Link Building With Twitter

Daren Bach via SocialMediaToday.com

Getting your head around the recent stats revealing that the 10 billionth tweet was posted in March 2010 and more than 600 million searches happen on Twitter every day may still not persuade some as to exactly how business can tangibly benefit in real ROI terms.

Right now in realtime, there are over 110 million Twitter users, 80 per cent of whom are doing it on a mobile device! With the forecast for social media interactivity and mobile search together to erupt in 2011, it’s clear that marketing strategies must gear up to take advantage of the approaching avalanche in super fast, social search.

The role of Twitter in word of mouth search has gained in importance with Google and the search engines, as reflected in the many social search features added in 2010. The Google algorithm was also this year tuned for responding to traffic activity based on ‘social signals’, creating a new TwitterRank that may yet overtake SEO keyword search terms determining present PageRank.

This places emphasis on the Twitter user to be recognised as a trusted and credible brand identity themselves as the authority of the Retweet forms the basis of the new link building scenario.

Google uses more than 200 different “signals” to determine Pagerank in response to any search, including page authority, anchor text pointing at a page, HTML title tag, and within it, the appearance of the searched-for words.

Both Google and Bing now direct their attention to how persons using Twitter impact on web page performance and lend their authority to pages they tweet.  Both receive the ‘firehose’ of data from Twitter, i.e. a constant tweet stream which monitors how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users who shared the link.

Google tends to only use the data evaluated as a ‘signal’ in organic and news rankings to analyse and use author quality, and not for all of general websearch. Bing will look at user social authority by numbers of ‘followers’ and ‘following’, which gives added significance to regular search result listings and is obviously, of increased weight in Bing Social Search for best match relevancy.

Likewise, Google will use the ‘social signals’, most typically in the ‘Top Links’ section of Google Realtime Search although author authority is independent of PageRank.

Nuanced use of Twitter content strategy as a social signal resource means it’s essential to be seen sharing relevant, valuable information to your niche audience and win new followers, enhance  engagement potential and drive link traffic authority to raise TwitterRank with Google and Bing.