SEO is synonymous with ranking on the first SERP page in Google. Optimizing a site for Google means getting links, many links, no matter what. Defining and redefining SEO will not change the way these people perceive it. This is not an article for them. Those webmasters who optimize solely for Google are basically targeting only 70% of the search engine market, and disregarding the rest.

This is for those who have heard of social networking but don’t exactly know how it applies to SEO and want to use all possible SEO channels to drive more traffic and to gain more customers. This article will prove what “real” SEO value is to be expected from services like Twitter.

Does twitter Pass Any Link Juice?

Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its “SEO value” has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google’s SERPs. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

According to compete.com, Ask.com owns about 2.5% of the search engine market share. The same source shows that in November 2008 there were 255 million search queries on Ask.com. This is nothing compared to 7235 millions on Google, but can you seriously disregard a source of such traffic? Ask.com is a potential gate for visitors that could convert into customers.

So let’s ask the question again, shall we? Does Twitter pass any link juice? For Ask.com it does.

Do tinyURL Shortened URLs Have SEO Value?

The short answer is yes. TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead. The problem with Twitter, as we already discussed, is the “nofollow” attribute added to all submitted links.

Are There Any Other Possible SEO Advantages with Twitter?

As I already said, SEO is not only about building links. Optimizing a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. “Creating” is “onsite SEO.” “Promoting” is “offsite SEO.”

Every time you submit your site to a directory you “promote it” – meaning that you do “offsite SEO.” Every time a link to your site is published somewhere on the web a gate to your site is being opened. People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.

When visitors land on a page from an exterior link some other metrics are affected: number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on site. These metrics matter for the search engines more and more; since all other variables are so easily gamed (links and keywords are all subject to spam and black hat SEO strategies).

To make a long story short: although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss.

Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

Yes, another way to optimize, another acronym to add to the pile. But what is Digital asset optimization? (DAO I guess) It’s basically taking your digital assets, i.e. flikr photos, youtube videos, pdf’s etc. and optimizing them for the search engines. This type of optimization is a direct result of the Web 2.0 movement. We have already seen these being indexed. Here is a good example of digital asset optimization in action.

Ok, enough of the definition, how do we optimize these assets? There are two ways to do this for both on page and off page. What do I mean by this?

On page Digital Asset Optmization :
This would be considered the images, blog posts, videos, pdf’s you have on your site. Ways to increase indexing are first naming the file with your keywords you want to rank (and the ultimate them of the asset, duh!) If you have a video or image of your company’s offerings or even strategy- label it as xyz_strategy.jpg. Most site programmers and designers label it with their own interpretation of what’s in the image rather than keyword focus.

Next, add an alt tag. This should be done for the major images, not the graphic images that make up the website, i.e. spacers and border images.

Lastly add the keyword you want to focus in the content as many times and it fits. No, I’m not saying add sentences like, “check out xyz strategy because xyz strategy is the best xyz strategy.” That’s considered keyword stuffing and is prohibited by most of the search engines. And always focus on one or two keywords. Trying to rank one page for 15 different keywords gets you nowhere is the search results and also lessens the chance for a visitor to convert.

Off page Digital Asset Optmization :
This would be your Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and every other social networking application TechCrunch reports on.
Most of these sites provide areas to include, title, description, and tags to use in their own search results but Google has been indexing of course, YouTube results and I’m sure once deals are in place others will follow.

Digital Asset Optimization has become a important compliment to traditional SEO so keep this in mind when creating that rich media.