The power of Twitter within the SEO space

Last night I was in a Twitter discussion where SEO issues were discussed, and the issue of social signals came up.  

Many  SEO PRACTITIONERS will tell you that social signals have no influence on your search engine optimisation strategies in any shape manner or form, and personally I believe they are right.  How ever the power of  individual tweets is a whole other animal, and some tweets can have a truly astounding impact on your individual online assets in strange and devious ways that at first glance seem unrealistic.

To understand the power of an individual tweet there are many different things that need to be understood, with the two main issues bring

• Duplicate content
• Website architecture

The first thing that one must clearly come to grips with is that each tweet must be annalized and dissected as a stand alone web page.  In every social media platform, your individual posts  are actually deemed to be stand alone web pages, and most folks have great difficulty in digesting this

Now the questions start to pop into your thinking patterns and thought process.... What does the website architecture of your social media activity look like.  In this post we will deal exclusively with Twitter and how your posts on twitter carry #SEOJUICES to the rest of the internet. The SEO juices of a single tweet can be very powerful and carry a great deal of influence in ensuring that individual digital entities recieve rather serious boosts within the Search Engine Results pages

So in Twitter your user name or Twitter handle has a host of different activities, and different uses, some are easy to understand, and others are exceptionally difficult to grasp untill you realise that web site architecture can be, and is indeed used in two distinct and different ways within the twittersphere.

The first one is simple and uses a flat structure where all your tweets are chronologically placed one under the other in the space.  Twitter.com/username/tweet, most folks understand this, as that is what they see within their twitter profiles when they look online?

Think domain/folder/subfolder

The second set of twitter architecture is where all the fun and games take place. This is an exceptionally complicated space where sub domains and nested  drop down folders that can be multiple layers deep, with  rather wide sub level bases. These are found hidden in structures, much like an organisation staff organogogram 

At the top is your original tweet which lives at http://username.twitter.com/tweet

Think subdomain.domain/folder where each tweet is considered as a folder within the subdomain 


Think USER.TWITTER.COM 

Next are the first level replies / comments on this individual tweet.  This level can be very wide, as each comment / reply to your original tweet will sit in this space.

Think USER.TWITTER.COM/ORIGINAL TWEET/ REPLY

Next level down is the replies / comments to the first level of comments / replies.   Then there may be more levels going deeper down the list as each new comment / reply slots into its appropriate position within the developing nested web site architecture, leaving a mass of sub folders containing each new comment / reply in a structured drop-down set of sub folders.

 This will look very much like a company staff chart, with a single boss and a number of workers who are directly responsible to him / her.  Where each first level reply / comment will sit on this level, spreading the first level base as far as there are new replies / comments on the original tweet in question.

This is now where things get rather sneaky and very interesting, coz replies / comments to sepperate posts at this level will drop down into the second tier of the resulting website architecture. Just like the boss in the company has workers who report to him directly, So each reply / comment will have its own list of second responders.

Think   USER.TWITTER.COM/FOLDER/SUBFOLDER

Each first level response will have its own second tier, and the second tier may have its own set of responses in a third tier. These third tier responses may have their own responders who will form the next tier within that individual drop down list.

This can and does get out of hand on long twitter conversations.  So be warned that this is very complicated, and rather messy, making it difficult to put into proper perspective.

Each of these individual tweets may also have likes and shares, then also reshares of shares complicating things even further. The likes do not carry any true SEO VALUE, as they are deemed to be social signals, which most search engines tend to ignore, or give little value within the SEO environment. That being said, the share factor is some what different, with each share bring treated in much the same fashion as the original tweet

So this website architecture is looking like a simple drop-down structure that has an easy to follow make up, with the sharesand reshares taking the same structure, but being placed adjacent to the original tweet

Now that we have the website architecture under control, and can see the flow of tweets in a business staff type organogram we can get into the real meaty part of the discussion

The content of each tweet is now evaluated from a Semantic perspective, starting at the top spot, and flowing steadily through each level with all of the sepperate sublevels bring indexed and evaluated.

Standard SEO evaluation by search engines is applied to each comment in the comment stream, taking into account this list and MANY OTHER ISSUES

• where in the nested loops the comment resides
• What the semantic context of the tweet consists of
• are there any out bound links to pages that expand the conversation
• What is the site authority and page authority level of any such linked to page
• are there any inbound links to individual comments
• Is this comment stream part of an embedded twitter post
• Who are the folks commenting
• How fresh are the comments
• Are the comments relevant to the conversation
• Should the comment get spam treatment
• What was the purpose and intent of each tweet in the comment stream

Because each comment is seen by the search engine as a stand alone web page, the interlinking between each comment is evaluated, where the level within the site architecture is used as a link referral base and out bound links add tremendous value to the SEO link juice of those tweets which contain them, adding SEO value within the entire conversation chain.

