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4 SEO Improvements to your Twitter Account

Here are a few simple things you can do with your Twitter account to help your website’s SEO:

1. Tweet with Keywords. If there is only one thing you do, be sure to use keywords in your Tweet. This way, in the least, your tweet might appear in personalized results at the bottom of search engine requests for that keyword. If someone trusts your opinion enough to follow you, they might take your suggestion when you mention a what they are looking for in a tweet. Now, I am not suggesting you send a tweet with just keywords- please don’t spam! Nor should keywords be unnaturally squeezed into every tweet. Just find something productive to say that happens to include your keywords.
2. Always Include a Link. I’ve experienced the affect a link on Twitter can have on SEO. I’ve seen previously unindexed pages without any links going to them suddenly indexed by Google once they appear on Twitter- eventhough Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to a link. Get the Googlebot to your page by Tweeting it. Please remember that indexing and ranking are two different things. A page needs to be indexed in order to rank but a page won’t rank just because it is indexed.
3. Use an SEO-Friendly URL Shortener. The number of URL shorteners is growing in direct proportion to the influence of Twitter. This is because we want to share something, but need to do it within the 140 character limit that makes Twitter so much fun (that is how I think of it- really!). Don’t just pick a URL shortener because it offers the shortest possible link or because it comes with your favorite Twitter app. You need to make sure it throws a “301 Moved Permanently” header code. This code tells the one following the link to the new page that this old link is now in a new location- as opposed to a 302 code that tells them this change is only temporary. This is important for SEO because Google flows page authority through a 301 redirect but not through a 302. Search Engine Land has the definitive list of URL shorteners.
4. Use a Twitter Link Monitoring Service. There are a couple websites out there, twitturly is my favorite, that tracks links shared by a particular Twitter account. Make sure your Twitter account is being tracked by one of these websites. Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links from their website, negating any link benefit from them, but these link monitoring sites often allow link authority to follow through the link. This does more than build links to your website- or whatever website you mention- but it also the content of your tweet becomes the anchor text (clickable words) of the link. This way, if you’ve used your keywords in your tweet, you will have a higher-quality keyword-based link. (Not all Twitter link monitoring services allow you to determine your keywords- Topsy uses the title tag of the webpage)
   

Can you think of any more tweaks to your Twitter account to benefit SEO? Share them with the rest of us, in the comments below.