Social sharing has indeed become an SEO factor and micro blogging can help not only your website but your business, so you want to start using it to help you get some nice traffic benefits. But, how do you do that?
How Do Your Tweets Help Your Website?
It is funny how search engines (Google, specifically) works in very mysterious ways. At one point, a specific tactic may work, and after an update, it may be harmful to your website instead. However, Twitter and quality tweets are on the green side of the fence, especially when used to its full potential.
Twitter is the second most popular social media website today after Facebook
The first way Twitter helps your website is through social signals, which are incorporated into Google’s search algorithm. These social signals are factors for ranking, so the more social signals you have, the more important your site becomes for search engines.
Another benefit for using Twitter is brand awareness. While the main goal of SEO is to rank on the top of the search engine results pages, you cannot discount the fact that Twitter can help your online presence and brand awareness, allowing your target audience to find you more easily. Twitter is a great way for people to reach you, and for you to reach people as well.
The other important benefit of Twitter for your business is authorship, which is achieved with real, human Twitter users. While Google does count re-tweets when it comes to ranking, it also looks at who is doing the tweeting; are these real users? Do they have followers? What do they usually share? Posting quality tweets and having a couple of real people share them or re-tweet them is better than having 100’s of Twitter bots do the same thing.
If you have a budget for digital marketing (which, by the way, averages at 36% of the marketing budget) it is advisable to avail the SEO services of a professional SEO/social media company. But if you’re on the budget, here are some tips for you.
Some Tweeting Tips for SEO
Now that we have established the importance of tweeting for SEO, here are some tips that you should keep in mind to make sure that your tweeting efforts are successful.
Quality Is Key – The first and most important thing that you should always keep in mind is quality. Whether it is a guest post, a press release or a blog post in your very own blog, the quality of your content is something that you should not ignore at all because it will do wonders to your efforts. So, if you plan to tweet to promote your business, always keep quality in mind.
Pick A Good Username – Your username or handle should be something relevant to your business, and should be quick to remember. A handle such as twitter.com/yourwebsite is much better than twitter.com/THEyourwebsite10212. This will be better for search indexing, and will be easier to remember and tweet.
Examples of handle names and account names.
Choose A Great Account Name – Your account name is actually different from your handle, because it is the name which appears on your profile. While you can keep your account name and handle the same, you may also want to change it to something that promotes yourself or your brand. A good idea is a variation of your brand name or business name that is the most searched for.
Use Keywords in the Tweet – When you tweet, you also want to target your keywords of choice. One keyword should be enough. Ideally, it should appear in the first 42 characters of the tweet because that is what is usually factored in as the title tag of your tweet. Do not stuff keywords, though because you want to make your tweets engaging and not spammy!
Think Retweet – Twitter allows 140 characters, so if you maximize that, and then other people re-tweet you, they will not be able to re-tweet the whole thing, unless of course they use services like UberSocial and other Twitter apps which allow long tweets. So, the best thing to do here is to allow enough character space for that additional RT @YourHandle in front of the tweet. Now, that makes perfect sense to keep your handle short and concise.
Insert Backlinks – Insert backlinks that redirect Twitter users back to your site. However, do not overdo it and insert back links on all your tweets.
Don’t Lock Your Account – Search engines only rank public Twitter accounts, and do not count accounts which have the locked symbol. Of course it does not make sense to make your business account private, but still it’s a good thing to remember.
Pay Attention To Your Website – While Twitter links can help your SEO efforts, they are not the only factors that matter. SiteProNews explains that websites still matter, especially in terms of keywords and content.
One Response
Social media is certainly not going anywhere any time soon. Most likely, it should probably be increasing as more online businesses realize the necessity to embrace the social community.