Twitter in Perspective
Twitter is a great communication tool for group collaboration. Witness the political shifts in north Africa and how it helped link like minded people to organize and rise up against ruthless dictators. We are still getting many calls from customers caught up in the Twitter and broader social network frenzy that believe it will provide miraculous results for their site marketing.
We have installed Twitter feeds on dozens of sites over the last year and we have Twitter feeds on several of our own non seo directory sites (e.g. www.boatinggeorgianbay.com ) that we tweet to daily and monitor carefully for results. We don't have a Twitter feed on our main site www.first-page-seo.com. Competing for search engine marketing business online is the toughest gig in town and we come across clearly as #1 in Ontario. If it was really useful from an organic search perspective believe me, we'd be tweeting our heads off.
Here's the straight goods on Twitter from a marketing perspective. Twitter will add some interest to your site but it will not have any measurable affect on your organic site placement. Tweets have been indexed by Google for quite some time, however none of them see the light of day on search. Check it out for yourself. Do a search on "Ontario resorts" and you are searching an index of approx. 12.7 million pages. You will not find a single Twitter post in the first 50 pages.
Ok so what about backlinks? Not very effective there either. If you are running an existing Twitter feed now and you tweet with the occasional backlink to you site (or even daily) and you check your backlinks with link popularity software you will see very few backlinks are from Twitter. As a matter of fact in most cases even if you are tweeting daily and you have thousands of backlinks you will not typically see any from Twitter.
So why is this? Just because Google indexes Twitter posts does not mean they will have the desired affect or any effect on your organic position. Fact is Twitter posts are too shallow to have any search prowess in any competitive keyword search and there is not enough context in a tweet to create a backlink that would establish anything over a PR 0 or PR 1.
Now this could change in the future if Google did major algorithm changes to treat Twitter differently than other content and give it a boost - given a tweets lack of content and context. However this would be a major shift in direction because it would in fact entail special treatment for Twitter and that means running parallel algorithms integrated downstream - which is possible, but easier said than done. More likely that the Google search function would include a separate search request for Twitter similar to what it does with images and video.
What you can see creeping up into the search placement listings is syndicated news. On this same search for "Ontario resorts" two of the top 10 positions were occupied by news sources. And guess what? ... news is trusted by Google and creates viral backlinks when syndicated properly. Downside of news is the story placement doesn’t stick for long as the news gets stale - but the backlinks are still in the indexed content and will be around supporting your site position for a long time.
To be fair, some search engine algorithms have a traffic component (like Google Chrome), but it is a small factor and unless you have thousands of Twitter followers it won’t be a big benefit either to your site marketing.
So to set the record straight we are not against social media or Twitter per say, but there are more effective and easier ways to influence content, back links and ultimately your site position than with Twitter. Twitter has an obvious use in specific group communications but most Tweets are like background noise. Don't get mislead and focus too much of your resources and efforts socially with Twitter. You'd be better off bookmarking social article releases in terms of backlink results to your site. How do we know? - we live and breath this stuff and we've tested it over and over on many sites.
In a recent FAQ video conference session Google's very knowledgeable algorithm guru Matt Cutts set the record straight on how Tweeting can benefit organic placement. Basically he related that the benefit would only come to the site if someone reading the Tweet was interested enough in the site/topic to place a backlink from their own site to the site referenced in the Tweet. Of course the manual site vote backlink would also have to have some kind of theme match - so the link would need some relevant anchor text to go with it. In other words there is no direct algorithmic connection from Twitter to your site. I would make the case that this is pretty far removed as a link strategy and although there is nothing wrong with Tweeting, the methodology would be almost hopeless as a way to help your organic search position. Reality is, you need to have other reasons to Tweet because it is not a terribly effective way to market your site organically at this juncture in time. Twitter is for social networking and it is not a seo tool for direct organic placement improvement. It is clear that there are more effective, less time consuming ways to build your backlinks than Tweeting because there is no direct connection from the Tweet from an organic marketing perspective to your site. It is strictly a case of human connection i.e. I read your Tweet and liked your info and I'll give you a link from my site to show others.
Without question Twitter is addictive and I love to Tweet on some of our feeds myself - so have fun and use your Twitter site feed to build general interest to the page ... but don't expect placement improvements attributed from Twitter or you will be disappointed.
