Every good blogger knows that there is a world of opportunity in social media, especially the rapidly growing social media platform of Twitter. The site recently went through a redesign in order to make it even more user-friendly, and, as a result, activity within and around it is booming. So how can bloggers take advantage of Twitter? Well, for one, having a solid presence on Twitter is a requirement. But is this enough? Is interacting with your community on Twitter enough to drive traffic to your blog? It’s certainly important, sure, but there’s more you can do. Though you might not realize this at first, it’s actually possible to optimize your Twitter presence for search engines, thus benefiting your main blog. Here are a few things to consider as you reevaluate your Twitter presence.
Do you have the right handle and profile name?
These are perhaps the two most important parts of setting up a Twitter account that is search engine friendly. The handle, a username like @yourbrand, establishes a static url at twitter.com/yourbrand that search engines can index so that future information on your feed can be accessed and linked to quickly and easily. Likewise, your profile name, the name that appears next to your handle in the profile, further establishes your brand. Ideally, both of these names will target keywords related to your interests.
Have you written the right kind of profile?
Secondly, you should take the most important keywords and incorporate them into your profile. Just like any text on the web, your profile can be seen by search engines, so it makes sense to apply the same SEO tactics in this text as you would for any other blog post. Make sure you use all one hundred and sixty characters in your profile, and follow the usual keyword to content ratio.
Do you Tweet for SEO?
Just because you only get one hundred and forty characters for each Tweet doesn’t mean you can’t include some keywords to attract the attention of search engines. Have you ever Googled something and found that one of the first links pointed you to someone’s Tweet? That should tell you that Tweets do get searched, so you should include keywords, especially in the first few words of your Tweet in order to get maximum attention from searchers.
Do you use links?
There has been a lot of discussion about ‘nofollow’ and Twitter, but that shouldn’t discourage you from trying to get traffic and search engine recognition from your links. Because Twitter is so popular now, there are many other third party sites that aggregate Tweets for a particular niche, and these sites can determine their ‘follow’ or ‘nofollow’ policies. Better to count on your link spreading than to give up on linking. Furthermore, the more popular you are on Twitter, the better your link traffic will be. Because of this, you should use a url shortening service that allows you to track stats on your links. I recommend BitLy, which uses search engine friendly 301 Redirects, thus allowing the search engine to index the destination url.
