Twitter SEO

I’ve just begun looking at Twitter (yeah, yeah I know) and looking at its merits from an SEO perspective. It’s an immensely popular microblogging service, although, a recent study by Nielsen found that 60% of users gave up after the first month.

The links in Twitter have a “nofollow” attribute. What this does is tell search engines like Google and Yahoo not to let this link positively influence your search engine rankings - MSN doesn’t even follow the link. So basically, there’s no SEO value in the links.

However, Twitter maybe useful for Online Reputation Management (ORM) where you can easily create one more search result to displace the negative ones.

Unlike Wordpress, Twitter makes use of folders rather than subdomains e.g. http://twitter.com/larry compared to http://larry.wordpress.com - both fictatious and for illustration only. This effectively allows the Pagerank from Twitter’s other internal pages to get passed on to yours, so sooner or later, your page will rise in rankings.

The avatar links under Following also do not have the “nofollow” attribute, hence they pass Pagerank too. So by getting followers, you’ll also get linked from their Twitter pages and thus, make your own page stronger SEO-wise.

I hope I’m making sense so far.

Another good thing about Twitter is their profile pages are SEO-optimized, i.e. they make use of meta tags, heading markups, etc. Your “Name” becomes the title and your “Bio” becomes the description, so you should pay special attention to what you set for these two - they should contain the keywords you want to optimize for.

A good example to use would be @MariSmith - she’s a Social Marketing expert and more importantly, her Twitter page is PR6. And if you searched on Google for “mari smith”, you’ll find her Twitter page is ranked #4 out of 500 million results.

With all this knowledge in hand, I’m going to experiment by creating a Twitter page called QuestNet Blog. My objective is to be able to show up on searches for “questnet”, so I’ll have to make sure that this keyword is in my link, name and bio. Then I’m going to follow other users, in the hopes that they’ll follow me back and thus, link to my Twitter page.

I’ll update this post in 3 months to see if I’m able to achieve anything.