Does Twitter Have Any SEO Value?

Twitter adds a “Nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. This causes Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link.

So does this mean that Twitter has no impact on SEO?

According to a blog post by Mihaela Lica The answer depends on your definition of SEO.

If you agree that optimising a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. If you accept the definition that “Creating” is “onsite SEO.”  And “Promoting” is “offsite SEO.”  She argues that if you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage that you cannot afford to miss.

A number of other indirect SEO benefits from Twitter can be realised as follows:

• By posting your Tweets to your main website home page. This frequent content updating will help increase the authority of your home page.
• If you have a blog you can create a new Tweet for each new blog topic, If you have enough followers this should help create additional back-links to your site. Assuming your followers are in a similar field they may put a link to you article on their site or re-tweet the article that can be picked up by their followers.
• Your Twitter profile page will be indexed by Google. This means that you can use the title tag on this page to deliver organic traffic to your site.
• Twitter can be of value as a means of syndicating your content across the web. An SEO consultant, James Williams carried out the following experiment involving:
  • Creation of a new page on his website (It was already listed in Google’s Webmaster tools)
  • Sending a Tweet to this page
  • Next day he checked the back-links to the page
  • He saw that the tweet was mentioned
  • Plus after a short time the link appeared on many other websites.

On the negative side to all of this, since most links from Twitter are shortened links, they usually result in poor conversion rates for direct selling.

In summary I believe that Twitter can deliver significant benefits for increasing brand visibility and awareness. However I have not seen enough benefits to convince me that Twitter can be  one of the best methods of direct selling.

If anyone has experience otherwise, I would like to hear your story.

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