Recently Google confirmed that it uses social signals to determine ranking of websites on its search engine. This was hardly a surprise but very helpful to have confirmed by Matt Cutts. Having added real-time search functionality featuring Twitter feeds and then withdrawing after a few years trial it is clear Google sees mileage in integrating social. In fact, I used the real-time search option heavily and often was the first place to start my hunt for fresh information. It is now rumoured that Google will be bringing back Realtime search in the form of Google +, it’s new and fresh social media site. We will review this in later articles as it’s still fairly new and I don’t have enough contacts on my profile at the moment to fully test.
On the topic of Twitter, let’s explore further how this can help small and medium sized business to achieve improved rankings on search engine’s results pages.
Get started with a Twitter profile
The first step is to build a business profile which starts off with a good username. Your username on twitter is limited to 15 characters, if your company name is 15 characters or less, or can be reasonably abbreviated to 15 characters or less then secure it as soon as possible. Avoid using hyphens or underscores if possible. Even if you aren’t planning on using it right away, secure the name, almost as if it were a domain name.
The next stage is to add a good profile picture, preferably your logo. The aim is to try and keep synergy with your main website and have a link from the site to your Twitter profile page. Build a comprehensive profile including locations you serve and a link back to your website – this is very important.
The next stage is to build a list of followers. The best place to start is your existing network of friends/colleagues; a simple invite friend’s facility is available allowing you to enter multiple addresses. You can also search for other businesses/people simply searching for them using the standard search box. The more followers you generate the more benefit for SEO.
In the next post I will explain how to maximise on using your new Twitter profile.
