Twitter Addicts are Good for your SEO
Last week I uncovered a study that showed links from a Google+ Page have a significant effective on your search rankings.
Well it seems that Google isn’t just taking notice of links on it’s own platform when it comes to Social Media signals.
Links In Tweets Count Too
Branded3.com used their award-winning petition website, Twitition, with over 1.4 million Twitter followers, 7.6 million signatures on over 198,000 petitions as a base for their recent study.
Taking a sample size of just over 8,500 petitions they looked at the effect on search rankings when users Tweeted the URL of a specific petition page.
The Key Findings
Average Google search ranking across all page URL’s in the study was 54.17.
Based on the number of Tweets containing the URL they recorded the following results:
- Page URLs with 500 or more Tweets, average rank 45.81
- Page URLs with 1000 or more Tweets, average rank 40.76
- Page URLs with 5000 or more Tweets, average rank 30.51
- Page URLs with 7500 or more Tweets, average rank 4.96
Where pages that were shared more than 50 times all saw a ranking benefit, those that were shared more than 7500 times almost always appeared on page one of the search results!
Rankings were checked by using the page titles, removing any special characters and using the first four words of the title as the search phrase in Google. For example, a Twitition with the title ‘We want Justin Bieber in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil!’ became ‘We want Justin Bieber’.
Download the full Tweets v Ranking report here.
Make Your Content More Shareable
Whilst there are many factors at play when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), what this and the previous study clearly show is that the more your content is shared the higher it is likely to rank in the search results.
Therefore it is critical that you make your content as interesting as possible to increase the likelihood of it being shared, and that you actively encourage sharing by your audience.