This can thus add true value within the Search engine optimisation flow patterns to all the out bound links, with any out bound links in the original tweet getting the lions share of this link juice. The closer to the top of the conversation an out bound link is found, the more link juice it should carry, but this is not always true, as there are many different factors that influence the flow of link juice from a social media conversation.

It can thus be seen that the SEO value of a Twitter conversation can become a very powerful and much appreciated boost to the individual online assets which may be linked to from within the comment streams of a tweet

By on line assets I mean web pages, blog post,  social media profiles or any online content such as images, videos or PDF documents

 Twitter is thus an extremely powerful link building tool
 

knowing your customer and intended TARGET MARKET

  The true value of knowing and understanding your customer base and intended target market audience is one of the most important aspects of your SEO strategy.

Before you can know who your customers are, and who your intended target market audience should be,   you need to do the relevant research and have the company action plan in your arsenal of documents that you will be using as reference points in your target market research.

Knowing the purpose, aims and objectives of the company are very helpful in doing your target market research.  Having access to the product / service or event documentation, that you will be marketing and all related information is also a pre-requisite to any serious topic and key word research.

Access to your company accounting records, showing the contact details and any other information that may be available such as buying patterns, product usage stats,  service complainants and complements as well as any recommendations that may have been sent to the administrative staff  are of extreme helpful nature during the early stages of the SEO process where key words and selected topic structures are selected to be turned into online content for your information consumers (intended target market audience) to consume.

Content that supplies an answer to your interned target market audience as well as your current audience and customer base is highly recommended as potential online content, and this should be a very highly sort after content category. If you do not know your intended target market, how can you satisfy the information  needs of your intended target mark.?

How do you get to know your target audience so that you may use this within your greater marketing vision?

Target market research is a very delicate affair, where great care should be taken to ensure that all false positives are eliminated from your target market makeup.  failure here can be very costly further down the line, when your online content suddenly starts to tank out of the SERP's due to a very poor conversion rates as well as bad  bounce rates The false positives within your target market mix is the biggest cause of this terrible state of affairs that is going to be very costly to repair. 

If you take the time to do your target market research properly,  and document this in a manner that others can easily understand, and also have access to, then things further down the line also become an awful lot easier.  From a #FUFISM based marketing  perspective this documentation of your intended target market is vital, as the post publication stages of your SEO where you concentrate on expanding the influence of you  published content through the #OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation) stages of your SEO using the various social media marketing techniques where link building, network building, inbound marketing, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and so many other techniques are applied, all have the same target market and focus on the same basic keyword set that is used within your #IPSEO (In Page Search Engine Optimisation)

By taking the time to know and understand your intended target market audience, then documenting your findings,  you allow your various online marketing teams to have insights into how they should apply this information.  This will help your copywriters for your  various online platforms to collaborate and share insights as to the methods that they use within their specific platform, and how other copywriters in other platforms may make use of their content to bolster #STFSEOVI (Semantic Trust Factor Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators)

If your copywriters all have access to this customer / target market centric information, as well as the issues around the In Page SCHEMA tricks and other related techniques used to expand the semantic footprint of your original web site or blog content, then these can be used as well in ways that  enhance your semantic footprint and add value to the related SEOVI associated with the IPSEO.


It thus follows that knowing your target market audience and customer base are an essential part of the SEO process that needs to be shared across different marketing platforms, as they all have the same basic issues when it comes to connecting with the end users thinking patterns and related online behavior.

Once your web site content is published the real SEO takes place within the social media, where your social media posts discuss your web site content in ways that entice your intended target market to click through and consume the content within your web site.  Social media marketing thus also forms a large portion of your traffic driving techniques and plays many different roles within your total marketing strategies .

Improving the STFSEOVI or Semantic Trust Factor Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators is not the only function of your social media marketing. Driving traffic to your web site is also part and parcel of your social media marketing aims and objectives.  Link building and network marketing are also part and parcel of the SEO factors included in your social media marketing efforts. There are also a host of other issues that are addressed by your social media marketing such as but not limited to :

inbound marketing
customer contact  and information sharing issues
HR (Human resource) issues
PR (Public relations) issues

*knowing how your intended target market audience perceives these issues, and knowing how to frame these issues in a manner that best suits your intended target market is thus a vital issue that can only be addressed through a clear understanding of who your intended target market audience is, and why this population segment was chosen as your intended target market audience  in the first place*

IT IS THUS IMPORTANT THAT YOU KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS AND INTENDED TARGET MARKET AUDIENCE VERY WELL.

 Knowing your customers and intended target market audience allows you to target them in an informed and well managed way, that would be impossible other wise.  Knowing your audience allows you to address their pain points and service their information needs  from an informed perspective, so take the time and do the necessary research, and remember to document this research clearly, as many different marketing professional will be relying on this vital information in their planning of content strategies and associated work.