Consumers discover online. They discover services and products, they discover memes and cartoons, they discover ideas and thought. And they discover all of this through online search.
And if that’s how people are discovering, that’s how businesses need to focus on being discovered. Earlier this week, I launched an ebook, Learning SEO from the Experts, that helps businesses learn how to do exactly that. The experts featured come from HubSpot, SEOmoz, SEO.com, and Distilled.
The first section is specifically on keywords. What isn’t mentioned, however, is how Twitter can accelerate your keyword strategy by becoming extra fuel for your SEO efforts. Here’s three simple, quick, and easy ways to optimize your Twitter presence for not only Twitter success, but SEO success.
1. Create a special subset of Twitter keywords.
While your business should have a set of keywords or key phrases it wants to rank for, all those keywords may not translate over seamlessly to Twitter — especially if they’re long. Analyze your keywords through various tools, and pick a subset of keywords specifically for Twitter. This set should be smaller, as Twitter is updating constantly, and as we learned a few weeks ago, Google constantly updates its algorithm to display the most recent results — so that tweet from yesterday is probably long gone! Try to have a small set of keywords and use them throughout your tweets to help boost your rankings.
2. Include keywords in your Twitter bio.
Twitter allows 160 characters worth of information to be displayed on your homepage. This ‘about’ section is typically used to provide bio information. Don’t riddle this with keywords, but be sure to have at least one in there to reflect your business in an accurate way, while helping to improve search visibility. Keep in mind that search engine results often display your Twitter bio in the description of the link when a Twitter username appears in search. Make it attention-grabbing so that users are inclined to click on the link.
3. Ensure tweet lengths are retweetable.
As if the constraint of 140 characters isn’t enough, here’s a little more limitation. Make sure your tweets save a solid 10-20 characters leftover so that users who “RT @username: TWEET COPY” don’t have to eliminate your keyword to make all the characters fit! Try creating a formula for your tweets based off how long your Twitter username is (which brings up the importance of a short username).
Happy optimizing!
Photo credit: mpcstudios.com
