0 What Do We Know About Twitter and SEO?

What Do We Know About Twitter and SEO?

Case Studies

The people at one website noticed the site suddenly ranked on the first page for a particular keyword right after the site was linked to by a prominent Twitter account - one with more than 350,000 followers - and that tweet was retweeted more than 100 times.
In a recent experiment, people were asked to link to one page from their website, or tweet a link to another page. The results so far? The page that was linked in 522 tweets outranked the page that was linked 646 times across 36 different websites. It showed up as the first result for a specific keyword search.

Points of Order

• Search engines take note of public Twitter accounts only. If you see the lock symbol, and you have to request to follow someone, their tweets won't help anyone's SEO.
• Websites still matter. You must continue to build good backlinks to your website to guide more people to your site and rank well in search. Links from Twitter are a new tool to help your SEO, but they can only do so much.
• Links from Twitter are still NoFollow. That's because Twitter can't possibly monitor them all, and judge which ones should be followed - that is, confer some link juice. However, when search engines look at the entire stream of public tweets to evaluate what's being discussed, there are no rel=nofollow tags present on those links. Search expert Danny Sullivan believes that means links in Twitter do carry some weight, and help the links rank.
• Google and Bing look at links on Facebook, but they can only do so in profiles that have their status updates set as public. Most people have their Facebook accounts set to be private (the opposite is true of Twitter), so search engines see mostly just the information that's on public business pages.

What We Don't Know

• How long will the SEO boost from Twitter links last? Most SEO experts believe the boost in rankings from a tweeted link diminishes over time. That's because tweets are constantly replaced with new tweets, unlike a web page. So tweeted links don't have the persistent presence of a link on a web page.
• If you're going to get X amount of tweets linking to a given page, is it better if they're retweets of the same content, or uniquely written tweets? Not enough is known about this yet, but people can certainly get tired of looking at the same tweet over and over again in Twitter feed. That's not going to help you get more clicks.

I expect we'll know more about Twitter for SEO as more information is gained from experiments and studies.

Taking note of social activity makes SEO and search engine algorithms more complicated than before, and hopefully better equipped to produce search results that really matter to people.

For website owners, it makes sense to think about earning links in the social networks, as well as on websites and blogs. Don't leave the benefits of sharing on the social Web on the table.

 What Can I Do To Encourage Tweets and Links

1. This should be pretty obvious - I hope. Create great content that people will want to share.
2. Make it easy for people to tweet and share your content. Consider including a Twitter button, a call to action, or some simple way for people to share a link to your website.
3. Engage with your followers and attract new, quality ones. See our Twitter Marketing 101 article for guidance.
4. Keep tabs on who has mentioned or linked to you and thank them. You can also ask them to link to the newest thing you've created.