1. Aggregators & Scrapers Play an SEO Role
Without Topsy and the countless Twitter scrapers, it's unknown how fast our pages would have been indexed. The aggregators and the scrapers contain two features which undoubtedly helped our URLs to rank in each Twitter experiment:
- Optimized Title Tags for the target phrase, i.e.
<title>SeeYourImpact.org » Assist a mom, change the world – english | Twitmunin</title>
- A prominent followed link to the target URL near the top of the page.
2. Retweet – Retweet, Repeat
The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility it obtains with the social media aggregators referenced above.
With Topsy, for example, a URL that makes it into their top 100 list achieves much more visibility than a single tweet.
3. Social Authority = Ranking Potential?
“Who” tweets your content used to be just as important, or more so, than the number of people retweeting your content. Can Google still calculate this in any meaningful way?
It's interesting to note that Google still shows Twitter sharing data in personalized search results, as seen below.
Whether this sharing data translates into author rank remains to be seen.
4. Traditional SEO Still Rules - For Now
Lately, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who are genuinely confused about the new role of social factors in search engine optimization. We in the SEO industry have contributed to this with our wall-to-wall coverage of Facebook likes, Google+ and articles like this one about Twitter. Ian Laurie wrote an excellent article on the topic. This attention has caused some people to believe that social media has displaced traditional SEO. This is far from the truth. Let me be clear:
Social media doesn't replace traditional SEO. It helps it.
Each of these tests contained a URL optimized for the targeted keyword phrase and the target page was optimized for the keyword, including the URL, title tag and on-page text. All of these factors undoubtedly helped it to rank.
Traditional SEO practices including content creation, external link building and on-page factors still lay the foundation for long-term ranking success.
