Should Twitter be Part of Your SEO Strategy?

Twitter is still a very young site, but its growth as a social network catalyst and its effective uses as a marketing tool cannot be ignored. Twitter acts as streaming search engine, allowing you to find the latest news about the topic you’re interested in. Of course, Twitter has its advertising spammers, but mostly you’ll find recommendations for information that includes user comments and other valuable links to the subject you’re looking for.

Twitter has taken social media by storm. As you may know, social efforts on behalf of your site can be almost as important as your content when it comes to rankings. For example, you may have a top-notch design, proper keyword placement and the most user-friendly site in the business. But if people aren’t talking about you, sharing your links and promoting you on social networking sites, you could be dead in the water.

This is what organic SEO’s have been talking about for years. Hallelujah! The world is finally catching up. You can’t just cram in keywords, spread your links around the web and expect to see lasting results. You have to tediously and carefully place your links where they can be shared, commented on and seen.

Think like a user. If you enter a phrase into a search engine and get results, what do you assume the top results are showing you? Is it the most keyword rich site? Probably not the first thing on a users mind. Users have come to expect that the top rankers are the most popular as well as the most relevant to their search. So, as a business owner, shouldn’t you be focusing on making your site not only look good and function properly, but also on making your site popular?

You can’t force it down people’s throats and you can’t make it all happen with Twitter. But, you can provide useful, interesting, current information about your field, prompting users to popularize your site for you. Twitter is only one of the tools that your SEO company uses to help you accomplish this.

Popularization through social media can take some time to increase your search engine rankings. The upside is that the results can last a lot longer than the occasional promotion or print ad. Furthermore, investing in search engine marketing will help sustain your site’s popularity through economic downfalls that can zap your advertising budget. Would you rather pay for a temporary ad or actually gain a fan base that can weather the storm in hard times?

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.