Gaming Twitter Next for SEOs?

I have to admit. Search engine optimization is a bit of gaming when you think about it. Many SEOs want to admit that SEO is either an art or a science. But it’s a little bit of both. Nevertheless, the whole field is built upon the fact that SEO professionals can test and figure out what search engines like and give that to them. There isn’t anything malicious behind what most white hat SEOs do but let’s call a spade a spade. The word optimize is closer to the word gaming than most SEOs want to admit.

Every aspiring SEO wants to know how is it exactly that search engines go about ranking search results. Is it the number of links you have or maybe the type of links you are getting to your site. Could it be your domain name or the location of your server? There are hundreds of factors considered in a modern search algorithm. While none of the algorithms out there today are perfect, they do the best possible to provide folks like you and I with the most relevant results. Google and other search engines may be moving towards personalized and real-time search, but SEOs are not going to give up trying to figure out search engines’ algorithms and dominating them.

Twitter seems to be the next battleground for SEOs. As search engines try to index and rank tweets, it has given SEOs another opportunity to game the system and get their own tweets at the top of the results. This process can be more difficult as building a real following on Twitter can take a bit of time. But search engine optimization experts (black hat and white hat) don’t ever let such challenges to scare them away.

There are plenty of ways to gain a lot of followers on Twitter. Services such as TweetAdder are being used by black hat and white hat tweeters to follow and gain followers on the fly. You can also try advanced Twitter tools that are out there to figure out who is more likely to follow you if you follow them. So the gaming is definitely going on in this space. Believe it or not, Google actually does use an algoirthm to rank tweets. That means there is always going to be people who want to figure out how to take advantage of these factors to get their own tweets to the top of the results. In this space, it’s hard to predict what could happen to Twitter or Facebook in a few years. But for now, Twitter is here to stay, so we all better get used to it. As far as the gaming part goes, it’s not like anything we haven’t seen before.