If used right, Twitter and the networking tools it provides can become invaluable for someone trying to provide SEO for themselves or another company.
However, on the flip side, use it wrong and you can find your efforts coming to nothing, and your clients heading elsewhere.

Twitter in itself is a godsend for the SEO community, being able to publish your articles and provide clear, almost natural links through the medium of microblogging is a clear step for anyone working with SEO, having tools ready made to create a viral output through twitters ‘retweet’ feature takes even more effort out of the task for you.
But how do you harness these tools and turn the power into clicks?

Well, to start from the top, your name: The username you choose to host your twitter account has to be catchy, but it also has to be memorable. If you’re selling plants, using the user: ‘p1antl0VeRs345’ isn’t going to rank you high up the list of people looking for others who enjoy plants.

Your name forms a static link to you and your posts, so making sure it’s easy to access and easy to remember is paramount in making sure people can find you.
Secondly, a key rule to any sort of social networking SEO is to keep it human, and this is no different on Twitter, even if you are limited in what you can write.
You bio can be 160 characters, 20 more than a regular ‘tweet’ so make them count, but also make them personal, make sure you cover the mission critical phrases for your company, also try to also find room for something personal about you. Some of the most successful corporate bloggers are those who don’t hide their personality behind the corporate image.
Twitter bio’s are indexed constantly, so whatever is in your bio provides the key relevance for your page.

So now you have a twitter account, your username is simple, easy to remember and relevant. Your bio, all 160 characters of it, is right on the money and hitting all of your company’s main keywords….. What’s next.

Well, now we need to start spreading the word, by integrating a call to action on your own site, you can bring anyone who visits your site onto your twitter page.
There’s no point putting loads of content onto your page hoping to get the views. You will be much better off to start with gathering followers who might be interested in your services and then progressing onto the public, allowing your followers to retweet the rich content you post.
        - You can use twitter to promote your site once you have started posting content. Be aware however that any links posted through twitter are automatically given the ‘Nofollow’ tag meaning your business won’t gain any ‘juice’ from the link, but you may still gain traffic and that can lead to sales.
       
- Make sure your tweets, particularly early on, are interesting and keyword rich. The first characters of your tweet will determine if your tweet can be found and indexed.
By using your important keywords here it will generate a better lead in for your company and by linking back to your homepage in your twitter bio, you can make sure your services are easy to access even as a general searcher.
      
  - Remember, for those who do take up this new opportunity, Twitter can be an excellent way to increase the SEO of your company through a clear, natural process of link building, with companies retweeting your posts, and if you’re able to insert links to useful information, such as much larger blog posts, although the actual link from Twitter will contain a Nofollow, the process still stands, with clear additional traffic to your sites and further links from the landing page which aren’t limited by the twitter Nofollow.
Retweeting:

Earlier I spoke about making your posts retweetable. A quick reminder for those of you wanting to capitalise on this opportunity.
In order to retweet a post, a user must be able to fit the linking text in front of your tweet, (RT @yourname) depending on the size of your username will determine the maximum size of your tweets to maximise your retweetable options, remember, 140 characters is your limit.

The beauty of Twitter is the ability to skip all the bumpf and padding that fills out any bit of information. Twitter gives you the option to post the raw facts and lets people digest the information much easier. So keep it simple, keep it clear and concise and try to keep it interesting.

If in doubt, create yourself a test setup, something you can prototype and play with, post yourself a handful of tweets, leave them and come back in a week, read them again… would you be interested in hearing more from that user? If not, you may need to rethink your twitter strategy.

Social networking is only just coming to the forefront for SEO companies, and if your company can progress with the trend you will find yourself spearheading a major shift towards social network SEO.

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Google don’t make mistakes. General Custer made a mistake, Gerald Ratner made a mistake, and Tiger Woods has made loads of mistakes, but for Google, it is rare.

Google’s ‘decision’ (assuming somebody actually made a decision) to rush-launch its new real-time listings was a mistake, but it has provided rich bounty for marketers looking for easy, free traffic. Google suddenly said to us all… forget all the hard work involved with link-building, and page optimisation. Just spam Twitter all day with popular keyphrases and you will dominate our most valuable keyterm pages.

We have been keeping a very close eye on these listings, and although it is impossible for us to obtain accurate statistics, it is very clear that the number of real-time ‘windows’ appearing in the organic listings has been slashed heavily. This is bad news for the hordes of marketers who could suddenly appear on page one of Google for amazingly popular and commercial search terms, but if you look around, the opportunities are still out there for some super-heavyweight search terms.

For example, do you sell Blackberry phones? If so, why not spend this evening monopolising the search term by twittering how great your Blackberry store is? A mere 550,000 searched for the term ‘blackberry’ last month in the UK alone.

Page 1 for the search term ‘Blackberry’:

You see, this is where the slick Google machine turned into a blob of ice cream. Unusual, I know, but every online marketer I spoke to knew the implications within 3.2 milliseconds of seeing it in action so why didn’t Google’s army of boffins? Were they too busy counting their share options? Is ‘The Big G’ panicking about the rise of Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms? You can bet your derriere that they are, but this really isn’t the way to counter it for some kind of half-arsed ‘first-mover’ advantage.

Google, you got it mind-numbingly wrong, but my clients would like to thank you for all the lovely free traffic!