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Can tweeting be good for your SEO?

The jury may still be out for many potential tweeters on its use or benefit for business development and promotion but there may be other benefits not yet realised. Many companies both large and small are experiencing benefits when using Twitter in terms of brand and customer relationship building.

However, I've noticed another which could prove beneficial from an SEO (search engine optimisation) perspective.

Search engine visibility

Attracting organic search visitors, by searchers entering keyword/phrases into Google, Yahoo, or Bing and clicking through to your website, is the prime motivation and driver for SEO.

To increase search traffic, search engines have first to find your site and/or specific pages and add them to their index. When your keywords are entered you web site, hopefully, features on the first search results page, (not many searchers now go beyond).

Search engine spiders/bots are regular visitors

Getting your site and pages indexed depends on search engine spiders (bots) finding your pages. If they don't you won't be found and you won't get many organic search visitors!

When you post a tweet you are able to include a web link which those following you can click on if you've caught their attention. If it's interesting enough they may even re-tweet it to their followers and so the viral nature of Twitter continues.

Apart from the visitors you may get directly from the tweet link there is another, possible longer-term benefit:-

Organic Search Visitors!

It's long been recognised that blogs, social media are regularly visited by search bots.

Checking some statistics relating to tweets posted I've noticed that in addition to direct human visitors, bots also frequently visit and do so in real time.

A blog post I made earlier within 2 minutes had received 14 direct visits from real people (humans) and 4 from bots (see right - showing 15 and 5 respectively now).

What is more interesting is that a tweet made on the 16 July which attracted 51 visitors, 32, over time, were from bots.

Real long-term benefits for search engine optimiation

The implications could have some real benefits for SEO and more importantly conversion.

Getting pages indexed is the first stage in the process and attracting visitors and converting to customers is the goal.

With that level of interest being shown by bots (not all might be from search engines, however) there is a real possibility that if the landing page (the page linked to) has been, itself, properly optimised for a specific topic, that page could feature prominently in search results for the topic concerned and reasonably quickly.

Conversion is the long-term goal but first you have to get the visitors!

It may be that Twitter has more to offer than simply tweeting!

Tags: SEO | Search Engine Optimisation | Twitter | Conversion | Social Media