Can you use Twitter for SEO?

Twitter is very helpful to SEO effortsI have to admit my hesitancy to dive into Twitter- it always seemed so narcissistic. Once I started, however, I was hooked – so hooked that when twitter was attacked by the DoS the other day my first inclination was to check Twitter to see what happened! (D’oh)

The most important way I use Twitter for SEO is for link building. Now, I know some of you want to add to my bounce rate- screaming, “but Twitter uses nofollow tags!”- but I am not the only one who thinks like this. St. Eric Ward (patron saint of linkbuilding) has written multiple articles about Twitter link building advantages for SEO. His point is that Twitter exposes people who are interested in your industry to your link and increases the potential of people building links on relevant sites naturally. This is why I will be tweeting this article as well (hint, hint!). This is also why I have added a cool button at the bottom of this article to allow you to easily Tweet this (hint, hint!).

Regarding “nofollow” tags, I noticed a couple months ago that Google is indexing the mobile Twitter site, which does not place “nofollow” tags on the links. That means, if you use a good URL shortener (from an SEO perspective), Google might pass you some nice juice. This might be why one SEO I know submits new sites through Twitter- Google seems to index them quickly. This is why I have used kl.am for the sponsors of my Twitter app, FeedTwit. Not only does this shortener redirect links with a proper 301 redirect, but if a link is really popular it gets another link on their homepage. All this is in addition to the link they get off the mobile Twitter FeedTwit page. This is yet another reason I will be tweeting this article. (BTW- you can sponsor FeedTwit too)

I forgot to comment on a couple other aspects of Twitter link building in this post, so I added them to a second.

Twitter is a very important tool for me to use in SEO. What about you? How do you use Twitter for SEO?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 12:45 am and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Can you use Twitter for SEO?”

  1. Jon Payne Says:
    August 12th, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    Same as you have described… we use it much like one would use any networking or communication tool. The goal is not links from Twitter to our target site. The idea is to use Twitter to get our content in front of lots of people in the topic area, and then hopefully the content proves linkworthy. In this sense Twitter is no different than IM or E-mail, its the communication channel. Its better than email in that a similar notice via email is often more likely looked upon as spam.

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