Yes. Twitter can be used to not only drive prospects to your websites, articles and blog posts, the tweets themselves carry a potential goldmine in good search engine optimization. Most of us know that Google and Yahoo have a “nofollow” stance on the links inside of a tweet. This means that these search engines give no backlink value to websites embedded in a twitter link. However, Ask.com does. The market share for Ask.com my be small compared to the big three search engines but Ask still gets 350 million searches per month.

The real SEO advantage from tweets came in the fact that the search engines are including real-time tweets in their search results. This means that tweets appearing in search results will have almost instant updates as compared to regular page listings that need to be indexed to be updated. Keeping this in mind, your tweets need to be keyword rich so that Google and the other engines can locate these tweets quickly. Google will only display the first 42 characters of a tweet in their results, so make sure that your keywords are near the beginning or start out with them: “Public Speaking: Check out these great humor skills” and then leave your link to the resource in the tweet.

The number of visitors coming to a webpage because of a tweet can help with your search ranking too. I had 437 unique visitors to a website in 5 minutes because of a tweet I sent out about a resource “You just have to see!” And this was just from my followers…not from the search results. This blast of traffic, called “Usage Data” can help increase page rank and search positioning. Considering the inclusion in search results, the buzz you can create and automatic tweet updates to Facebook, FriendFeed and more from your Twitter account, you can quickly see how powerful this popular tool can be for your website success.

By: Colin Martin

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