Twitter for SEO?

There's no doubting that Twitter is huge, and is going to get even bigger in 2009. When recent troubles broke out in Gaza, CNN used Live Twitter reports from people inside Gaza to update their newsreel, and the recent plane that crashed in the Hudson river in New York had another Twitterer sending minute by minute reports of the rescue mission. Micro blogging sounded like it would never work, but it's working incredibly well.

However if you ask me, Twitter for SEO is a bit of a no-goer. At least in my experience so far for my site and clients. Part of the reason is that it's a bit like Facebook, but quicker, and Facebook is used primarily for social interaction - keeping up with friends, checking out thier photos, etc. There are many company pages you can become "fans" of, but those pages with the most fans that aren't people, tend to be funny niches like comedians, or films, etc. Twitter is much quicker, even if I do seem to find error pages almost all the time I'm on there?!

With regards SEO, you can drop links (via tools such as tinyurl) all day long if you like, and build up your home page to gain a decent PR (Page Rank). Then you also have a url on your home page which would technically be a great 1 way, high PR link.

There's just one problem. All the links are nofollow. So for all the hard work and "original content" that you're making, same as your blog, there's no SEO benefit. I can see twitter being highly addictive, and there are some great add-ons which make it possible to become even more addictive, but I think time spent on Twitter with regards link-juice is a waste.

Where I think Twitter would really work, would be branding and gaining real customers, if you have something really interesting to say about your company. If you simply follow people so that they can see your tweets of links, in the hope that one might click, then that's spam for me (which is why Matt Cutts, and the Google Spam team decided to add the nofollow attribute, I guess). This was also highlighted in a Guardian.co.uk article a while back (sorry, can't remember the link). The article highlighted how good Twitter would be in a specific location, due to it's speed. It used Barcelona as an example, and said that if someone was visiting Barcelona, and had a PDA/Iphone, etc. they could tweet people about Barcelona and receive real-time replies about places to go, events on that particular day, restaurants, etc. The author made the analogy that if you searched "Barcelona" on Twitter, there was a few random posts of people in Spanish, and then one particular agency (who I won't name) that replied to everyones tweet with spam messages about their Barcelona apartments.

For me the jury is out, as I think time could be better spent commenting on dofollow blogs, article writing or other such activities. I'd love to hear some positive stories about your Twitter experiences however, so please feel free to comment.

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