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Twitter, a social site which allows users to add quick status updates (similar to Facebook) this week made a small change to its title tag, showing us all that even they are interested in improving the Search Engine Optimization value of their website.
The format that was being used previous to this week for the Title Tag was “Twitter / Profile Name”.
The page title has now been changed to read, “Name (username) on Twitter”
I will explain why this matters in a bit.
Twitter Page Title Change Example
This change is so new that you can see that Google has still not picked it up in their own results page. Here is how the result used to be displayed when typing ‘TechWyse’ into Google:
With the new change, once Google acknowledges it in the results page the ‘Page Title’ will appear more like this.
A Quick SEO Lesson
As many people know, the ability of your website to rank well depends on the amount of people linking to your website. As noted in an earlier article, in the last year the subscriber base has grown more than 1350% from a user base of 475,000 in Feb 2008 to more than 7 million in Feb 2009. As a result many people are linking to their Twitter profile. This means that Twitter has become a heavyweight to the search engine algorithm.
So much so that when you type in your own profile name into Google, you may very well see Twitter on the first page results! For example, try typing in our own company name “TechWyse” into Google and you will see that as of today, the Twitter result is in the middle of the first page!
How The Title Change Will Effect Your Own SEO
This change by Twitter will mainly help Twitter pages get indexed even better and more importantly will help improve click through rates to Twitter pages when they show up in the index.
How can it improve your own SEO? Well the impact for your own site is that it adds a heavyweight back link to your web site. Is this going to make a huge difference to your own business or website? Probably not. But small things like this done over and over again begin to make a big impact for your search engine rankings. That is the whole point!
What Is The Business Purpose of Twitter?
As stated in an earlier post, How Twitter Fits Into Your Corporate Marketing Plan, the real value in using Twitter at this point is gaining followers. By gaining followers you are able to traffic direct people that want to read your message to places you want them to go. Think of it as an opt-in mini newsletter service.
There are some small things that you can do yourself to help your SEO on Twitter. I will detail those in an upcoming article but it is my own opinion that the biggest impact Twitter can have on your business is by developing a strong following.
Hey – have I mentioned that we have a Twitter page yet? If you liked this article, we are accepting followers! 
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9 Responses to “Twitter Makes Changes To Improve Their SEO”
Twitter has a user profile running into millions. And, having a back link to your site from such a heavy weight should obviously scale up your search engine rankings considerably. Good advice for everyone wanting to achieve more online businesses with the help of social networking sites.
March 26th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Twitter is the king of the social bookmarking hill! There is no question about Twitter’s dominance in social networking of all kinds. No wonder, Google has started giving importance to twitter results in returning their results, yes this has great impact on our SEO results.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Twitter is something new and people still have not understood all its features properly.
Agreed, twitter is the best social media platform so far, but I guess another social media platform will pop up in the future that will be as good or better for business use than Twitter, but for now Twitter is the king of social media in internet marketing.
March 29th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
The reason that Twitter is the most -sought-after above the rest of the social networking sites when it comes to business use for internet marketing, is because of the ease it makes to build and attract your audience, which the whole platform is based upon, and because of its extreme pure simplicity.
I am really enjoying the beauty of simplicity in Twitter…
March 29th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
There is so much talk about twitter today that I find it difficult to decide whom to believe and whom not to. But this article makes a compelling case for twitter and I now comprehend why it is the business’ best friend. Thanks for the all the info DJ!
March 30th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
It’s a very debatable question, whether Twitter passes any link juice or not thus helping SEO. Twitter links are nofollow for the search engines which means that users won’t find them in their searches. And while some engines do follow the links, they exclude it from ranking calculations.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
I have a different take from Dimitry here. To me Twitter is a very effective tool for offpage SEO. Every time a link to your site is published somewhere on the web (Twitter has lots of links) there is always a chance that a new welcome visitor will arrive. People don’t care about nofollow attributes. If they see a link that presents appealing content they are going to follow it for sure.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
[...] sold blogging software Blogger to Google five years ago. Twitter feeds have been appearing in some Google search results, and developers have been adding plug-ins for browsers such as Firefox that add Twitter feeds to [...]
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April 3rd, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I think the changes are cool! But how can I see if someone is following me or not?
Erik Johnson
June 30th, 2009 at 9:30 pm