By Sherice Jacob – web designer, copywriter and author of Get Niche Quick! Follow her @sherice
Did you know that your Twitter tweets are ripe with search engine juice that you can put to use to get more marketing exposure? Of course, links you post on Twitter, including links in your bio, are automatically no-follow, meaning the search engines will follow them, but “link juice” (like Google PageRank) isn’t carried over.
That doesn’t mean the party’s over for optimizing your Twitter page though. Search engines do index Twitter tweets (through “statuses” – which look like this). So how can you help ratchet your tweets up into search engine results as well as increase your number of followers?
By including relevant keywords within your title on your status pages.
Twitter creates the title for your status pages by taking up a slew of characters for itself. You can’t change that part (such as Twitter / Sherice Jacob) but you CAN change what comes after it. There are only about 27 characters available for you to use (and you thought fitting something into 140 was tough!), but every little bit counts.
In addition to showing up in search engines, when you include keywords in the titles of your status pages, you also become more visible through Twitter’s own search interface, as well as the many search sites out there that comb through Twitter posts and tweets for certain keywords – like this:
If I were looking for twitter tips, and these tweets came up in the results, would I want to follow these people to see what else they had to share? Absolutely!
And if you click on “View Tweet” for any of these results, you’ll be taken to – surprise! The status page! Status pages are static – which means they will stay there forever unless you delete them or Twitter disappears from the face of the Earth (not likely!) – so use them to your marketing advantage and start including a few keywords in your titles and tweets.
Now that you know how to better leverage your titles and statuses, get to work and start optimizing those pages with every link you post!
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thanks that was very helpful!!
@billbean
Clear and simple. I like that. Thanks @sherice I’m still trying to get a handle on this stuff. I suppose catching up will never really happen.
@btrandolph
I’m a bit confused. You mention to the “title” of the status page and state that “twitter takes up a good deal for itself,” leaving 27 characters to play with. Are you talking about the URL of the page? Are you saying there is a way to enter your own 27 character string in the same way it’s possible to override some url shortener-assigned URLs? Cool beans! Or do you mean make sure the _text_ of your tweets is keyword-rich? either way, useful tip.
@ScottFindlater
Hi, Great post. The only thing I am slightly confused about is where this keyword title comes into play. I understand that when I click View Tweet on the twitter search results the urls are all like the one you showed – “http://twitter.com/ScottFindlater/statuses/5895951355″ ending with a number. The SERP description appears to be the tweet contents, so where does the keyword url come in? Thanks, Scott.
@ScottFindlater
Hi again, having sat back and thought some more, I understand you are referring to the browser title for keyword optimsation. Thanks for a great SEO tip
@dhirschl
I’m not sure what you are referring to when you say you “you CAN change what comes after it” and “about 27 characters available” ?
I think I am missing the picture. I understand that you can make these changes, but I don’t see where you explain how to do it.
Am I missing something?
@shubhamoy
Amazing tips for using Twitter in a better way. Hats off to the author
@mikestenger
I’ve also found that the first sentence or so of your Twitter bio can rank in Google. Of course not a very competitive term unless you were some sort of SEO genius I guess but no joke, I rank #2 on Google for “Coolest Redhead Online”.
You can’t make stuff like that up! So now, when a fellow redhead tries to dispute that, I just tell ‘em to take it up with Google LOL
@sherice
Okay – let me clarify — The first 27 characters or so of your tweet are what will show up in your status page, so if you’re sharing a link or you have your blog set to automatically tweet your latest posts, you’ll want to make those first 27 characters of your tweet a little more SEO’d —
I did it with this post – see here:
http://twitter.com/sherice/status/5923656525
I just made sure the keywords “Twitter SEO tips” appeared after the default Twitter/Sherice Jacob part. So if anyone is searching for those keywords (and lots of people are), my status will appear in the results.
Does it make more sense now?
@shrinagesh
Awesome. Twitter results now being streamlined into the serps, using the 140 chars wisely from seo perspective is a great idea. Thanks for the tip
@Monika_FPilates
Thank you Sherice, the additional explanation was helpful as I wasn’t sure which 27 characters you meant. Now trying to work out how to express myself in 27 characters!!!
Many thanks
@howbloggerearn
Awesome idea! Thank you very much for sharing it.
@PaintingDenver
Great Tip,Tks. & know twitter status page has got to help!
Off/Topic, but here I go. Can’t help also thinking branding will eventually pay off w/ keyword domain being painting denver. Had another keyword domain/template site w/o doing a solitary thing seo, & w/s grader of 35 @hubspot. 7 mos. old site, getting bottom of 1st. Top of 2nd. on google for phrase painting interior.net
This weekend, cleaned it up, making deep links, has g/p 51. Painting Denver gets 8900 searches p/mo. on google, being very geo targeted. ) I like PaintingDenver better in that have complete name on twitter as well as w.site, but will not turn down aNy business if someone finds http://www.paintinginterior.net
Wonder if statuspage name for twitter is takenLOL
@mvolpe
I actually think an even better way to leverage Twitter for SEO is to have a blog where you publish really useful and interesting articles. Then you Tweet links to these articles, driving more people to the blog and getting more people to link to your posts. Social media is a tool to build links (authority) for your content by promoting your content to people in social media.
The individual Tweet/status-update pages that get created by Twitter have so little authority that they very, very rarely rank well for anything useful. You are much better off taking your tweet and using it as the title of a short blog article. A blog article on a blog where you have built some authority will rank much better than a single Tweet.
@Freedomcoach
I’d like to get more clarity on “status pages”. I am unfortunately unfamiliar with this term and you would think I would know about it since I have 9000 Twitter followers. Anyways, someone, please tell so I can fully comprehend and apply this Twitter wisdom. Thanks.
@sherice
@Mike – Oh you’re absolutely right with that. I’d much rather tweet a link to a great blog post than just use Twitter for the sake of trying to get a little leverage on the search engines. Right now the tweets appear more often in Twitter’s search engine than in Google’s (obviously) but I do think Google is keeping a close eye on how Twitter is evolving.
@Howard, the status pages are static pages that are made every time you write a tweet. If you go to your Twitter home page and click on the date you made the tweet, you will see the status page. The date doesn’t actually look like a link (it’s not underlined) but if you click on it, you should be able to find it.
Hope this helps!
@D2Coding
This would be a good reason to put hash tags at the beginning of the post instead of at the end too, no?
@sherice
Absolutely. Every little bit helps!
@sonlinebiz
I’ll have to go edit my auto tweet plug-in settings now. I guess to automate this all post titles must be SEO’d till the very 27th character.
P.S: How do I access my status page?
@AtlantaLuxHomes
I usually put he hashtags at the end, but I guess they may serve a higher SEO purpose when placed in the beginning?