to reason that they are 'paying attention' to the links being Tweeted. Unfortunately, since most links are Tweeted as a bit.ly / tinyurl.com urls it becomes hard to reverse engineer the link (if you don't know the shortener)...
So, the bottom line is 1) you can find out conversations on Twitter that matter to you via keywords and hashtags, 2) you can monitor these conversations, and 3) you can hopefully encourage links to your website on Twitter. Going forward for SEO, it certainly won't hurt you and probably will help you as the world moves faster and faster towards social and realtime search!
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