SEO Blog

This is just a quick one..

We all agree that Twitter is a good SEO tool?

For those who’re not sure – I’ll write another longer post shortly about this,  or join my search engine marketing tips newsletter (form over there on the right hand side) but basically, getting your URL into tweets doesn’t have immediate SEO benefit as the links have the NoFollow tag on the tweet, so the search engines ignore it – but, there are a couple of places that these links do actually go to, that don’t have the nofollow attribute, and that do have an SEO benefit.

This is one of the reasons you should make your tweets as good as possible, and the pages / blog posts you’re including in the tweet, as high value as possible, so more people will re-tweet.

Anyway – for now just know that there is an SEO benefit from including your link in the tweet.

But, if TinyURL is used (either automatically, or manually) this SEO benefit will still come, but it will take longer to come – this is because the tinyURL 301 re-directs to your site, so the search engines will pick this up & pass any pagerank that is flowing, to your site – but using a tinyURL it’ll take a bit longer for this to flow – also, if you want to create a brand, you can’t do this using tinyURL, all you’re doing is helping to build someone else’s brand.

So – consider registering a much smaller domain name, and either building a new site on this domain, or 301 re-directing this domain to your longer domain name.

What I’ve just done, is I’ve registered a smaller domain – s-e-o.tv & I’m now using this to link directly to my blog – and as the latest blog is always at the top of the blog, I don’t really need to link to a specific page, just linking to s-e-o.tv will do.

OK – you can still say that there will still be a delay in any flow of link juice through the smaller domain to my main domain, and that’s true in this case as I’m just 301 redirecting it to my blog, but A) I could very easily just build the blog on the smaller domain – and B) even if I don’t do this, using a smaller domain that I own, to re-direct, instead of a tinyURL, means I get the benefit of any branding that is done via my tweets.

That’s all for now folks

Kev