Twitter is huge! I don’t know for myself if this is true or not, but I’ve heard that it’s the most popular, most visited and most used site currently on the internet. When I first heard about Twitter I wasn’t really that interested in it. I imagined that if I was signed up on Twitter that I’d be seeing a lot of short messages that I’d have to keep up with and respond to, and the whole thing sounded kind of irritating to me. The more I’ve come to know about how it can be used as a business tool, the more I see it’s value.
One important value that I discovered for myself is that you can use Twitter to not only help others know more about your business, but you can also use it to help your website’s perceptions by Google. When you post a “Tweet” on Twitter, you can reference something of value on your website and then include a link pointing to your website. The syntax for this would be something like: http://ImagePerceptions.com – include the http:// – you don’t need the www. and that only adds characters to your tweet, so leave that part out.
An important point to remember about this: USE YOUR ACTUAL URL, NOT A SHORTENED LINK! In other words don’t use the utilities that create a shorter link for you, Google won’t see your site’s domain name. For example if I use http://ImagePerceptions.com, Google can see my domain name and recognize it as a link to my site. If I use a link like http://tinyurl.com/yhgvxde, Google doesn’t see anything about imageperceptions.com here. So be sure to use your actual URL.
Update to original post: Another equally important issue of using Twitter to show links pointing to your site is that as tweets get old, those links kind of fall off the radar, so only recent tweets really help you with this. So, if you you’re tweeting regularly this can help, but if you’re only posting something once a week or so, it won’t have much of an effect. Hopefully people are re-tweeting your tweets as well. How does this happen? Either you’ve got people helping you by doing this, or even better, the information that you’re tweeting is so helpful and interesting that people are re-tweeting for you organically. (that’s always the best way!)
Anyway, adding the links in your tweets pointing to your site not only helps people know more about your business, but it also helps you build more oneway, inbound links pointing to your site. And, since Twitter has become such a big deal on the web, links coming from twitter pointing to your site helps your site’s standings. See my earlier post about the value of having more oneway, inbound links on other sites pointing to your site.
So, if you haven’t signed up with Twitter yet, I would recommend it. You can use it as often or as little as you want, but it definitely can help your business.
