Twitter has become mainstream. It was discussed on the Sky news this very morning in connection with Jennifer Aniston ending her relationship with John Mayer over his obsession with Twitter.
Everyone is talking about Twitter and what it is and what it isn’t; but can it help your SEO campaign?
Don’t forget that SEO is the process required to improve rankings in search engines for certain relevant keywords.
So to answer that question let’s look at the two aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) – on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation (link-building, promotion, etc) – and see where Twitter fits.
On-Page Optimisation
One of the benefits of blogging is that you can add the blog to your own site (domain/sub-domain). This means that each blog post is adding additional content to your own web site with the associated SEO benefits (freshness, expanding content, long tail, authority building etc).
Twitter is sometimes referred to as "micro-blogging". But each blog post or "tweet" is only 140 characters in length and not really worth its own page. Furthermore, these posts generally only exists on the twitter network and its web pages. Although you can add your twitter stream to your website using RSS or similar and get some content benefits, the impact you would receive would be minimal compared with other methods.
So in terms of "on-page" optimisation – Twitter does not really deliver anything positive to your SEO campaign.
Off-page Optimisation
Off-page factors are extremely important to SEO. It has been said that with competitive keywords, off-page factors can account for more than 60% of the impact of an SEO campaign.
Off-page is about promoting a site to build its credibility and its authority on specific topics. Articles and press releases, links on relevant sites and in vertical directories – these are all elements of an effective off-page optimisation campaign.
The goal of SEO is not purely to drive traffic to a site. The goal is to improve the ranking results in search engines for primary, secondary and long-tail keywords that are relevant to the website. Traffic generated from these results will be relevant and qualified.
The main problem with using Twitter for off-page optimisation (in the context of search engine optimisation) is that all links in Twitter are "nofollowed". This means that every time someone tweets about your great blog post or your new product, you get no "link juice ".. no "SEO" benefit for it.
Having said that, Twitter posts seem to be indexed by Google quickly and although you do not get any "link juice", it has been reported that you can get your new web page indexed more quickly sometimes using Twitter.
Furthermore, more and more people are adding their Twitter feed to their own website. It seems that links in the tweets from these feeds are NOT "nofollowed" and so you should get some link benefits if other people "retweet" your tweets that contain a link (now say that three times fast).. but unfortunately these links will not have any anchor text, which diminishes their benefit somewhat.
Also, you should chose the link shortening service carefully to ensure that it uses a 301 redirect (e.g. tinyURL does this) so that your site gets the benefit of the link and not the shortening service itself.
But a popular tweet with a good link could get additional linking benefits providing that
a) it gets to people who have their twitter feed on their site;
b) they choose to allow these links to be "followed"
c) you use the correct link/url shortening service
So in terms of "off-page" optimisation – the results are less black and white. Twitter does not benefit your site in the context of improving your rankings directly.. but it helps in getting new pages indexed and CAN help you if you get enough retweets.
It certainly will help in generating additional [non search engine] traffic to your site.
The important thing to remember here is that not everything online has to do with search engines. Internet Marketing is not just about search engine optimisation or search engine marketing. Twitter is showing promise to be highly effective in marketing your company/web-site and drive some significant traffic your way.. but it’s SMM (Social Media Marketing) and not SEO.
