Let me preface this post by saying I am no SEO expert. I've been lucky enough to hire some of the smart people who specialize in this fast evolving science, and I try to pay attention, but I have never made it a core skill.
That said, I've been mulling something over the weekend, since my friend Eliot Burdett brought my attention to a tweet by Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki noted that Twitter provides Alltop (an information aggregator and one of Kawasaki's business ventures) 1/4 the traffic that Google does, but 10 times the traffic the site gets from Facebook links.
Those are astonishing results really for Twitter, a messaging and micro-blogging platform most of us only started experimenting with in the past year. Disruptive.
But these results are even more interesting then they appear at first glance.
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Alltop's Google ranking is certainly being boosted by the inbound links created in his tweets and many re-tweets of his posts. Twitter is very definitely improving Kawasaki's Google performance. That can be true for the rest of us too.
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In fact, to the distaste of some tweeps, who believe the knowledge will diminish the value of the conversations taking place on Twitter, SEO folks are starting to see the value of Twitter links for improving search engine rankings, and some are starting to propose ways to game the system (which I am NOT advocating, BTW). The key to understanding this is to understand that the Google algorithm has not yet been tweaked to discount inbound Twitter links, or to intelligently process the value of these links (by taking into account follower count, say, or re-tweets, or by discounting non-arms-length Tweets).
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As an information and link aggregator, with endless numbers of pages on endless numbers of topics, and a huge number of inbound and outbound links, Alltop should have a much better Google ranking on most topics than most businesses could expect to have, and more clicks from Google, where information discovery is the whole purpose. That means, for most of us, direct inbound links to our content are hugely more important than they are for Kawasaki.
True, Kawasaki's Twitter traffic will also be all out of proportion to the average twitterer, given that he has a huge following (> 80 K at the time of writing this, compared to my measly < 400) and his is one of the most re-tweeted Twitter streams.
Still, Twitter cannot be dismissed by marketers.
I have been saying to my marketing pals that consumer brands must be on Twitter, at a minimum to monitor what is being said about them in real time. More and more, I see the value for us B2B marketing types as well.
As an (admittedly very small, and very new) example, this blog gets 90 percent of its traffic from social links, split pretty evenly between LinkedIn and Twitter. I have also generated a couple of inbound links in other blogs that generate a bit of traffic. I have, to date, seen only a minuscule amount of traffic through Google, mostly for posts on a specific thing something might be searching for, like a book review.
I think the same is likely to be true of most companies who don't have a huge Google footprint, those in growing and building mode.
That is, most of the rest of us.
Related links of interest
Google is not about to buy Twitter. New York Times.
The Conversation is Shifting. John Batelle's Searchblog.
