How Twitter can help your SEO links

When it comes to delivering an effective SEO strategy it is often all too easy to get bogged down with statistics and number crunching to determine trends, results, density of phrases vs links and search engine prominence.

This is all well and good but sometimes the real meaty stuff has been missed simply because of a lack of creativity. When managing an online marketing campaign there are a wealth of online tools available that can help drive traffic and sales which are sometimes regarded as ‘out of the box’ compared to traditional SEO techniques. One of those tools available is Twitter.

How does Twitter affect Google?

We all know Google’s views towards links, their value and how they can affect your web positioning. It’s the very fabric of the internet and what it’s all about, building up on networks of links to useful and relevant resources of information. Google loves links; it’s only the delivery of those links that sometimes Google questions your methods.

Twitter on the other hand is designed for people to share links easily between networks of people and will quite often be used to deliver a viral effect of link sharing. What does Google think about this? Well simply put, Google loves Twitter…have you noticed that Google is now showing real time tweets in search results for trending topics?

People want to know what’s going on ‘in the now’ and therefore Google aims to deliver these messages as quickly and easily as possible. Therefore the more links you can get from Twitter the better, but more importantly the more links you can get the better on a regular basis. Google is always monitoring chatter on Twitter especially if it’s about your brand. Therefore they might appreciate your site more than those brands that perhaps are not being talked about on Twitter.

Quality vs Quantity

When it comes to SEO we are always talking about ensuring your content is of high quality rather than farming out tonnes of links and pages all at once. Keeping it coherent and easy to find is the key. In the case of Twitter however we are looking at quantity. The more links from different people the better as you are expanding your reach far and wide.

In addition you’ll attract a much higher volume of traffic because of the diversity of the links. Whereas you may have tons of links from a few people but the chances are there will be much less impact on your SEO that way.

Leverage as much as you can

Being creative is not always easy, but its benefits can pay off immensely. To get things started take a look at your site and try to make it work for you. Writing engaging content and have regular readers will always help and the two work together closely. You won’t gain extra regular readers without writing engaging content to begin with and you won’t necessarily know what to write about without engaging with your readers.

This is why blogs work so well when sharing on the social networks because you are already placing your content in front of the viewers eyes. People that follow you on your social networks will be able to see your latest content and share it within their own networks. But also those that don’t follow you on the social networks should also have opportunity to share amongst their friends.

Entice them to share

You need to give readers some sort of incentive to share your content on the web. Perhaps a competition or email campaign to promote your content and persuade your readers to share the wealth on the net.

There are various plugins available on the net for enabling users to quickly share the content on their most popular platforms. If you have over 1000 users on your site per month and you place a share on twitter link on the most used content then how many links could you expect to receive back to your site? Well we’d hope for up to 1000, which is a pretty big incentive to Google to look at your content, see your network of links and rank you accordingly.

Twitter for SEO in practice

We recently developed an online game for a client to catch email addresses through completing the game and submitting their score to win a hot air balloon trip. The campaign was a great success and because we included the ability for users to tweet and share on Twitter or Facebook it went viral and received a huge amount of traffic. This was a great opportunity of viral sharing with links back to site from a host of different sources.

Another example is back on April fool’s day we did a bit of blogging about the Google April fool’s day antics and in real time search results our blog posts were being fed via Twitter to the top of the search results. This resulted in a 2000% increase in traffic that day to our blog with links from 100’s of different sources. This has helped promote our site further and since then we have seen repeated referencing throughout the web to various other articles within the blog.

Story telling in social media

People love to read stories about what others are up to and what’s new and interesting so keep posting up relevant and interesting stories that people will love to read. This may take some time to develop and understand what your core readers are really into. But by posting regular and relevant content you begin to see increases in your readership and sharing.

Interact with your readers

Don’t treat your readers like machines, they aren’t going to be interested in anything and everything you say. At the same time you have to show them that you are human. Post pictures and videos that unveil a part of the real you. Comment on your followers status updates, get involved, post questions, and answer their questions with your knowledge. Be friendly and interact with people.

This is by far the best way to build up a list of contacts that will start to know and respect your valuable information and knowledge and they will reward you for it.

Most of all however, enjoy it…if you don’t enjoy it, it won’t last long and it’s the momentum that will carry your communications forward and help build up your network of deep links back to your content and articles.

We’d love to hear your stories so please feel free to share them on Twitter or Facebook.

Have fun!!!