Today’s Volusion blog post discusses how you can use Twitter to help your search engine presence. You’ll receive information on how search engines rank tweets and best practices in optimizing your Twitter account for search engine success. Keep reading to learn more.

With the latest partnership announcement between Twitter and Yahoo!, the online community is in a flurry on how to take advantage of the social channel’s search engine potential. As you may know, Google and Bing have forged partnerships to include tweets in their search results, both branded and keyword oriented. In other words, people can find your Tweets when doing a basic search, so make sure you’re giving them something worth clicking.

Of course, there’s always a cloud of mystery around optimizing content to appease the almighty algorithms of search engines. So how can your online business take a max of 140 characters and turn it into SEO bait? First you need to have a Twitter account. Then you need to take a look into your Twitter strategy. Take a look at a few basic tips from a great Mashable article to get started:

• Choose a good handle (handle = username). Make sure it’s short, simple and helps define your business. Our handle is “volusion” – pretty straightforward.
• Spend some time on your bio. You actually receive 160 characters instead of 140 for your profile’s bio. Define your business here and be sure to use critical keywords.
• Write keyword rich tweets. If search engines are searching for keywords and your tweets will show up in search results…you get the idea.

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That makes sense, but it’s fairly basic, right? Luckily we’ve received word from a real-time search expert at Google on how the powerhouse engine ranks tweets. It’s pretty rare that we learn algorithm information directly from the source, so pay close attention:

It’s not a popularity contest. Think of Twitter like you think of PageRank – the higher quality connections you have, the better. Google isn’t looking at the number of followers you have (think about all the Twitter spammers out there) but is more concerned of your followers’ reputation. This means you should spend some time wisely choosing those that you follow and those that follow you.

Watch out for hashtags. While hashtags (i.e. #volusion, #justforfun) can help users easily find tweets regarding a specific topic, Google has recognized that hashtags often include a lot of invaluable tweets. Thus, think twice before you use this popular Twitter trend.

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That’s about all they gave us outright. Fortunately we can take general SEO tips and apply them to our Twitter/SEO strategy. Make sure you’re focusing on keywords, keep your tweets recent and try to provide unique, helpful content to your followers. Check out this article for more specific details.

Hopefully this will arm you with the tools needed to utilize your social media efforts and achieve double duty with search engines. Now that Yahoo! is on board with even more advanced strategies, a lot more people will be able to see your tweets.

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Happy (and Twitter/SEO friendly) selling!
-Matt Winn, Marketing Associate

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What are your thoughts on the Yahoo! and Twitter partnership? How important is Twitter to your search engine strategy? Do you have any advice or insight on how to use social channels to boost your SEO? Anything you’d like to share? Let us know below!