Search Marketing Sage

As an SEO who is on Twitter but doesn’t really use it as others do, I found this article ‘Riding the Twitter Link Waves’ by Eric Ward useful (really, they all are). Now, I use Twitter but can’t seem to get past certain aspects of it-such as those who use it to complain about each and every thing throughout their day or report on minutia. Some minor stuff is fine but there are people who are downright ridiculous about it. So that was an initial turnoff for me. However, as time goes on Twitter is getting tweaked and so is becoming increasingly more valuable.

Eric is talking about the linking opportunities-”waves and echoes” by merely tweeting an article- be it your own or someone else’s. A great point Eric makes is that Twitter users:

“…have influence in very specific subject areas. If I’m announcing a niche health related web site, I can do a bit of research and quickly find which Twitter users are regularly tweeting similar health related URLs, and reach out to them…”

Fantastic! So the point is that an article tweeted could then get caught in a “wave” of tweets and thusly “echoed” in retweets. What he says could’ve been tweeted by, what appears on the surface to be only, a few followers, could more deeply show to be many, many more. Taking into account of how many followers a user may have, you can imagine your article reaching those followers and those followers’ followers.

Those people tweeting and retweeting will most likely (says Eric) be in the niche you’re shooting for that could show some return.

So Eric tweets an article, he then receives so many retweets and:

“Still, here’s some Twitter math to illustrate the power of Twitter Link Waves.

o 41 Total Twitter users who have tweeted a link to the article

o 53,282 Total number of followers those 41 Twitter users have

o 52,270 Total number of Twitter users shown a link to my article (I removed my own followers keep this honest)”

Eric goes into discussing possible overlap of having so many followers and people sharing the same article. In another article Eric talks about how he announced a client’s site through his own site URLWire. This announcement did not included Eric tweeting the site himself. The results were purely from the tweets of others.

“Where I see the real value in Twitter as a link building tool is in recognizing that many people who use Twitter have influence in very specific subject areas. If I’m announcing a niche health related web site, I can do a bit of research and quickly find which Twitter users are regularly tweeting similar health related URLs, and reach out to them, outside of Twitter.”

You can imagine that the “wave” of tweets somewhat builds on itself and in this case, resulted in a permanent link from a medical school website.

So the lesson here is, get over the sandwich comments and minutia and get with communities that can result in great links. It will happen, you just have to be diligent.