Twitter & SEO

June 12th, 2009 Posted by Missie at 7:37 pm

Twitter search function has become of the most under-utilised features on the web where twitter users are replacing Google with twitter search, getting real time responses from tweeters. So what about twitter SEO? Optimising your website for a social networking search engine that is twitter can do wonders for your traffic and your brand.

Here’s some of the best steps you can do to prepare you website for the new leader of search engines and optimise for twitter.

Optimize Your Website For Twitter Search

Remember your keywords

You’re keywords are just important now as they have always been for search engine optimisation. 

Getting to understand and know your audience, their trends and your potential customers is critical to your SEO success. It will help you get more search traffic and you’ll be able to tailor your marketing strategy and understand those who you are selling too.

Twitter users are no different from anyone else using search engines, so the same search terms and queries are used across both Google and Twitter. Using such tools as Google’s Keyword tool and keyword discovery will help you develop the understanding on common keywords used and how you can tailor your keywords to them.

RT marketing campaigns

Twitters ‘retweet’ function where twitter users copy and send your tweets to their follows, is just like inbound links where they represent ‘votes’ for a page in Google Search. Twitter retweeting functionality is like an algorithm for popular content.

So building your twitter SEO means building the number of retweets of your content. This type of viral marketing is your key to twitter search and is an extremely important tool that have people taking and sharing content about you and your stuff, especially if it’s apart of your marketing campaign.

Brand, brand, brand

Branding yourself is one of the most important things you can for you’re SEO and social media presence. If you’re using twitter as a marketing and business tool to increase your website traffic, sales and business reputation having a strong profile is one of the most important things you can do. Setting up multiple accounts one for business and one for personal can target a variety of twitter audiences, increasing your traffic from twitter. Don’t tweet about the same things; rather, use them to target specific audiences.

Customising and creating a unique profile that stands out from the rest on twitter can do wonders. A catchy profile picture and background image and can build a reputation with followers who easily indentify you and your tweets. Take that step further and add contact information and a short catchy description about you and your business to your background image. It’s a free business card to thousands of potential customers.

It’s all about relationships

Building a solid follower base and relationship with your users on twitter is just as crucial to your success as Google’s take on domain age, quality and quantity on inbound links. Tweets of trusted users who have taken the time branch out and build followers will likely boost your results in twitter search.

Building a twitter following over night isn’t the easiest thing to achieve. Avoid using scams that promise thousands of followers in an instant. Instead, use intuitive ways to engage your followers such as tweeting games, best follow Fridays and other tweet related strategies. But do these in moderation. Spamming people can have the opposite effect to building a follow base and you can end up going backwards rather than forwards.

What are you doing now to prepare for the social shift in search engines like Twitter? Anything else you can come up with to optimize your sites and brands in Twitter? Leave us a comment!