The Social Schmuck

In the third instalment of our social SEO guide, we take a look at how to optimise Twitter to help you get found, gain followers and optimise your content both for internal search as well as being found by search engines. It’s incredibly important to get your SEO right on Twitter, as you’ll probably find it’s the social network that you generate the most frequent content on, so you want to make sure it gets found. With Bing also embedding tweets into their main search results, it’s even more important that your content is written and distributed with one eye on SEO, and the other eye on your users!

Consistent keywords

Given the amount content you produce on Twitter, it’s important that you’ve identified which keywords you want to show for, and ensure there’s continuity here between your profile and the tweets themselves. Within your own profile, try and ensure that you are repeating keywords where possible, through your profile name, bio name and bio description. This is obviously difficult with such a limited amount of characters to work with (160 in your bio description), but you’d be surprised how many people try and write descriptive text here, without mentioning staples such as their brand name. Since this is the most likely keyword to be in your profile name, bio name and description, ensure you’re also including this keyword in as many tweets as possible, so search engines can recognise consistency and relevancy for these words.

Keywords with photo & video uploads

When Twitter introduced the functionality to upload photos and videos into their site, they also introduced photo and video into their search results. Twitter will only continue to grow as a platform to find content and increasingly, this will be multimedia content as well. Think about what someone might be searching for when looking for this content, and ensure you’ve got the keywords in your tweet to show up for it. So don’t just write ‘yummy’ when posting a picture of your food, but instead go for ‘yummy – check out the hotel food our guests are enjoying today!’. You’ve done the work in producing the content in the first place, so just spend an extra 10 seconds to include keywords to go with it.

Name your profile picture

A little-known place to squeeze another keyword into your profile, is in the file name of your profile picture. Twitter will actually retain this name and it will go into the url when you click to expand on a profile picture. I didn’t do this when I created my profile picture, and you can see that the code in this url is simply the screenshot reference from my Mac :

Skype for example are doing this a little better :

It might not seem like much, but it’s another chance to get your keywords higher up the CSS structure, from a high ranking page.

Think before you go private

When people are starting out on Twitter, they’re often tempted to set their profile to private, as the idea of that much public content can seem a little daunting. Think carefully however, whether this is definitely the right strategy for you. If you keep your content hidden, it means that, by default, it also won’t be indexed by Google. It may seem obvious, but many people don’t realise that they’re seriously impacting their chances of being found by Google, as all you have to go on is your profile name.

Customise your bit.ly links

While Twitter will recognise the full url of a shortened link, it is best practice to manually shorten your links through bit.ly and choose to customise them, so you can include a keyword within the url. To do this you will need to have an account with bit.ly and you simply shorten your url and then click customise :

Important keywords at the start

When you’re writing your tweets, as much as you want them to sound natural for the benefit of your users, it’s also important to think about how keyword placement should be done best, to benefit the most from SEO through Twitter. When a search engine pulls in your tweets, the first 42 characters count as the meta description, so it’s important that you’ve got your priority keywords in here, as it will be one of the first things that Google reads when visiting your Page. You can see in the examples below that the tweet is cut off within the title Google pulls in :

Keep the good tweets short

If you’re writing a particularly good tweet that contains a link to a good piece of content, or you know it’s likely to get retweeted, make sure you keep it short. When you retweet something that’s too long, you often cut out words to make it fit, and you don’t want someone to make the chop on one of your most important keywords! The SEO value of tweets has already been proven and if you have something that’s going to get retweeted hundreds or even thousands of times, you don’t want to risk all those tweets circulating around without your important keyword in there. So take into account the characters in ‘RT@xyz username’ and a short message people might add on when retweeting.

Share your Google + updates on Twitter

Just as with any website, Google will like Twitter pages that have links pointing to them, as well as those that contain links out. A good way to do this (but please bear in mind the impact on your Twitter stream), is to cross-post content from your Google + profile, onto Twitter. I’m not generally a huge fan of cross-posting, but given that there’s likely to be a lot of crossover between your communities on Google+ and Twitter, I’ve let this one in! You can cross post to your Twitter profile from Google+ via this Chrome extension, though it’s likely Google+ will introduce this functionality officially, especially with the introduction of their new API.

Profile name as anchor text

When you’re linking through to any of your social network profiles online, it’s important to use anchor text, as best practice. When you are linking through to your Twitter profile, try and use your profile name as the anchor text, consistently. When Google accesses the link it is the first reference they’re getting to your profile. If the anchor text correlates to the name in the url, which will be the same as the first thing Google will read when it visits the actual Twitter profile, you’ve given Google (or the other search engines) every indication of the relevancy of your profile to that particular keyword. This is also why it’s important to choose your profile name wisely and though you are limited by characters, think about what keyword(s) you would like to get in there.

Link to the good tweets

If you’ve found that a particular tweet of yours is getting a lot of attention, then help this along even further by building in more links. Every time someone retweets you, posts a link in their blog, Facebook profile etc.. it is building another link to that particular page. You can boost this even further by linking to that tweet where you can, such as through your Facebook page, blog, email signatures, newsletters etc.. When you’re doing this, make sure you include a keyword within that tweet, in the anchor text that you use.

Don’t forget hashtags

Hashtags essentially act like metakeywords and they can be a good way of including keywords in your tweets without it looking like a tweet was purely written to stuff in some keywords. When you’re writing important tweets that you think might get linked to or retweeted, try and include a few keywords here that will likely stay with the tweet as it gets linked to, building up the relevancy of that tweet for your particular keyword(s).

Tags: googe +, social search, twitter bio, twitter followers, twitter link, twitter linking, Twitter Profile, twitter profile name, twitter search, twitter seo, twitter seo tip