I am definitely not the first person to have written on this subject and surely not the last. However, recently I experienced the SEO value of Twitter first-hand and felt compelled to share my findings. Unfortunately I don’t have hard evidence to support the following claims, but I do have several theories as to how Twitter has directly added SEO value to a web property that I directly manage.

First, it is important to put Twitter’s direct effect on SEO value into perspective.

As many SEO Strategists have noted, the most popular URL shortening services including TinyURL and Bit.ly both use 301-redirects (permanent redirects) which tell the search engine spiders to both index and pass link value to webpages sent in Tweets with URL shorteners. This is a great thing! However, the downside is that Twitter utilizes the nofollow attribute on user submitted hyperlinks which tells search engine spiders to ignore the hyperlinks. Yahoo! and Google search spiders follow nofollow links, but exclude the links from their ranking calculations. MSN (Is it cool to call MSN Bing now?) ignores these links completely. Simply put, links shared on Twitter will not be counted as added backlinks for your website in three of the four major search engines – Yahoo!, Google and MSN.

So what is the SEO value of Twitter?

Ask.com passes link value on Twitter! Woohoo. Ask.com follows links using the nofollow attribute. Many people are quick to write off Ask.com as a major player in search. Why care about a search engine that has just under 4% search market share? Well, it is important to remember that a 4% market share is equivalent to about 375 million search queries per month. Depending on your company’s vertical, this could translate into a fairly significant volume of traffic to your website.

More importantly, though, is the added usage data to your website from Twitter users. There has been speculation that search engines factor in usage data when weighting the overall quality of your website, which ultimately effects your rankings. However, last year Google down played this speculation. But with the rise of shared links across social media platforms, I struggle to believe that usage data plays no role in how a website ranks. Examples of usage data variables include referring sites, number of unique visitors, number of page views, time on site and bounce rate. These variables are effected each time you share a link on Twitter and drive new visitors to your website. This is why it continues to be important to know your audience. If you know your audience and know that the content you are sharing from your website appeals to them, you will have favorable usage data. Google in particular has access to this data not only through Google Analytics, but also from users who have downloaded the Google Toolbar and Google Web Accelerator. There has also been speculation that other search engines purchase clickstream data.

Note: I prefer to use Bit.ly to track how a given link has been shared across Twitter. Simply add a plus sign to the end of any Bit.ly link to see the URLs analytics. Example: http://bit.ly/cxIRl+

Perhaps the greatest SEO value that Twitter has on any given webpage happens without you even realizing it. There are countless services that monitor Twitter for links and then aggregate the links in real-time. Many of the most well-known Twitter link aggregators, such as Tweetmeme and Twitturly, rank links based on how many times those links have been shared on Twitter. In other words, Digg-style votes come in the form of tweets or retweets of a link. Not only do some of these aggregators send significant traffic, but many of them do not add the nofollow attribute to the links they aggregate – meaning they pass link value to your website. This is not to say that all such aggregators and applications that monitor Twitter for content don’t utilize the nofollow, but there are countless websites that monitor Twitter for content that pass link value.

Share Content!

While Twitter itself doesn’t have much direct SEO value, the secondary effects of added usage data and passed link value from third party websites are worth paying attention to. Share relevant content that you know your audience will appreciate and share with their followers. As always, content is king!

For further reading on The Power of Passed Links through social media, Fred Wilson has some great data.

This article was originally published on The JAR Group blog in July of 2009.

Like many, you probably have no idea what FriendFeed does. FriendFeed is currently ahead of the pack of a number of recently released web applications that give users the ability to get up-to-date information on what their friends are uploading, sharing and commenting on across the internet. Add your Del.icio.us, Facebook, FlickR, Youtube, etc. accounts to FriendFeed and it consolidates your recent activity. You then add your friends to FriendFeed, and you can follow them as well.

For other examples of this see:

FriendFeed.com
Correlate.us
Iminta.com
LuveZuu.com
MyBlogLog.com
OneSwirl.com
Profilactic.com
Socialthing.com
Secondbrain.com

But who cares? All the geeks are raving about FriendFeed. The geeks being the Internet celebrities (Just to name drop and hit those Google Alerts: Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Michael Arrington, Pete Cashmore) who’s personal brands rely on being way too active on the major social networks, Twittering way too much, and being way too connected to way too many people, as well as the web 2.0 crowd and the overly connected internet user.

I would consider myself as being in the web 2.0 crowd and being an overly connected internet user. I experiment with every new web application that looks remotely interesting, I have an account on just about every website that FriendFeed allows you to import, and I am still not convinced that FriendFeed will ever reach a mainstream audience.

Maybe its not FriendFeed’s goal to reach a mainstream audience, but there has been speculation as to whether or not FriendFeed can reach the tipping point, resulting in a user base that reaches “critical mass,” and I don’t believe it will unless the service is enhanced with reality mining.

Reality mining will make the concept of lifestreaming much more appealing to a larger audience. The rise of location based services combined with connected mobile devices will make reality mining not only possible, but efficient. Reality mining will provide an ongoing social graph of real information, instead of updates telling me that a friend has added the new Kanye West video as a favorite on YouTube.

By pairing online activity with reality, the data becomes much clearer. A service that meshes these two concepts together will be wildly successful.

My lifestream should tell me the cities I visited in 2008, the people I hung out with the most often, the music I listened to and found most appealing, the concerts I attended, the girls I dated, and the restaurants I went to. Some of this information is online, some of it isn’t, but the information that is online, aggregated by services such as FriendFeed, will be a part of this larger organized lifestream. It doesn’t all have to be made public either, however you should want to share certain parts of your life with those people who helped make the moments what they were.

With the rise of services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which allows you to share your location information with services and applications that you choose, and MyBlogLog’s recent addition of the ability to bind your bluetooth address to your account, the technology now exists to bring real meaning to your lifestream. Just this past week I got pretty excited using SkyDeck, a web application that downloads all of your cell phone bills and generates statistics on who you communicate with the most often, showing the complete breakdown of voice minutes and text messages to that person. The people are then ranked, and you are given the option to add more details to the contact’s profile. Enough API’s exist for services such as SkyDeck to allow for the creation of a meaningful lifestream.

Who is going to win the race and do it right?

his article was originally published on The JAR Group blog in April of 2008.