If Twitter was a person, the newspaper headlines would call the site’s relationship with the public a fairytale romance. In 2008, its position in the UK’s ‘most visited website’ lists was 969. In 2009, the site rocketed from this obscure position to number 38. This meteoric rise has led to a lot of SEO experts pondering Twitter’s place in a successful SEO campaign, but there are many things about Twitter which should put the SEO world off.
Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter, whether you’re sitting on a train or chatting on an internet forum. Part of the site’s success is no doubt due to its famous supporters, particularly in the UK after Stephen Fry publicly and repeatedly gushed over his tweets. By the end of 2009, if you weren’t talking about Twitter, you were asking what it was. In the business world, if you weren’t asking what Twitter was, you were seriously behind in the game.
Many of those in the search engine optimisation community have complained about the relative dead end that Twitter provides. After Twitter put a ‘nofollow’ on links in user profiles, many SEO experts went into a meltdown over how this affected SEO campaigns using Twitter. The site has continued to be incorporated into SEO campaigns, however. This is because it provides benefits that more than make up for the loss of link juice from the user profile.
The main thing that businesses want from Twitter is output. Businesses register on the site in the hope that Twitter users will eventually get curious enough to visit their sites or, even better, encourage others to visit. It was estimated in May 2009 that the micro-blogging site was the 30th largest source of traffic for UK sites. This averages out to Twitter being the source of 1 out of every 350 visits to a site, an impressive number for a humble social media site.
A thinking site owner may well ask, how does this traffic come about? The statistics get slightly less impressive when you ration out what kind of sites receive Twitter traffic. More than half of the traffic Twitter sends to other sites is to content-rich websites. This is good news if you’re running an online magazine, a blog or your own social network. Retail sites have yet to receive much direct traffic from Twitter, although there really is no way to measure the overall impact of individual retail viral campaigns.
The appeal of content-based sites is an interesting reinforcement of something SEO companies have been pushing clients toward for years. It seems that having plenty of interesting content on your site is just as important for social media marketing success as it is for success with the search engines. Well-written content can have a big impact on your business presence. You can talk to us at SEO Consult if you are thinking about a content plan.
The hype around Twitter may well die down. Until then, both SEO firms and site owners watch developments with interest.
You can also measure your tweeting efforts also by using a tools like 
