This week the number of newsworthy items about and on Twitter was so overwhelming that I I solely focused this Twitter Friday on Twitter and SEO.
We have witnessed at least 4 major Twitter SEO developments this week that mattered most from our industry perspective:
- Twitter title tags got optimized
- Kevin “SEO is spam” Rose launched WeFollow Twitter directory
- Salesforce added Twitter support to its CRM webware
- New Twitter “PageRank” equivalent launched
Why is such a simple step as “Twitter title tags got optimized” so important? Well, go figure: In case you use Twitter with your real name or brand name Twitter might now rank on top of search results for it. In case you did some online reputation management or SEO prior to this it probably won’t but it still will rank somewhere in the top 5 or 10. Isn’t it good news you might ask? It depends.
In case you did a good job branding yourself as a professional it is. Otherwise, when you chose to write about your lunch, what you hate or showing off pictures of your wife undressing it might be bad news. Also Twitter might simply outrank your homepage now. Either way you have to take notice and think twice whether you like the fact or not and how you adapt.
Twitter went abuzz with the launch Twitter user directory WeFollow, a service by failed entrepreneur Kevin Rose who just recently gave up his Twitter competitor Pownce. Kevin Rose is also known for his controversial social news site Digg and directly responsible for the ban on SEO topics there. Try to submit a post with an SEO headline there and you will never make the frontpage unless you’re Matt Cutts, Google itstelf or write how bad SEO is. A while ago Kevin Rose stated in a Search Marketing Standard interview that “the whole SEO industry” is dedicated to “gaming the system”.
To make the long story short: Now this guy starts a Twitter user directory.
WeFollow is opt in and of course most SEO professionals joined quickly. I didn’t. You may want to consider joining. Most people in the SEO industry have no problem with working for Digg for free as long as they can use their power to promote their own stories too. Those people will surely have no problem with WeFollow either. The set up of the directory is simplistic. People are categorized by tags they choose themselves and displayed based on the sheer number of followers (the most followed users are on top).
To be honest: As a SEO I would quickly jump on the trend and set up a directory like this to compete with Rose. It should be no big deal to program and design it. Also there are more advanced directories like Twellow already.
In the general business sense there is a much bigger news about Twitter: Web based CRM software global leader Salesforce added Twitter tracking to it’s suite. This is a major step as the crossover from customer relationship management to potential customer relationship management on Twitter is just a small step logically but until recently the two weren’t really directly connected. SEO and CRM are more and more interconnected in recent years due to the nature of tracking results by the conversions, leads and sales instead of rankings or traffic. The Salesforce Twitter connection manifests this process.
Some weeks ago we struggled with measuring Twitter authority. With search Google created PageRank to simplify this process. Webmasters could obsess about a green bar for years. What about Twitter though? A third party has launched a similar Twitter tool now for all of us to rejoice. It’s name sounds slightly humorist but to me it reflects the true nature of such metrics.
Join us next Friday for Twitter Friday again on SEOptimise.
Thanks for the info. But I can’t understand that why “SEO is spam”?
I can’t understand it either. :-) It’s like racism, it’s not rational.