SUBMIT 2.0

During the summer of 2008, I decided to search for myself in Google. I knew that my competition would be stiff, since there is a famous Mexican soccer player named “Rafael Marquez” and there’s also a boxer that shares my name as well.

Both of those guys have millions of fans worldwide, plus a lot of press coverage that produces a lot of content about them. Despite that, I was surprised to see that I, who I consider to be “the real” Rafael Marquez, did not appear until page 56 of the Google Search engine results pages.

Given my dismal initial results, I decided that I wanted to improve my own search engine rankings without Google bombing. I wanted people to be able to find me when they were looking for me. During the course of the year, I noticed continually improving results, however, as of this writing, the highest ranking page with that I have is my twitter profile page.

My Twitter profile page ranks on page 1 of Google, in the 10th slot. Which comes in at number 10, meaning on page 1 of Google when you search for my name.

Here are 5 reasons why I believe twitter has been such a boon to my search engine rankings:

1. lnbound links. Every time I create a tweet, the individual tweet carries with it a link to my profile page. As of this writing, I have over 6000 tweets, meaning over 6000 inbound links to my profile page.
  2. Keyword in the URL. Each one of my tweets, besides the link to my home page also carries my keyword, in this case my name, in the URL. So, every time I tweet, I create a keyword rich link back to my profile.
  3. The power of the retweet and the reply. Every time someone retweets one of my messages, or makes a public reply to one of my messages, I get another link from their profile. What that means is that when you do a link search for my profile, I have well over 14,000 inbound links to my page.
  4. I tweet a lot. I tweet about 20 times a day, spread out through out the day. It’s a natural and organic growth pattern of inbound links that come in at random times through out the day. Google loves natural growth of inbound links.
  5. Don’t be a bot. One of the keys, in my opinion, is that you can’t be a bot that continually tweets out spam or other junky messages for the sake of creating links. When your messages are retweeted or you get replies to your tweets, you’re getting link votes from other users. Link votes are where it’s at in most of the search engine’s eyes.

What does this mean for you?

Twitter passes rank and link juice along to the webpage that is linked to from your twitter profile page. If you pick a keyword rich name for your twitter user name, then, I believe that there’s a good chance that you’ll receive link juice benefit from your twitter profile page.

Search engine results pages are a dynamic animal. It is possible that when/if you try to look me up on Google, out of 1.2+ million pages indexed, my twitter profile may be on page 2 rather than page 1.

Source: Ezinearticles

Filed under: Web-Site-SEO