Confession: this blog post is an example of blatant SEO.
According to Google, the phrase “Twitter status” is searched 14,800 times per month in the U.S. as of this posting. I’m doing this on purpose to prove a point: blatant SEO isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it’s done correctly. In the case of this particular post, I had no idea what I was going to write about before I started. I just knew that I was going to put the words “Twitter status” in the title tags and that it had to be at least somewhat relevant to SEO. Also, I needed to deliver something of value to someone who types “Twitter status” into the Google search bar. I won’t be using that phrase any more in this post, for fear that Google may penalize me for excess keyword saturation, though I don’t know exactly where the threshold lies.
Fortunately, I’ve collected links to a couple of high-quality blog posts from different sources on the subject of how Twitter relates to SEO. I’ll share them here.
I’ll start with a classic Mashable article from 2009. It’s a good primer on how to get the maximum SEO value out of Twitter. More recently, the SEOMoz blog talked about an “unexpected case study” that demonstrates the value between tweets and SEO.
Lesson learned: you can put together a blog post pretty quickly if you read blogs regularly and save up links to the good ones. There’s no rocket science here. Keyword research should give you a good indication of what people are looking for. In this case the phrase “Twitter SEO” doesn’t really tell me a heck of a lot about what someone actually wants if he/she types that phrase into a search engine, so I’m somewhat taking a stab in the dark here. Sometimes, SEO is like that. Short keyword phrases with large search volume might draw a diverse crowd with different needs. You can’t please them all, but you can make your best effort to provide something of value.
Tags: twitter status
