Awesome SEO tip - (ab)using Twitter!

Hey all.

I just posted this on my affiliate marketing blog, but figured I'd share it here too since it's so cool.

Basically, in case you hadn't noticed, Twitter is ranking pretty well in the SERPs. And that means one thing for us - parasite SEO!

If you don't know what parasite SEO is, it's basically where we take advantage of someone elses ranking power to get our content ranked. Creating a Squidoo Lens for example - that's parasite SEO because we're piggybacking on Squidoo to appear high up in the SERPs.

Well now we can do the same thing with Twitter. While all links on Twitter are nofollow, the pages themselves are still optimized around the account holder's name - which you're free to stuff with keywords.

1. Go to the Twitter sign up page.
2. Fill in your keywords as your real name (”Online Poker”).
3. Fill in a shortened version of your keywords as your Twitter name (”onlinepoker”).
4. Fill in the rest of the form and sign up.
5. Post a few “tweets” with links off to your other sites, or cloaked affiliate links.
6. Get a few inbound links to your new Twitter page, using your keywords as anchor text. These can come from all the regular Web 2.0 properties, blog comments, forum links etc. If there’s not much competition for your keyphrase, this bit should be quite quick.

Give it a go - the majority of the top 25 products on Clickbank are still open, and even if Google notices and cracks down on this in a few months, imagine what have 30 days worth of ranking top 3 for "truth about abs" would do for your bank balance!

 

Ive been seeing a few odd names and twitter ids around just lately, what you have described above makes so much sense I think it is being done quite a bit already.
Im going to give it a go, although I already have a twitter account, I dont suppose it will matter if I have a couple more.
Thanks for the tip, lets hope it works for a little while.

 

That strategy won't last you too long. You may be able to get a quick rank, but if enough people report you to Twitter as a spammer, your account will be deleted.

 

And what keywords have you seen that rank well? I have never seen a Twitter page come up on Google Serps.

EDIT: Just read your blog post. Ashton ranks well because of all the news of his 1 million followers. Darren ranks well because he started a blog and marketed his Twitter name big time. I doubt this will work ...

 

I noticed this accout - twitter.com/LegitOnlineJobs keyword:legit online jobs 30# in google.

 

I'd like to think this strategy wouldn't last long... but I see Google spitting out all kinds of really stupid results for some of my biggest keywords... so maybe it is worth a try

 

I wouldn't consider that as a serious link building strategy.

 

Twitter is nofollow, but the point isn't to get PageRank through outgoing links, it's to use Twitter's status to get your page ranked, then siphon the traffic off through links in your tweets.

And yes, it might get slapped soon or you might get banned, but the same is true of any Web 2.0 publishing site - Squidoo, Hub Pages and so on.

I haven't seen Twitter ranking for many things related to products, but that's probably because not many people are trying it out.

Tell you what - I'll try it out and post the results here. I'll be using my shoulder pain product, and will go for 3 keyphrases:

pain in shoulder
shoulder blade pain
neck shoulder pain

There's the first few links. Now I'm off to get 10 more each and see what happens

Edit This isn't linkbuilding, it's parasite SEO. The point is not to get high PR inbound links to your sites. And of course I wouldn't say this is a solid, long term SEO strategy, but it's one more tool in the affiliate marketer's box, and it could be great if you need fast rank for something. People do a very similar thing with Ezine Articles and Squidoo pages all the time - Twitter is just one that hasn't been exploited so publicly yet.

 

It may work well for the ultra less competitive keywords

 

I dig the parasite SEO aspect, I'm big on that these days. More and more it seems like all the search engines want to rank high are these sorts of web 2.0 sites.