All posts tagged twitter seo

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. This time a few days late due to the SMX London coverage. Today I’ll introduce the most common Twitter SEO best practices. Twitter SEO means at least 5 things:

  1. Ranking with your profile for your name & brand
  2. Ranking organically with your tweets in Google
  3. Getting found in Twitter search and other tools
  4. Making tweets spread virally by retweets
  5. Entering Google results via realtime search

Plus many others I can’t cover today. Let us start with the basic best practices everybody should take into account.

This week the Twitter Friday column expands as a major Twitter SEO topic is on our agenda. Last week Technology Review published an article titled “How Google ranks tweets“.

In the TR article leading Google engineer Amit Singhal explains ranking factors for tweets.

Some of the ranking criteria are quite clear and obvious while others remain fuzzy behind Google’s veil of secrecy. There is one big surprise: Google hates #hashtags, or at least some (probably you using too many) of them.

It seems Google treats #hashtags the way it dealt with the meta keyword tag in the past: Neither do they really count nor do they count in a positive way in case they do.

In other words: Using hashtags may hurt your tweet rankings. That’s not all of course.