SEO and Twitter: How to get your page ranked

Adding search engine optimization to a website is as essential as good design and content. SEO is the cornerstone of making sure a website is found by search engines, which helps increase site traffic and authority. Most people are catching on to SEO these days, but they still don’t associate it with Twitter. Which is a shame because they’re missing an easy opportunity to increase their exposure. 

Twitter is highly indexed by Google and taking a few simple steps will help your Twitter profile appear on the first page of results when someone searches for you. Too often we’ve done research for clients and found that a company’s Twitter page doesn’t appear in the first few pages of a Google search. If that applies to you (go and check, we’ll wait), by making a few changes to your profile, you can boost your ranking.

Profile name - Picking a username is one of the most important things you can do. A username should either reflect your industry, a name you’re well known by or your company. This is how people will find your profile and associating your account with a name that is already associated with your industry will increase its value. Avoid dashes and try to keep the name as short as possible. 

Your website - Don’t bother adding “www” in front of your url. Twitter will add “http://” so the shorter you can keep your url the better. Twitter will only show the first 20 characters and the first 7 are pre-filled in. Just use the domainname.com. Avoid using url shorteners like Bit.ly or Tiny Url. 

Bio keywords - With only 160 characters allowed in your bio, don’t waste characters with words that don’t add to your value and have no search relevance. Your bio is a short introduction to who you are and will be displayed in the search results. It should tell people who you are, what you do and what you’ll tweet about.

Avatar - Most people don’t think about this, but Twitter doesn’t rename your profile photo like some sites do. By giving your profile photo a correct name, it will appear in search engine image results. This is important when it comes to making sure people are using the correct version of your logo or picture.

Use your account - Now that you’ve set up your account to maximize search engine results, use your account. The more active you are on Twitter, the higher Google and Bing will rank your profile in search results. This will lead to more people finding your profile, getting more followers and increasing your brand authority. 

After making these changes, let us know how it changed the search results for your Twitter profile.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

Comments

[Andy @ FirstFound]

Excellent advice. I had no idea about the avatar filename issue, but the rest of our Twitter page is pretty much down pat.

[Katrin Kruger]

Useful post. Thanks for sharing this.