Our MyST Blogsite generates highly qualified leads compared to other venues of online lead generation. One of the primary reasons is we have a trust factor, which we built (and continue to build) by providing dependable and accurate information through the blogsite. As a result, actions are more meaningful for business and the customer."
Here's a top-ten list of important SEO considerations for your micro-blogging strategy.
If you hope to improve your search findability with your micro-blogging effort, here are some things to consider.
Content
As you know, good content is the cornerstone of a successful organic search strategy; micro-blog content is no different. However, it's really difficult to measure esoteric quality in 140 characters (or less). Ideally, tweets will provide good headlines that lead readers to good content. Think of tweets as good headlines about good content.
Create keyword-rich tweets. Typically, this happens naturally, but from time-to-time, take a few moments to craft your headlines paying extra attention to the terms and phrases that really matter to your customers. Even though tweets are limited to 140 characters, search queries are generally shorter. As such, it's possible to leverage Twitter content for long-tail search findability. But be cognizant of the tradeoff between long-term findability and short-term interest. This post from Louis Gray is particularly helpful.
Use locality-rich keywords. If your business depends on a local trading market, occasionally post content that reflects your locality with terms such as community, city, county, state, and zip code. The use of area code will help establish your locality in search engines as well.
FollowMe links on every blog post. Since follow me links point to your Twitter profile, there's no harm in creating lots of inbound links to that page - this is a core requirement to high ranking pages. There's also no SEO or business downside to adding new followers that have already read some of your content; hopefully this will lead to more inbound references to your blogsite.
Simulcast blog posts to Twitter. When you post in your blogsite, also take a few minutes to post about your new blog post in Twitter. This is as simple as copying the headling and including a URL to the blog post. Doing so will generate additional inbound links to your content and call attention to the latest post to your followers. Don't be bashful about asking your followers to re-tweet the post about your blog post, but save a request like this for special or important content - specifically content that is generally helpful to the readers.
Register with Twitter-specific registries. Add your business (and/or personal profile) to Twibs (example), TweeplePages, and WeFollow. These (and other) services will help to sustain or increase discoverability of your Twitter profile page and timeline content.
Integration
This is a topic that few people discuss, perhaps because it can be complex. But some of the ideas presented below are simple and straightforward and require no programming or cost. Integration of your Twitter content is a key SEO success factor though, so don't dismiss these ideas simply because you lack the technical resources.
Subscribe to your Twitter feed. Google and Yahoo news readers present unique opportunities to increase visibility of your Twitter content. Take a few minutes and subscribe to your Twitter feed in each service. This will cause both search services to probe the feed looking for content to index, sometimes accelerating the discovery process by many weeks or months. It will also instantiate your Twitter content in an RSS space where millions of people look for news and information.
Syndicate your timeline. Most people think that adding a Twitter widget or a WidgetBox to their website or blogsite will increase search visibility for the syndicated content. News flash - it wont. Widgets are client-side integration tools; search engines (including Google) are not able to see the content displayed within these tools. As such, they are beneficial only to people that are browsing your site. You really need to syndicate your Twitter timeline at the server. (example - see important note below)
Syndicate @ mentions and re-tweets. While your public posting timeline is full of SEO-maximizing terms and phrases, posts by other people such as @ replies and re-tweets, contain ideal references to your profile page and your business and personal brands. Displaying this content in a reputable and consistently indexed page will increase the odds of greater exposure to your tweets and increased value to the pages where they appear. (see important note below)
Publish Twitter feed address(es). While your Twitter profile includes a link to your RSS timeline, you'll get wider visibility and possibly greater visibility if you add the link to your home page. Ideally, this feed should be added using the RSS auto-discovery meta-tag format as documented here. This will make it possible for visitors to see your Twitter feed integrated into the tool bars of browsers that support RSS auto-discovery.
Twittersphere Landing page. I recommend you create a single page where visitors can learn about you, your company, and other Twitter members of your organization (example). This serves as a master contact page and may include links to follow you, contact you through email, and even provide syndicated displays of your Twitter timelines. Displaying the timelines creates additional on-page SEO benefit for your Twitter content as well as the people you are responding to.
IMPORTANT: To syndicate content with SEO benefit you MUST integrate the RSS content at the server; this is to say that the RSS feed must be parsed and rendered as part of the page's HTML itself. Anything short of this, and you will achieve nothing from an SEO perspective.
This serves as a master contact page and may include links to follow you, contact you through email, and even provide syndicated displays of your Twitter timelines.
While RSS still plays a very important role for practically all online publications to get their news out to subscribers, and Google plays a critical role for the stories to get picked up by casual visitors, Twitter is playing a middleman role and growing in the minds of many publishers, who see the microblogging service as a significant traffic driver.
I spoke with a group of bloggers in Phoenix recently. What I found is that very few had any business from their blogs despite a lot of effort. I have 5 closings and 7 active buyers directly from [our MyST blogsite] in 2008. I know because I ask. One person told me they have been reading my blog for almost a year before they called me to buy a property."
