What do you get when you cross a network of 124 million users posting news and information with more than 800 million daily searches? I’d call it a search engine optimization opportunity you can’t afford to ignore!

While Twitter itself is serving up search results on Twitter.com, Google is also indexing Twitter profiles and updates (tweets). Anyone who’s interested in search engine optimization is likely to wonder at Twitter’s place in the SEO toolkit.

I won’t profess to be a Twitter expert here. But this weekend I took some more time to dig into the Twitter-SEO question. In that quest, I’ve discovered a few easy things you can do to add SEO power to your Twitter presence.

1. Tweet new content to accelerate indexing.

Just added a new blog post? Issued a press release? Of course it makes sense to tweet it. But what about a new page or section on your website?

While new blog posts and press releases (depending on distribution platform) tend to show up in SERPs quickly even without tweeting, traditional web content has been known to take weeks, even months, to show any significant ranking results. Entirely new websites sometimes take six months to a year to build up solid search rankings.

Some SEO practitioners have been experimenting with Twitter’s usefulness in getting new content indexed and ranked quickly. It may be working (see this Twitter discussion at WebmasterWorld).

No one seems to know exactly how this can result in new content being indexed, as Twitter stamps all tweeted links with the standard no-follow tag. One possible explanation is that your tweets may result in links popping up on other web properties. If you’ve got an active group of like-minded followers, they may just be interested enough to write about your newly posted link in their blog, for example.

Regardless, it may be worth using anchor text in the URL you include in your tweet. (Just create an account to use the custom naming option with a URL shortening service like bit.ly If you want to use more than one word, separate with a hyphen. Just in case you didn’t know, search engines do not index shortened URLs but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead.)

Reminder: Just don’t make all your tweets about your own content – nobody wants to follow a prima dona I’m-so-great-it’s-all-about-me kind of tweep. Remember to share other interesting items, ask questions, and tweet facts that will provide value and interest to your followers.

2. Optimize your Twitter profile page.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask all rank Twitter profile pages in search results. If you’re on Twitter and interested in gaining followers, you’ll want your page to show up. Here are a few tips to optimize your Twitter account page.

* Choose a username that relates to your area of expertise. This username forms part of your page title tag and URL.
* Consider your account name, too. This can be different from your username and is also part of the page title.
* Your Twitter bio becomes your meta description tag, so optimize accordingly.
* Build links to your Twitter page. Link to your Twitter profile from your global footer or another similar spot on your website and promote your Twitter account whenever appropriate.
* Follow others in your direct line of business. It may impact how relevant your account appears for the terms you’ve included in your username, account name and description.
* It’s also been suggested that having a lot of (related) followers can boost PageRank for your profile. Regardless, having a lot of followers brings plenty of non-SEO benefits your way, so of course work on growing and retaining a quality following.

Tip: Like much you do in SEO, doing good for your Twitter followers should come before anything you do for pure SEO impact. Remember, Twitter carries another set of benefits that you should be aiming for BEFORE you even try to build more SEO into it. Like anything worth building rankings for, your Twitter profile page should offer value to the people who land there.)

3. Optimize your tweets.

Your tweets can help you gain more exposure for your profile, the content you link to, and your brand in general when you optimize your tweets for findability.

The title tag for a tweet is around 42 characters: the first 30 characters or so of the tweet together with the username of the account tweeting it. So make sure any keywords appear as close as possible to the front end.

When retweeting, it’s better to have the RT@username placed at the end of the post, rather than the start, as it keeps any carefully placed keywords near the beginning. Follow this style and others may pick up on it, too, when retweeting your updates. You may also want to keep your tweet to 120 characters so people will have space to add RT@username without chopping off part of your original tweet.

Don’t forget that you also want to optimize your tweets for findability on the Twitter search engine itself. Use the hashtag (#) symbol when you post, next to the topic your post relates to. Keep in mind that some SEOs caution against overuse of the hashtag.

mcdamas

An ordinary man pursuing extraordinary goal best describes who I am all about. I do my best, God does the rest.

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