The Best Times, Methods and Reasons For Tweeting To Maximise Your Exposure

Following on from previous posts I’ve written in regards to Twitter and SEO I thought I’d share some research I found on the best ways to use Twitter to your advantage which in turn can help devise a strategy for any SEO campaign.

Previously I’ve discussed how Twitter shouldn’t just be the key element of your campaign and there are other ways to get content added to be noticed by potential clients. This said, social media has an impact for many businesses and used in the right way, can be an effective way to get online exposure but it’s all down to when, what and how you tweet.

The Best Time To Tweet:

After finding this post by Ben Hoffman, “The Best Times To Tweet Important Updates for Maximum Exposure?” I found that depending on when you decide to discuss your news has a major impact on the click through rate and the difference in converted sales.

Ben suggests the best time to tweet within the weekdays should be just before lunch, just after lunch and after 6pm. This is when many people are checking their online banking, Facebook pages and personal emails, so their focus is on what you are saying not on themself.

What To Tweet:

Many of us perhaps believe that our tweets won’t be noticed enough to make any impact so the content doesn’t really matter. If this is the case, then what is the point?

Twitter may have masses of people all looking out for the most useful tweets, so it’s vital to make yours one of them. Promotional tweeting is an ideal way to go about posting information that is worthy of something, and there are few ways to go about doing this;

Making short tweets makes it easier for people to catch what is being said in a glance rather than it being cut off.

Make links within the post to interesting subjects. People will click through to this just to ensure they are not missing out on anything. However, make sure it’s relevant and this isn’t done with every tweet you make, otherwise people will think you have nothing to say.

Don’t just tweet industry specific points. Interact with all your followers by posting social and fun tweets about things you’ve perhaps seen.

How To Tweet:

You can Tweet to make it an advantage to your SEO campaign. Incorporating key words into your post provides the opportunity for you to appear when searched for.

Re-tweet those posts you find interesting. This helps you connect with your followers and allows them to respect the fact you’ve taken the time to do so, and perhaps return the favour next time.

There is much more to Twitter than meets the eye and for businesses it’s vital they don’t just Tweet because they feel they have to keep in with trends. There needs to be thought with every post and understanding as to what it can achieve in spending the time to do so.

The structure of your website is very important for maintaining good search engine positions. Headings are quite possibly one of the most important elements in maintaining a good structure to your web pages, they can convey meaning and represent the base on which the rest of your copy sits.

Headings are helpful to all of your visitors. Your human visitors will be grateful for the use of headings as headings help break up the text, making it easier to ‘skim read’. If your visitors also use screen reading equipment then they will find well-structured headings even more useful as headings can be tabbed between giving blind or partially sighted visitors the opportunity to ‘skim read’ just like everyone else. Your robotic friends, the search engine spiders, also rely on good html structure, and headings offer them a real clue as to what your page is all about.

Heading Tag Ordering

The order in which you place your heading tags is very important to maintaining a suitable, usable structure to your web pages. The first thing to remember is to place your heading tags in descending order, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6. The h1 being the most important heading on your page, should be closely related to your page title, and contain your most important keywords. There should only ever be one h1 on each page. The rest of the heading tags are subheadings, and should be treated as such, being thematically linked to the headings above and support the main, h1.

You don’t have to order your headings in h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 all the time. This may seem like a contradiction to what I said above, and I suppose it is a bit, but let me explain with diagrams:

So you can have an h3 under an h2, then you can go back to another h2, then place another h3 underneath it. What you must never do is skip headings. By this I mean, h1, h3, h2 – this isn’t logical.

Heading Tag Content

In the paragraph above I touched on the fact that your heading tags should contain your keywords. If you have planned your SEO campaign well, then your keywords should naturally fit into your web pages without too much ‘shoe-horning’ – in fact I’d go so far as to say that if you can’t get your keywords to work naturally then you should go back to the planning stage and work out a better list of keywords because you’ve probably chosen the wrong ones.

I would like to take this opportunity to tell you not to stuff your headings with keywords. Keyword stuffing doesn’t make much sense to your human visitors, so in my opinion is a pretty useless exercise, especially when your think of the search engines’ goal – to provide a list of useful websites for the search query. Instead, you should make sure your heading tags are grammatically correct, read well, and entice your readers to read the paragraph they head up.

