Search Advisory

The category of “microblogging” is dominated by Twitter, so that’s the site that I’m going to focus on.  Each tweet (Twitter “post” of 140 characters or less) does actually become its own unique web page.  You can see this by going to Google and typing this into the search box: site:http://twitter.com/yourname.  You’ll see one web page displayed for each tweet that you’ve posted.

However, this doesn’t mean that the very brief “content” you’ve posted will show up for any searches other than that very specific one.  Tweets are too short to fit many search terms in them, and there’s no reason for these “tweet pages” to have any links pointing at them.  So using Twitter to have more content show up in the search engine results pages won’t work, other than possibly your profile page.

Profile pages tend not to rank too highly, since there’s not a lot of room for search terms there either.  You can add links to your site in your profile, but you can’t put search terms in the link text, and there’s some debate over whether or not the links pass juice.

But there are indirect ways to use Twitter for link-building.  You can follow leaders in your industry, and also do searches for relevant conversations that are happening about your brand or vertical.  If an opportunity presents itself to reach out to these folks with quality content, you may get “retweets” to further spread the word, as well as links in tweets and, ideally, on other sites as well.