Twitter Tips to help you rank highly

 

With Google recently ending its realtime search deal with Twitter, it’s led many people to question if Twitter is still worthwhile for SEO.

Twitter still can have a lot of benefit to your SEO, with several great ways in which it can gain some additional spots on the organic search results pages, as well as drawing in traffic and helping your website be found.

So how can you influence your Twitter account for search?

1) Your Twitter name

Your name on Twitter doesn’t necessarily have to be your actually business name (unlike Facebook). Twitter allows you to name your account anything you want as long as it’s fewer than 20 characters long.

If it is available your actual business name is perhaps the most important thing you can set your Twitter profile as due to the fact it appears in the title tag for your Twitter profile. This makes you highly searchable both on Twitter and Google as it is something that will appear in Google under your Twitter Profile.

2) Your Username

Like your Twitter profile name, your Twitter username is an important piece of content that will be displayed in the title of your Twitter profile page. This again can be anything up to the 15 character limit.

Your username really should be keyword-rich in order to draw the attention of anyone searching for related keywords.

Resource Techniques Twitter profile: position 4 on Google for the search term ‘Resource Techniques’.

3) Your Bio

The next important thing is your bio. This can be vital to your SEO as it is highly indexable content and the first few words will appear in your Twitter page’s description on the Search Engine Results page.

At 160 characters long, you have more to play about with. It’s important not to waste these characters though. Make the first few words an interesting and relevant introduction which will draw users to click. To improve the likelihood of being ranked by Google, make sure to include at least one or two keywords that you are targeting.

4) Links

Links are always important for SEO; your Twitter profile will need links just like any other website would. Getting links for your Twitter profile is actually quite easy, just make sure to link to your Twitter profile everywhere you can. For example include it in every author byline when you write an article, on your staff profile page on your website, etc.

Gaining links for your twitter profile works well for SEO as it is closely related to your website. This means you can pass along a great deal of trust to it from your website. Which in turn makes your links that much more valuable.

5) More followers

Getting more followers to your Twitter profile improves the trust factor with Google. The more people following you, gives you that little bit extra link juice.

This helps you compete with other Twitter profiles that might have the same or a similar topic.

6) Don’t go off track with your tweets

Twitter is all about giving your followers what they want, which is interesting and fun posts but you have to remember to include tweets that are on topic and with keyword-rich content.

Try to do this regularly; you have to remember that your Twitter profile is like any other web page in Google’s eyes. As with any other web page, if the content has keywords and links within it, it is more likely to rank well.

7) Your URL

Twitter uses a “nofollow” tag on all its URL’s and links meaning it won’t pass on any SEO authority, but it’s still important as it directs traffic from your twitter profile to your own website.

Remember this is your primary objective, to draw people back to your website. Making the URL a crucial part of your Twitter profile, so don’t forget to include it.

While Twitter is limited to what you can do with it in terms of SEO, it doesn’t make Twitter any less powerful for SEO. Although it is something that you have to work hard on to succeed.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant