OPTIMIZING TWITTER
In addition to adhering to the standard admonishments about providing good content and using well-researched keywords, you can follow a few extra guidelines to improve your ranking in search results on both internal Twitter searches and on external searches:
. Your name on Twitter acts like a title tag. If you want to benefit from branding and to rank on your own or your company name, you have to use it! If
you haven’t already done this, log into your Twitter account and click the Settings link. Then change your name.
. Your username, or Twitter handle, should relate to your brand, company name, or campaign and be easy to remember. It can include a keyword
or topic area. Change it in the Settings area.
. Pick your one-line bio with keywords. Your Twitter bio serves as the description metatag and is limited to 160 characters. Use resume-style language
and include some of your primary search terms. Talk about yourself or your company in the third person. Click settings on the top right of the page,
then click the Profile tab in the navigation bar. Complete the Bio box.
. On the same Profile page, use your business address as your location. (Or click the Settings link and then the Profile tab to modify). Doing so
helps with local searches. Remember to save your changes.
. Collect Twitter followers. Essentially internal, inbound links on Twitter. They carry special value if your followers themselves have a large number of
followers. As the Twitter variant of link popularity, a good follower count may improve your PageRank.
. Include keywords in your tweets and retweets whenever possible. With the 140-character limit, Twitter might be a good place to use those single-word terms.
Use keywords in your Twitter #hashtabs, too.
. Remember the importance of the initial 42 characters of a tweet. They serve as the title tag for that post. Your account name will be part of that
count. Search engines will index the full tweet, however.
. Format your retweets. Keep them under 120 characters so there’s room for someone to add their retweet information at the front. When you
re-tweet, avoid sending duplicate content by changing the message a bit.
. Maximize retweets as a measure of popularity. Write interesting content or share good articles, especially when the direct link to detailed content goes
to your own site.
. Increase your visibility. Link to your Twitter profile from other sites using your name or company name as the link text, rather than your
@Twitter address or Twitter handle.
Because Twitter adds a nofollow attribute to links placed by users, linking to your site doesn’t help with PageRank. Truncated URLs behave just like their longer version cousins because they’re permanent redirects.
However, links from Twitter still boost branding and drive traffic to your site. More traffic to your site improves your ranking at Alexa (www.alexa.com), which in turn improves one of the quality factors Google uses for setting PageRank. It’s all one giant loop.