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
 

What is the purpose of repurposing content ?

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF RE-PURPOSING YOUR EXISTING ONLINE CONTENT.

The topic of re-purposing content is coming up a lot these days,  and this recent post by  +Neal Schaffer  is just one example.

Most folks do not realize the SEO benefits of re-purposing your online content, and the value that this adds to your #SEMANTICFOOTPRINT

The term re-purposing is also just another way of saying that you are doing content marketing.....   just saying that words are confusing to folks who are not willing to understand the context of conversations.

Your original content is already within the online environment, and re-purposing your content allows you to do all the basic SEO tricks such as but not limited to

• CONTENT MARKETING
• CROSS MEDIA MARKETING
• SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
• LINK BUILDING
• SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
• SEMANTIC MARKETING

Most online marketing folks use a host of tricks and big words to confuse management and business owners into believing their version of online marketing is different and has more value than others.  These are quite often the same  folks that use the phrase "SEO IS DEAD"  and similar attention grabbing or click bait tactics to enforce their new version of online marketing where Search Engine Optimization is vilified and   made to appear as irrelevant or irrational.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization has evolved from a links and keywords only issue, way back in the late 1990's,  into a vast complex set of issues that are all interconnected and impact on each other through strange and mysterious relationships within the semantic environments of the inter-webs.

Re-purposing your content and linking the new work to the original content in a manner that it expands the conversation,  in different platforms,  is not a difficult task, and the powerful influence of this within the semantic marketing space, where the depth of your semantic footprint is the issue at stake, must never be underestimated.

Search Engines are now using these issues in complex algorithms, to determine the intent of your online content,  so that they may match this intent with the intent of search queries.  This  matching of intent  is a very complex issue, but one that has become essential due to the vast amount of data and information available within the interwebs.  It thus follows that re-purposing your online content and linking the different aspects of the conversation around the actual intent of the original piece of content is very benificial to your SERPs or Search Engine Results pages.

This re-purposing will also give you more than one avenue of getting discovered in the search engine, as each piece of content will have an opportunity to feature within the SERP's, and if your marketing is done well,  you will dominate the Search Engine Rankings for your desired set of keywords and semantically related topics, with many different platforms featuring within the SERP's. 

Folks will be able to find your content within the different platforms, using the internal search engine features of each separate platform,   and if you have ensured that your social media marketing is within the public environment, then you will also have multiple listings in search engines,  making your brand, company or business seem much more important.  Multiple listings in the SERP's will elevate your marketing to unimaginable heights.  

Re-purposing your content has been around for quite some time, never being  spoken of as re-purposing but as content marketing, social media marketing and other confusing terms, specifically to make the folks who use these tactics, seem more important than they are.   SEO or Search engine Optimization, is in reality just a very complex integration of all your online marketing efforts into a single well managed online marketing effort.

I have been using the term #FUFISM or Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media   for some time now, and am thus greatful to all them online marketing folks who are now begining to move away from the idea of marketing silos where each marketing platform is seen as a stand alone platform to the apparently new concept of #INTEGRATEDMARKETING