Our very own Jon Smith (Co-Director of the SEO-Authority) has kindly agreed to offer a sneak preview into his new book which will go on public sale on the 1st July titled:

                         Dominate Your Market With Twitter:

                         Tweet your way to business success

To avoid infringements of publisher rights (Publisher: Infinite Ideas) we can give you exclusive quotes from the book that will give you some insight into Jons Twitter research and findings, but to get the full story, yes you guessed it, you will have to buy it.

This blog post isn't about plugging the book as much as possible (did I mention its available in all good book shops) it's simply extracting some of the key points relating to SEO Strategy.

We all know the importance of back links and authority ones at that, however Twitter isn’t great for providing such links but that doesn’t mean it cant help with your SEO efforts:

Jon states:

“A <nofollow> tag is an instruction to the search engines not to follow a link to its destination and to essentially ignore it. Twitter could be a great tool for generating thousands if not millions of links, because every time you post a web address in your Tweet this could be a valuable backlink to your website... in fact lots of people are including their URLs in their Tweets for that express reason – however, what they don’t realise is that Twitter is adding a <nofollow> tag to those links essentially nullifying them from an SEO perspective.” (JS)

He goes on to explain:

“Why? Well, if links within Tweets were taken into account by search engines, spammers would immediately try to take advantage of it and flood Twitter with useless links and spam. For that reason Twitter is adding the <nofollow> tag to ensure the party isn’t ruined by spammers and abuse of the system” (JS)

So should you even bother with Twitter links?

Very much so, regardless of the <nofollow> tag, the search engine web bots may not be able to follow them but humans certainly can. Additionally if you have something informative to Tweet to your Followers then include it, after all quality content as with websites will attract a natural flow of targeted traffic.

Jon does point out that:

“Although links posted within Tweets are not relevant for search engines… Don’t forget that you are able to add a link within your profile to your website – the web page you point to on your profile does not have a <nofollow> tag so it will indeed assist with your  search engines rankings.” (JS)

Twitter Trends

Twitter is a great way to visualize trends and observe what are latest hot topics. SEO is very much related to keywords and Twitter is a great mechanism for tracking those keywords and in real-time conversations, so back links are not the be all and end all of SEO.

Jon writes:

“So, instead you can focus your attention on Twitter to see what is becoming interesting, which keywords users are using in order to create relevant articles or content. Therefore Twitter is a great way to both anticipate and to monitor interesting subjects, and to ensure that you are first to know what is already or is becoming important.” (JS)

Tip: Check out some of the TAG cloud tools such as Tweetscoop which present visual depictions of a sites content to help you quickly identify those trends.

Finally Jon talks about Twitter and SERP’s

“Twitter posts and accounts appear on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), especially if you have linked to them from other sites (like your blog or your website etc.)"

"Using Twitter regularly and including relevant keywords in your Tweets will increase your Twitter account visibility on search results, whether or not the search engine user is a Twitter user. This is a great way to drive that traffic to your website.” (JS)

Give us a tweet..

To find out more about this book and other publications from the Author Jon Smith please visit our Publications Page