Twitter And SEO: Can Tweeting Increase Your Visibility In SERPs? - Insight From Semalt
Popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest are very good places to increase the brand awareness among the potential customers. Thanks to the recognition built through the social media, the users are more and more likely to click on a link containing a content related to a company. Factor CTR (click-through rate) indirectly affects the page ranking in the natural search results.
The links marked with a nofollow tag, contrary to the popular opinion, are not insignificant at all. It is mainly such links that we can get from the social media. It differs from the regular links on the point that it does not convey the "power" of the page.
Google pays more and more attention to the quality of the links that direct to our website. Our position in SERPs is largely influenced by the trust that the search engines have for our website, which depends on many factors. Through the social media, we can obtain the so-called social signals, i.e. all possible interactions between all users and a company's profile. These are likes, comments, followers, shares, retweets and many more.
A company that publishes an original and interesting content on the social media has a great chance that it will be passed on by the users. The impact of the social media on the SEO will be significant if the materials that are published by the company are interesting enough for other people to share.
Twitter has been one of the fastest growing social networking sites for many years. How to use its potential in your SEO activities? Find out in our article.
How does social media influence positioning?
This question is bothering many SEO specialists. You cannot give an unambiguous answer here, because the positioning is influenced by a huge number of factors. Nevertheless, we can see some dependencies between the social media profiles and the visibility increasing on Google.
The advantages of running the social channels can certainly include:
- Social networks are great places to reach the new audiences. Building your community and convert it into interest and traffic to your site. Such user behavior will certainly be noticed by Google's algorithms.
- Social media is an additional place for the external linking. Share the new blog entries or products in your posts.
- Portals of this type strengthen your brand. The potential customers often look for information on the social media before making a purchase or otherwise interacting with your website. It is worth taking care of the constant updating of the data contained therein and the regular publication of entries.
- Users who have noticed your business by browsing their social channels can enter the name or related keywords directly into the search engine in search of more complete information about your business. Undoubtedly, this affects the traffic and can increase the visibility of the website.
So you can see that social media has an indirect influence on the positioning. However, it is an important ranking factor due to the perception and interest of a given brand by the users. Therefore, it is worth scrupulously building your profiles on the mentioned portals and creating the relationships with the created community. In this way, you will increase the awareness and trust of the customers, and additionally increase your visibility on Google.
How does Twitter work?
As I mentioned before, the profiles on the social networking sites have a huge potential to attract the new recipients of our activities. Twitter is one of the most popular social media channels. It was established in 2006 as a microblogging service. Twitter has had some ups and downs since its conception, but today its potential continues to grow. Mainly due to the popularity of this medium among the politicians and people associated with show business.
How can you make Twitter popular and benefit your company?
Twitter is the same channel for communicating with the public as everyone else. How to chat on Twitter? The communication rules are the same everywhere:
- Be considerate of those who follow you. You can especially recommend the interesting users. Don't forget to thank the twitters for their retweets.
- Respond to messages that are sent to you or that mention you.
- Be polite to all the users, bad PR is bad PR.
- Write really relevant and interesting information that may be useful to the others. If you only add the dry news or "promote" yourself-loved ones, it will not do you any good.
- Retweet. This is one of the rules of good form on Twitter. If you liked a user's post and found it interesting, don't retype it as if it were yours. Retweet or name the author of the post.
- Post to Twitter at least once a day.
- Don't write nonsense just to add one post a day if you don't have anything interesting.
- Do not write 10 messages at once. Clogging up the message feed by one user is annoying and leads to the blocking of the users.
- Supplement your message with a link to the full material, video or picture. Especially videos and pictures quickly travel over the network using Twitter's.
- Do not send spam or advertisements. For spam, your Twitter can be banned (blocked).
And one more thing: there is an opinion (especially among the beginners) that you need to add the users to follow (follow) everyone and as many as possible.
Our advice is not to do this. Add those who are interesting to you, not everyone. Don't litter your Twitter.
If your Twitter adheres to the rules stated above and is interesting to the users, your company will have a serious advantage over the competitors.
What is tweeting?