Heading Tags Summarised

1. Every page within your site should have at least one heading
2. You should only ever put one h1 on a page
3. Make sure your h1 is the first heading on the page
4. Your h1 should contain your main keyword and be similar but not the same as the page title
5. Style your headings with CSS, not inline styles
6. Never skip heading levels. It isn’t logical to skip from h2 to h4. However, you can go from h2 to h3, then back to h2 if your content warrants this
7. You can use more than one h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 on your page
8. All headings apart from h1 are subheadings
9. You should use your headings consistently throughout your website
10. Headings should be grammatically correct, logical and easy to scan
11. Put your keywords in if you can, if you can’t then go back to the drawing board…
12. Your headings should be closely related to your text

If structuring your headings was all you did to your website then you would be doing yourself a massive favour! I’ve seen sites shoot up the listings just by incorporating changes to the headings. If you have any questions or comments about headings then don’t be shy – comment!

How Keywords Are Used For Search Engine Optimisation

Reading through any search engine optimisation guide you will be sure to see plenty of information focussing upon choosing the correct keywords for your company.

In the industry, picking keywords that reflect what internet users are likely to type into search engines such as Google is considered as somewhat of a fine art, one that can have a significant effect upon the performance of your website.

Search engine optimisation is both an internal and external activity. Website designers optimise the website whilst SEO consultants and copywriters focus upon offsite optimisation by link building, blogging and distributing articles and press releases to industry specific websites.

So why are keywords so important and what are they used for?

Website designers use keywords to optimise a website, they incorporate them into page titles, meta tags and website content. Consequently, when search engine robots crawl the site, they pick up on these phrases, associating them with the website and business. The main aim of on-site optimisation is to ensure that when customer’s type in a search term related to the business, their website will be positioned at the top of the search engine listings.

Articles, press releases and blog posts are an ideal way to get exposure for a business, if they include their selected keywords they can be a considerable SEO tool. Using keywords to link to a business’s website, SEO consultants and copywriters could not only increase the number of back-links to a site but they could potentially increase the traffic to the site.

Another technique that is used by consultants is link building, adding links which include keywords to well-known directories can enhance the sites SEO efforts and the traffic to the site could be increased.

There are a variety of sources that can be used when choosing keywords, Google even have a ‘wonder wheel’ function in their organic search that enables designers and SEO consultants to input any keyword and find related phrases that Internet users are likely to search for.

Whatever SEO techniques you choose to use, it is important to note that for any of them to have a chance of enabling your website to perform in the search engines, it is important that the correct keywords are chosen initially.

News : Keyword User Interface, this provides a list a specific keywords that Google has found while indexing your site. Google claim this is excellent for finding out if specific sites have been hacked and your site has started to appear for random keywords. Buy clicking the keyword, you get a list of URL’s that the keyword appears on.

We think it also allows you to see whether a particular phrase you are optimising for has been optimised to the full potential and more importantly that Google recognizes that the keyword is related to your site.

Tutorial: Webmaster tools tips

That are worth analysing are:

• Top search queries
• Crawl errors
• Links to your site
• Keywords
• HTML suggestions - Duplicate Meta data

Showcase: This weeks showcase is SEO Spyglass link analysis tool, you can find the free demo at http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/. We will have a look into this more in next weeks tutorial.

Yesterday Matt Cutts announced on his blog that the long awaited roll out of caffeine will happen shortly. They will begin by going live at one data centre (or ‘center’ if you’re across the pond!) only, and the full roll out will be after ‘the holidays’ (which I take to mean after Christmas).

Google have been kind enough to wait until after the busiest time of the year for many businesses. This makes me think that the search experience will change more than Matt Cutts lets on. He says “Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

So, how can you make sure your listings aren’t going to be a casualty of this roll out?

Well, I would say, go back to basics, make sure the coding of your site is clean, lean and, well… mean. Make sure you offer useful, relevant copy to your potential visitors. Give something back to your online community by participating in social media and social networking, use forums to benefit others (not spam them), even start a blog if you haven’t already.

Unfortunately Google weren’t quite kind enough to leave the caffeine sandbox live so we have no way of testing if any alterations we’ve made to sites in preparation for this roll out have been effective. Like everything else in SEO, it’s just going to have to be a waiting game.