Twitter and SEO

[CJSmiles]

Hello Mozzers,

I am trying to determine the effectiveness of using twitter as an SEO tactic. A site in my niche (healthcare job boards) is ranking very well for a handful of head terms. Their backlink profile is okay, but not amazing. But one thing that stands out to me is their approach to twitter, http://www.physemp.com/socialTwitter.html. It looks like they send an automated feed of their jobs to these specific twitter handles. Each of the handles has over 2,000 followers (some are legit some are bots). The site ranks for some highly competitive head terms (see attached).

Can any of their ranking success be attributed to these various twitter handles? Is Google seeing these twitter feeds and associating high follower count and high tweet frequency with the URL attached to each account? Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

Thanks in advanced!

lMbkS

[stevefidelity]

I agree in this particular case the SEO value of their Twitter activity may not be all that significant, but there's no doubt that search engines are increasingly using social signals in their rankings algorithms.

I like to say that social media has 'democratized' the web in a way. In the past, acquiring an in-bound link was like acquiring a 'vote' of sorts for your site. Today, you don't need to have a website in order to 'vote'. When someone follows/likes/+1s you, it's a vote of sorts. I'm not suggesting that individual follows or likes are the equivalent of a good inbound link.

Search engines want to rank websites that they feel are both relevant to the user's search query, and websites that they feel are authoritative. There has been much discussion about search engines looking at things like your 'retweet ratio' or your 'follower to following' ratio. If those types of ratios are 'favourable' that sends a signal to a search engine that you are 'authoritative'.

[William.Lau]

It could play a little bit of a factor but not much.

The only reason people say social media is considered in SEO, is because for something to be social..it must have some sort of buzz. If someone just posts messages and no one interacts, thats not really social media. That is talking to a wall.

So those tweets might generate responses and those responses can generate into leads, but if they don't then it doesn't matter.