Does Twitter have a real SEO purpose?
Posted by Frances van den Berg on 07 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Social Media
This question has been on my mind for a while as I try to see the bigger picture of micro blogging for SEO marketing purposes. When you consider the fact that it sounds like glorified stalking; as Louis said about in his post about the dark side of Twitter, if your eight year old told you she was being followed, you’d probably freak out. And what can you really say in one sentence?
A lot, in fact: Oscar Wilde conveyed a great deal of meaning in short succinct sentences. I love Oscar Wilde’s wit and in one of his quotes he says that “Everything popular is wrong”. (Wilde would be such an entertaining tweeter). Twitter is certainly popular, but is it the right thing for SEO or is it just a waste of company time?
Jacqueline Zenn from SEOGroup thinks that most people are missing the point of Twitter in their attempts to use it for marketing purposes. She says, “Yes, there is nothing wrong with tweeting your latest post…but if that is all you use the service for you are completely missing the point”.
Webpronews has also had a lot to say about Twitter recently, and all of it is good news for SEO. Twitter and blogs complement each other. As Chris Crum says, “Twitter can gain you more blog readers, and a blog can gain you more Twitter followers”. It’s a good idea to mention your blog occasionally and also post links to interesting sites and links that your followers would value.
Interestingly, Twitter’s use as an SEO tool doesn’t stop at content. Eric Ward explains how Twitter can be used for link building. Twitter is the perfect place for finding niche experts and in the same vein, a tweet can quite conceivably lead to a link from a valuable website.
Zenn maintains that Twitter’s strength, like all social media’s strength, is about networking and communication that should come naturally to some extent. So, a categorical ‘yes’ is the answer to my own question: at present Twitter certainly has its place in SEO services, if it’s used well.
