As a professional SEO who tries everything to do with social media I often debate this question. Is Twitter helping your SEO? Helping your bottom line in terms of PageRank or leads?
My short answer is NO. Twitter is NOT helping. It’s an additive play toy that has no redeeming qualities that inherently build Google PageRank or increase the number of high quality backlinks to my web pages or move my rankings up on competitive phrases. But that’s just me. I have friends who swear by it but I still remain cautious.
I’m experimenting with a twitter plugin called “Twitter for WordPress” at http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/ (See below)
What Twitter does effectively is it allows Pundits of all kinds to churn out and publish interesting, helpful, and funny commentary all day and all night to a stream of zombie like drones (and regular folks too). Instead of having “SEO Radio” I can just follow tweets from the top 5 in the field who like to Tweet, like Matt Cutts for example. I can login to Twitter once a day, send a tweet to my followers and read up on what Matt Cutts has been tweeting. I might gleen some useful information that way and I have.
The big problem with Twitter it is that people get addicted and it becomes a time drain and gossip tool rather than a productivity tool. People get hooked and they tweet all day… until they quit. Email can become a time drain, I get 500 emails a week and I process every one. But I do it 2 or 3 times a day for 10 minutes each. And my iPhone helps me to crank through the volume quickly when I have time commuting or wherever. Twittering is a form of communication like email, but it’s more additive and less substantial because each tweet has a max of 140 characters.
Tweet away and when you need help, remember there are half-measures with Twitter. But when you are making the switch from addict to user, you might have to just put it down and walk away for a while before you can go back to it and control it… one or two sessions a day.
