There’s rather a lot of Twitter rhetoric being bandied about in the Web marketing industry these days so naturally a common question that’s been coming from Firetop clients is “Would being on Twitter help our search engine positioning?” and my short answer on this is “Indirectly yes, but nothing momentous“.

In my opinion the biggest SEO benefit of Twitter is in providing a publishing vehicle that you can syndicate onto a website’s home page to provide an element of freshly updated daily content. We’ve known for years that Google weights pages that have daily content on them more favourably than those that stay static for long periods of time, so in this way one might argue that Twitter post syndication helps SEO. However, by the same token you could just as easily change your home page content daily through some other means like a Content Management System.

If you’ve already decided to seriously embrace Twitter for the benefit of marketing to that social medium then of course you may decide to use Tweets on your home page for SEO as it’s really not much extra work to implement (typically). Micro-blogging with 140 characters via Twitter takes almost no time at all versus full article blogging and if fresh content for SEO is your primary goal then it does the job. It’s important to remember though that saying something useful, on topic and of consequence is important on Twitter in order to drive followers who will be seeing your regular Tweets.

Your Twitter followers do provide a potential link building source if they like what you are saying and decide to investigate your main site as a consequence of your mini biog link (which incidentally is one extra back-link). If you are writing blogs you can promote each newly published blog entry via Twitter to your followers, which again means that you might more quickly generate back-links assuming followers are in a similar field and that what you have produced is useful content that they want to promote on their own blogs or ‘Retweet’.

Finally, in addition to the extra biog back-link already mentioned above, your personalised Twitter profile page does provide an opportunity to have an additional Google search result listing – separate to your main website’s. Remember that your Twitter profile name appears at the start of the page’s <title> tag (still the most important tag for SEO in my eyes) so it’s important to make use of the 20 or so <title> characters you use there… within reason! The more useful your Tweets, the more followers you will gain and the more links your profile page might gain – making the back-link you have there more valuable too.

To summarise, all of these small search engine optimisation gains from Twitter are indirect and in my opinion it’s really not worth considering Twitter for commercial gain unless you  intend to fully maximise Your Twitter experience…

DECEMBER 2009 > An update on this topic which all changed with Real Time Search Results!

Great Hitwise article on Twitter about the key uses of Twitter.