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Twitter, Social Bookmarking and SEO

A couple weeks ago I wrote a couple articles about Twitter and SEO. The first article was an overview of Twitter and SEO. The second article discussed link building using Twitter.

Since I wrote those articles I tried an additional SEO experiment with an article that introduced my Twitter statistics. I mentioned the same article on Twitter three times- once as a regular tweet, the second by using Digg’s url shortener, and the third using Sphinn. In each case I used my Twitter statistics and posted the article on Twitter during the ideal time of day. I wanted to know which would give me the most exposure to my page and give me the most SEO benefit.

Using Twitter to mention the article (lets call this the “control”) gave me 19 unique visitors. In addition to the visitors I got a slight link building benefit. I know that twitter has “nofollow” tags on its links but the Twitter mobile site does allow links to be followed- you just have to make sure your URL shortening service uses 301 redirects when forwarding your link. Additionally, there are a couple sites that list Twitter links and allow link juice to flow through the link. The one I mentioned earlier was twiturly. Since then I also noticed that tweetmeme also allows link juice to flow through your links. To get the SEO benefits from these sites, just make sure Google can find them somewhere, in order to index them.

Sometimes SEOs re only interested in getting a site to rank. Although that is an important part of SEO, really the ranking is only beneficial if it leads to more conversions of the client’s goal. That’s why I tried to use Twitter to lead people to popular social bookmarking sites. Now some social bookmarking sites can be used for beneficial link building. In this case the sites I chose didn’t benefit me with link juice so much as broaden the exposure of my article.

For example I shared my Twitter stats article using Digg’s URL shortening service with the hopes that people would vote for it. The more people who would digg my article, the more people would have been exposed to it and thereby increased the number of visitors to my site. Although I was pleasantly surprised to find that someone had dugg my article before me, no one else voted for the article after I shared the Digg link through Twitter. Perhaps the article wasn’t digg-worthy or digg was a too broad for people to get excited about my article on Twitter stats.

Last I shared my article over Twitter by posting a link to Sphinn. I took my favorite URL shortening service (http://kl.am/) and created a link to my article on Sphinn. Not only did a few people Sphinn (vote for) the article but I received 21 visits to the article from that site (in fact, only one person who followed the link from twitter did not follow through to my site from Sphinn). Why was this more successful than Digg, which is more popular? I think this was because Sphinn is better target audience for the content of the article.

My conclusion about Twitter SEO through Social Bookmarks: you can expose your article to a broader audience by using Twitter if you publish a link to a social bookmarking site that links to your article. Your results will be most beneficial if the social bookmarking site is appropriate to the contents of your article.