In the past few months, Twitter has taken the online world by storm. The micro-blogging phenomenon has become a rage with film-stars, sportspersons, politicians, musicians, and authors. Twitter is being used by fans as a medium for reaching out to their favorite celebrities and knowing more about their lives. But that’s not all about Twitter; this service has great SEO potential too.

Twitter’s Utility for SEO/SEM Professionals

For SEO/SEM professionals, Twitter offers a great chance to promote new web content and creating a platform for immediately breaking news about offers and services. While Twitter follows Google’s nofollow tags, any URL shared on Twitter through a number of URL shortening services like TinyUrl, bit.ly, tr.im can result in quality organic traffic when people click on these links and this can help a website in increasing its page ranking on Google and get better visibility among the targeted consumer market. Twitter can also be integrated with blogs to notify a person’s Twitter followers when the blog is updated. Along with appearing on their own pages, a link posted on Twitter will also appear on the pages of a person’s followers, leading to more viewership.

Marketing in 140 Characters or less

The marketing potential of Twitter cannot be ignored by SEO professionals who want to create a stream of visitors to a client’s site and promote the products or services on offer. By posting meaningful and interesting ‘tweets’, the Twitter feed of a person or a company can function better than a mailing list as the message is addressed directly to the followers of a person and has no chances of getting lost in the spam or getting deleted.

Recent Changes in Twitter

The recent changes in Twitter’s API have brought a wonderful opportunity for people and businesses who want to feature on the first page of Google. The title page of Twitter now lists the account name along with the name of the owner of the account. This has pushed the rankings of businesses and individuals who registered their own names on Twitter, to the top of the page. In the recent Google searches, the Twitter pages are found to be ranking even higher than FaceBook or LinkedIn pages. Twitter’s partnership with URL shortening service bit.ly has also made it easier for users to shorten URLs without actually using a third part service. The links redirect a visitor through a 301 redirect which means that the URL belongs permanently to the long address.

To sum up, Twitter is here to stay and with keen insight and purposefulness, SEO professionals can benefit greatly from this unique platform for microblogging.