Tweeting is the fact to place a post of no more than 280 characters on your profile. Our short post is displayed to people who have observed our profile; they can also reach the unrelated recipients to it. This is due to the hashtags placed in the content, which in some way define the subject of the post and can be searched directly by the interested users. Interestingly, Twitter was the first social networking site to apply and propagate this functionality to grouping the topics published on its website. If our post is popular and encourages the interaction, they can additionally use the retweet option. Thanks to this, it will appear on their boards. Of course, the users can reply to or like our post, which also affects its visibility.
Twitter also allows you to place the multimedia, such as videos, photos or gifs. We can also add the active links, which is why this portal is very popular among the marketers.
What are the SEO benefits of having a Twitter account?
Google and Twitter entered into an agreement a few years ago, as a result of which we can see the thematic tweets in the SERP. Thanks to the entries' sharing in the search engines, there was much more traffic on Twitter, also among people who did not have an account yet. For Google, this collaboration has proven to be beneficial because it can publish the real-time feedback.
When it comes to promote your brand, Twitter is definitely worth using. One of the reasons is the fact that sometimes after entering the company's name in the Google search engines, information about a given brand contained in the mentioned social networking site may appear first.
Another aspect is the ability to search for the specifics hash tags on Google. It is practically used in every social networking site, but the Twitter entries have the greatest power for Google.
We will get the similar results after entering the topics "on time". The SERP will then find the latest information on a given topic. From the point of view of the company's promotion, it is an important section, especially when it comes to the marketing's real time activities. It is also perfect for the information portals.
The appearance of the Twitter entries on Google undoubtedly attracts the attention of the users and is an additional facilitation in searching for information in the real time. Promoting your website in this way is an additional source of reaching people who are interested in your business. However, in order for our posts to be taken into account by the indexing robots, we need to optimize the profile.
How do I optimize my Twitter profile and posts to be displayed on Google?
When we are creating an account on Twitter, it is worth taking care of the appearance and the content of our profile from the very beginning. It is necessary to keep the company name consistent with our website - in this way we will facilitate the brand search. If possible, do not use the special characters URL profile is usually taken from the profile name. It is worth checking if it is user-friendly (it is not also recommended to put the numbers and special characters), i.e. easy to remember and enter. Also, be sure to complete:
- Bio - a short description of your activity. The maximum number of the characters is 160, so it must be well thought out. It is worth including the hash tags or emoticons that will make it visually more attractive.
- Location - this information is very important for the companies operating locally. In the case of the Internet activities, it will be crucial to define at least the country.
- Link - here you must put the link to your website in the correct form.
- Logo - it is worth adding a logo with which our customers identify our brand. The background photo improves the aesthetics of the profile and is an additional place to communicate important information about the company.
After completing all the available sections in the profile, we can proceed to post the entries on our board. Our posts should contain the relevant keywords relating to our business profile. It is a good practice to include it in the form of a hashtag. The optimal number of hashtags for a post is around 3.
It's also a good idea to include the images and videos in our tweets that captivate attention. Create the names of the graphic files referring to the objects contained in those files, and after adding it, do not forget about the alternative description option. This is a practice that makes it easier for Google robots to identify the image posted.
If we want to show the world our new product or blog post, we should not forget to link it in the content.
These simple practices, combined with the creativity and the regular tweeting, will help your website not only to appear in Google search engines, but also in the minds of the potential customers. Social networks have enormous power that you can use to promote your brand in a very simple way.
FAQ
1. Does social media influence SEO?
Social networks have an indirect impact on the page's position in Google search results. Thanks to those media, we can reach the new users by appearing in the SERP with the help of our posts, e.g. on Twitter. It is also an additional channel for the external linking and a hint for the indexing robots about the popularity of our publications in the social media. This may convert into an increase in the position of our website in the search results.
2. What are the benefits of having a Twitter account?
Google has been working with Twitter for some time. There are more and more so-called carousels with the popular entries on this portal. It is related to the keywords or hash tags we searched for. By appearing in the search results in this way, we may attract the new users and traffic to our website. We also increase the authority of our brand and have the opportunity to create our own community.
3. How to optimize your Twitter profile?
Remember that your profile should contain the correct brand name, friendly URL and a short description containing the most important information about your business. Customize your logo as well as the other graphics to create an aesthetically pleasing composition. Add a location and an active link to your own domain. Try to add an alternative descriptions of the photos and videos in your posts.
Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.