why YOUR business needs to consider twitter
I’m a geek, I think we established that… as a geek, I like to try new sites and applications when they come out, often discarding them if they don’t offer any real business benefit.
Twitter was one of those. I set up a personal account… I could see how it was useful for certain types of internet users, to share ideas… I got that sometimes it was the best way of rapidly publishing information when you need to share updates with friends/colleagues or customers – like live blogging from a conference to say “this is on at stand so n so in 20mins” – in the US the SMS updates are free – but I didn’t really get how it was useful to most businesses.
I realised something yesterday, and I hold my hand up, I should of pieced it all together sooner..
EVERY status update on twitter (some people call it a “tweet”) gets its own URL – take a recent update from us about GimPhoto for example.
Yes, the link has a “Nofollow” tag… but… there is plenty of discussion about how the different engines actually use nofollow.
I’m also pretty sure that my rapidly rising traffic isn’t just because of my amazing writing style (ahem), I’ll be having a dig in Analytics, but I’m sure Twitter has driven traffic to this site.
Add to this the following post about Twitter and SEO (You should all subscribe to Blogstorm btw)
It makes me think that Twitter is not only a great way to communicate to a wider group of people (it is searchable) but it must help with SEO.
I’m NOT an SEO guru, but I’d love to hear from some of you that are!
Hi Luke
My take on this is as follows. There are 2 issues here, nofollow on links and relevant content.
You can have relevant content appear in the SERPS regrdless of NOFOLLOW. (Look at Wikipedia!)
The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link, thereby not passing any linkjuice that will help the Web site being linked to get better SERPs
Sites like Twitter will use nofollow to stop themselves becoming a target for Spammers looking for lots of backlinks.
So back to SERPS, if the content is valid, relevant and up-to-date when someone conducts a search then let it be found.
This will let the user find your relevant content click on the SERP and end up at Twitter, they can click on your link and end up at your site, but the searchengines do not give that link any weight whatsoever.
NB I do know that the bio section of Twitter has been expoited for linking in the past, I do not know the current situation and whether this loophole has been blocked.