July 23rd, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

As you know I’ve been playing around with Twitter for a couple of months now. As a communication tool I still don’t get it, sorry if that offends but I just don’t. On the other hand however I have found some very good uses for Twitter and I’m going to share one of them with you now. It’s how I’m using Twitter to funnel long tail keyword traffic straight to my websites.

If you look carefully at your average Twitter profile you can see that Twitter has become the new WikiPedia. What do I mean? Twitter is hoarding page rank in a cyclical way that is boosting the page rank (and authority) of its own pages. The only followed links on your Twitter profile are the links to the people you are following down the bottom right. These links point to other Twitter pages. Everything else on the page is no followed so under the new scheme of things a lot of juice is getting passed back to Google. On top of this every Twitter profile owner links to their page at least once (we just do OK), so in effect millions of users are funnelling page rank in to Twitter and very little ever comes out.

Sooo…if we have a lot of followers then that means a lot of followed links heading to our Twitter page and high page rank. The average Twitter profile with more than 500 followers seems to have a page rank of 4, some of the bigger names are much much higher. The good news is that these pages also rank in the search engines. Just do a search for John Chow and see what the second result is? This is what we can use to our advantage to pull in some killer long tail keyword traffic.

Once we have the keyword we want to target all we need to do is create a twitter profile as that phrase. Now if the phrase you want is longer than 15 characters just use part of it (the beginning is best if available). Straight away this gives us the phrase in our URL – bonus on-the-page SEO! From now on every tweet we do on that profile needs to relate to our term in one way or another. In some of these Tweets include a link back to your content. If you’ve had to use a shortened version of your phrase as your profile name then make sure to use the full phrase as your name and include this phrase in the majority of your tweets.

The next stage is to find some followers, we absolutely need as many followers as possible for this to work. In the past this may have been difficult but now there are plenty of reciprocal follow services out there. I use TwitterFollower. Within days you should easily be able to get a couple of hundred followers. Remember that we’re not looking for traffic from our followers, all we want is a chance at a followed link from their profile. It takes no time at all for the link juice to start flowing and for your Twitter profile to start ranking. Of course people going to that page from the search engines are likely to follow one of your links out to your real content. I’ve seen upwards of 60% CTR using this method.

I know this post is going to upset a lot of people who have been using this on the sly for a while. I also know that there are a lot of internet marketers out there who just don’t “get” Twitter, I hope that some of you find this post useful?

ps Forgot to mention, you’ll need an e-mail account for each Twitter profile you create so make sure you have them ready first.

Related Posts

Paul B