How using Twitter can help to boost your website search engine rankings

Hey hey

Following this post here we're now elaborating on how using Twitter effectively can actually help boost your website's organic search engine rankings.

Again, this post is really just a bunch of Sheffield SEO geeks telling you guys what we do to help our rankings by using Twitter. There are no real right or wrongs here, it's just opinion. And, as before we assume some things:

1. You already have a Twitter account
2. You know a little bit about SEO

Let us begin…

Ok, so you've now got your Twitter account up and running and you're well on the way to getting yourself a fair few followers. You're getting involved and people are enjoying reading your valuable, informative Tweets.

So how can we use this new found tool to help your SEO?

Well first of all you have to write some quality Tweets and start using your #tags to good effect. Let's say that the main keyphrase you optimise your website for is "beauty therapist"; based on this we have to write interesting Tweets that people want to read and that contain your keywords.

Examples being:

"Quality free tips for all budding #beauty #therapists, click here: <url>"

"Looking for Hollywood #beauty secrets without the celebrity costs?! DM us to chat to a #therapist for free advice…"

Simple, we know. And we don't know much about beauty therapy so please forgive the simplistic approach! However, the premise is there; use your keywords effectively but don't just spam the Twitterverse. Bad examples are Tweets like:

"#beauty #therapist #Sheffield #beautytherapist"

Just sticking keywords in does not help at all, because you'll simply lose followers; where is the value in your Tweet? Why should we as readers stick around to see what you have to say?

Makes sense doesn't it…

Adding value to your website

Now that we're posting good Tweets which include our main website keyphrases, we can start to pull this quality content through to the main website.

How? By using one of Twitter's prebuilt widgets. If you head over to http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_profile and take a look at the different options you'll find a version for embedding your Twitter feed into your website. The code is all ready to go and you just copy and paste it straight into your source markup.

Voila! A live Twitter feed for your website which shows search engines frequently changing, context relevant and keyword rich Tweets everytime you post! Of course this does depend on how actve you are on Twitter but assuming you follow everything we've mentioned herein then you should be posting quality Tweets already.. :0)

Don't like the standard Twitter widgets?

Then make your own by using the RSS feed that Twitter provides. (Want to know where to find your twitter RSS feed? Try the Twitter forums.)

If you're a PHP, Ruby, .NET developer etc you'll have no problem building a reader for your website that you can style to your heart's content. All with the same result; a Twitter feed of quality keyword rich content.

We're done

Like we said at the start of this post, this is what we do, and it seems to work nicely. If you have any other thoughts on this or you use any other methods that you want to share with the world, please do get involved in the comments section or grab us on Twitter!

Adios and thanks for reading. :0)