OPTIMIZING YOUR TWEETS FOR SEARCH

When Google announced it would start indexing tweets from Twitter, the responsibilities of the search engine marketer and social media marketer grew even closer. While having a strong social presence is undoubtedly an important part of any search marketing strategy, by taking the steps below, you can now improve the chances of your Twitter account coming up in both Twitter and Google searches.

Firstly, you’ll want to target relevant keywords. A good way to get a strong sense of what keywords to target is to look at your metadata and combine those keywords with popular hashtags and topics on Twitter that work well with your content. After a few weeks, you’ll be able to identify the keywords that are performing the best by monitoring your engagement levels, link clicks, and reach—a spike in any of those metrics will indicate which Tweets have effective keywords in them, and you should use those keywords going forward.

After you’ve identified the keywords you will be targeting, you will next want to optimize your account for Twitter search. This includes making sure your handle and username match your website and brand name, which will improve your chances of being found by your audience.

You’ll next want to make changes to your bio, photo, and link. Twitter regularly indexes your bio, so any changes to it will affect your relevancy score in search. Your bio is where you state what your purpose on Twitter is and explain why someone should follow you—update your bio regularly based on the type of content about which you are tweeting. Your link is also important as it is essentially your call to action, so choose which page you are linking to wisely. Finally, your photo actually has some SEO value in it as well; make sure you include any important keywords into the file name, separated by dashes.

Once you’ve covered the essentials of your account, add Google’s markup code to your website, which will allow you to specify your preferred social accounts to include in search results.

Now that you’ve covered your bases, it’s time to start tweeting. When possible and natural, include keywords you want to rank for in your tweets. After all, every time you tweet, you have a chance to show up in Google search results, even though you might not stay there long. By constantly tweeting with your target keywords included, you stand a much better chance of showing up in Google’s SERPs.

So going forward, be sure that your tweets are full of your target keywords and trending hashtags and topics so that you are ranking well in both Twitter’s and Google’s search results.