It appears to be development season for microblogging phenomenon Twitter – in the last week, we’ve seen the advent of two substantial updates, though they are only in the testing phase. Perhaps the most important update for developers, SEO experts and internet marketing specialists is the Annotations function which will allow for the addition of any type of meta data to Tweets.
At this stage, it’s entirely up to the developers what kind of meta data they would like to attach to the Tweets, providing it doesn’t exceed 512 bytes. Twitter has recommended that developers begin by attaching annotations regarding location, websites, reviews, music and similar.
As important as Twitter has shown to be for internet marketing companies, this new development could prove to be invaluable if the right applications are developed to support it.
Search Engine Optimisation
Obviously, anyone worth their salt in the search engine optimisation industry knows that meta data is a very important piece of the puzzle, but is the addition of meta to Tweets likely to make Twitter more useful to SEO in a direct fashion? Although it’s not certain yet, the answer is ‘probably not’.
Optimising Tweets is all well and good and we would argue is eminently likely providing either applications or the UI is developed to allow for this the way YouTube does now, but it’s unlikely that even an optimised Tweet will be able to pass on much – if any – power as part of a linking campaign.
Twitter applies the ‘nofollow’ attribute to all outbound links and while there is some debate amongst the search engine optimisation community about exactly how much or how little link power is passed on through these, it’s certainly unlikely to replace a good old-fashioned linking campaign.
What there is no denying, however, is that now that Tweets are indexed by search engines, optimising them correctly could well be an excellent way of pushing social media campaigns forwards and driving more traffic to the site you are trying to optimise which, ultimately, should be the goal of any SEO campaign.
This is all speculation until the Annotations application is rolled out across the board and developers begin to get involved with it, but it’s certainly something that is worth keeping an eye on for search engine optimisation specialists, social media experts and internet marketers alike.
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The SEO benefits of Twitter still remain to be seen. Tweets are indeed indexed but how it effects link value is dependant on so many other factors. Let’s see what the outcomes of this move bring