This guest post is by David Kendall

How do you optimize your twitter tweets for Google?    seo twitter tips

While Twitter is commonly recommended as a way to find a focused and attentive audience, build your brand, and generate direct traffic to your website, there are other advantages to maintaining a good presence on Twitter.

If you know how to optimize your Twitter presence for SEO, you can get better search engine rankings on both your website and your tweets, which should lead people back to your site.

Here are five tips on getting your website and content noticed in order to drive consistent, organic traffic to your site for years to come.

1.     Choose a good Twitter username.

One of the first things you need to choose when you set up an account is your username. Choosing a username is not a decision to take lightly! Your Twitter username, also called your handle, becomes part of your URL (which will be twitter.com/username).

Your URL becomes a static page in search engine results. Choose a username that relates to your topic, campaign, brand, or presence. Your username should be as short as possible – fewer than ten characters is ideal.

A short username will allow people who are tweeting at you more space to compose a tweet, and will ensure people can retweet your long tweets (some programs still insert “RT @username” before a retweet, so that’s a waste of five characters plus your username length).

2.     Use your real name or business name.

If you went for a keyword-focused username, your account name should be your real name or your business name.

Your chosen name is often more visible than your username, and other people will see it a lot. It should therefore be something you can brand and build authority around.

Don’t make your chosen name the same as your username; take advantage of the extra space to choose something different.

3. Include a keyword-rich bio.

Your bio is displayed on your profile page, and is one of the easiest ways to show search engines what your Twitter feed is about.

While you should avoid keyword stuffing, you have 160 characters to fill with relevant information about who you are, so you should be able to fit in a few keywords or phrases that are still easily intelligible by people reading your profile.

Spend some time writing and rewriting your bio to make sure everything fits.

Many businesses and individuals include an “elevator pitch” in their bio or a list of related industries or keywords separated by commas.

For instance, a good bio could start with: “Business Name: Corporate website design, print graphic design, and logo design.”

That bio would go on to describe a few more specific niches of interest, and the business website URL would be included in the appropriate spot (there’s a field in the Twitter settings page for the URL).

4.     Keep your tweets focused on your topic.

Off-topic tweets are okay for showing that you have a personality and interacting personably with people, but you should also create original tweets that include a keen focus on your topic and keywords on a regular basis.

Tweets should be 120 characters or less to allow for commentary and retweets by others, and the first 30 to 40 characters of the tweet are most important.

When breaking industry news is released, make sure you’re tweeting about the news, as search engines index social media pages quickly and you might end up getting some traffic or a long-term link for an important piece of news.

5.     Integrate Twitter with your website.

Send tweets about new content on your website (but make sure you don’t just tweet new content, or you look like a spam), and include a link directly to the content.

Since the people who clicked through are already on Twitter, if you can get them to retweet a link to the blog post or article and keep the keywords you choose, you’re in business.

You should already have a Twitter share button on each page, preferably one that allows people to post a pre-specified message or edit it.

Twitter is good for more than just getting direct traffic and immediate attention.

If you pay careful attention to your keywords and the SEO-friendliness of your Twitter account, you can use Twitter to gain search engine rankings for your tweets and even for your website.

Author Bio: David Kendall contributed this guest post on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis.com – see here for more information on their hosting reviews. David is a freelance technology writer and his articles appear on various marketing blogs.

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