Boost SEO with Twitter Lists

I came across this by accident recently and realized I'd stumbled onto something potentially powerful for SEO.

I was searching for something I had written in a tweet. The search results page (SERP) came up and low-and-behold it contained not only the tweet from my "sent" stream, but it also appeared in the stream of all of the lists I have been added to by followers.

The upshot being the more lists you are on the more your tweets get indexed by search engines, appear in search results and improve your search rank. Same goes for your lists, containing content of people in your list, showing up in search results. 

Here are a few tips to follow:

• Make yours lists public. Private lists don’t get seen by others and don't get indexed by search engines.
• Use descriptive list names. Your lists are given a dedicated URL consisting of your username and up to 25 characters that you specify e.g. http://twitter.com/#/list/b_WEST/social-media
• Create good (valuable) lists. Don’t add just anybody to the list - choose wisely. Lists with too 200 or more are hard to follow and defeat the purpose. A list of the "50 Best Non-Fiction Authors" is much more valuable and worthy of following.
• Use keywords or rather keyphrases e.g Non-Fiction Authors as list names vs. authors
• Add yourself to your own lists. Doing so means people who subscribe to your list will be subscribing to you as well.
• Talk about your lists on Twitter and your blog and be sure to link to them. Lists have URLs too.

Implement a few of the suggestions above, wait a week and then do a few searches using content from your posts or referring to your list and see what happens. 

Feel free to drop by my lists, and let me know if you would like to be added to a list, or leave me a link to your lists in the comments box below.

We'll go into more detail about how to use Twitter to boost your website SEO in our next work shop on Dec 3rd.