In a perfect world, you’d go about your life writing and tweeting without having to optimize anything for the search engines. Unfortunately, things do not work that way in real life. If you want to get the most out of your efforts on your blog, Twitter account, and even Facebook, you’ll need make some adjustments to things you tweet and display on your profile. There is such a thing as Twitter SEO. Who would have thought a few years ago that it’d be possible to dominate the search engines for a highly competitive keyword with just a Twitter account.

You won’t do any dominating unless you spend some time optimizing your Twitter profile for on and off page factors. We’ll discuss the off-page factors (e.g. link-building) in a separate posts, but here are 5 on-page things you can do right now to optimize your profile for the search engines.

User ID: the name you choose for your Twitter account matters. It is one of the most important decisions you make before committing to your Twitter strategy. When your account become more popular, you’ll have an easier time dominating the search engines for the term you used in your Twitter profile. It won’t be the only thing you need to worry about but you’d be surprised how having the right name can help you in the long run

Twitter Bio: it’s nice to have a chance to tell the world about yourself and your business. But don’t forget about your SEO efforts when doing it. Your Twitter bio gives you the chance to add your top keywords to your Twitter account and give yourself a better chance to show up high for those terms (relevant keywords are key). (more…)

When it comes to developing content on the web, I like to keep things simple. It’s really not that different from the basic laws of economics. It’s all about supply and demand. You can have the best product/content around, but if there is no demand/search for it, you are going to be the king of a very very small niche. If that’s your hobby, and you don’t intend to go anywhere with it, then you may be fine with your domination of your little niche. As a business owner, however, you can’t afford to go after niches in which there is not enough demand for what you are selling.

One of the best way to figure out where the demand is by using trend tools that are all over the Internet. Google Trends, WordTracker trends, and Google Insights all can show you what people are searching for and where your niche may be going. These are some of the classic tools available. But Twitter trend tools are perhaps the most exciting way to figure out what people are talking about right now and what you can do about it. Take Twendz for example. It’s a cool little tool that gives you a live overview of what going on Twitter. It shows you what the hot tags are, and whether people are talking positively or negatively about your specific topic.

Yahoo! Sidebar is yet another top twitter tool that lets you keep track of things on Twitter and find out where the demand is. It’s simple economics. If you can identify the demand, the need and desires of your prospects, you can certainly create content around those. (more…)

If you have been paying attention to the news in the search engine industry, you know Bing, Google, and Yahoo-Microsoft partnership are the talk of town. But what people need to be talking about is Topsy. Topsy is a search engine based on tweets that lets you find out what people are talking about on Twitter, who’s tweeting what, and who are the influential players in any niche. Twitter is still growing fast, and a lot of people are jumping on the ship, making the community stronger than before. It’s true that Google has almost too many pages in its index, but tweets are easier to create than web pages, and that’s why Topsy comes in handy.

You only need 140 characters to create a tweet, so millions of tweets can be sent back and forth on a daily basis. That means there is a lot of data out there, which Google and other modern search engines can’t keep track of for now. That’s where Topsy comes in. Tospy keeps track of top tweets across the board and lets you know which ones are more popular than others. It also shows you who has tweeted and retweeted what stories, and how influential each twitterer is.

So as you can see in the above picture, you can find out who’s been talking about your keyword over the past few weeks, month, or the past hour. Next to each story, you are going to see the number of times people have tweeted about that specific story. Another feature that makes Topsy so exciting is the ability to find out more information about each twitterer. You can not only use Topsy to find new people to follow, but you can also retweet stories easily and same time in the process.

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