The SEO value of Twitter

Besides being addicting, Twitter is underrated as a tool for driving traffic and vastly underrated for SEO. SEO is search engine optimaztion, or basically getting desired links (i.e. your website) to the top of a search engine’s results.

Maybe about two months ago, my boss at eNilsson started asking me questions about Twitter – essentially how we could use it to our benefit. I suggested, and did set up, a feed that automatically publishes eNilsson’s blog and news items directly to Twitter, complete with a link to the corresponding story. Result: Twitter now accounts for about 30% of the traffic to the eNilsson site. Last I heard from my boss, anyways – it could be more.

So now about the SEO value. A quick search of eNilsson on Google shows that the eNilsson Twitter feed has risen to the 3rd spot. Pretty impressive for only being up a short time.

But eNilsson already dominates searches for the eNilsson – that’s not surprising, it’s a pretty unique name. What about more common occurrences? What about ME? It should be about me. Everything should be about me.

My name is Leif Nordberg. It’s pretty rare in the United States, but abroad the name shows up quite a bit. And before I started Twitter, the results for a Leif Nordberg search on Google was dominated by some plastic surgeon and some professor in Sweden. In fact, to find me at all you would have to put my name in quotes and add some other key words (ie. Boston or Northeastern).

What about now? Well you can find me sitting pretty in the 3rd overall spot. I shall soon topple Dr. Leif O. Nordberg, M.D. Oh, I shall.

Now this is far from a scientfic study. Obviously. A political science degree doesn’t exactly make me a scientist. But it works, man. It works. Others have written about it, but it still hasn’t really caught on with all it should.