You know what’s ridiculous? Creating equity and funneling it into something you don’t really own. I’m not talking about working for the man (although that’s true too). I’m talking about the way we split our souls among 3rd party social platforms. We spend all the time and creative energy on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Flickr, etc., and from a link perspective, the platforms and profiles get all of the credit. We should be more concerned than we are about this.

As my own small contribution to fighting the system, I want to look specifically at how to exploit Twitter for SEO and link building purposes. Up until now, most of what you’ll read on the subject talks about promotion of content and indirect payoff. Things like:

- Tweet links to your content to get more exposure and increase the chances that someone will link to your content
- Use Twitter to get your content into the hands of influencers who can help promote it and get more exposure resulting in natural backlinks
- Tweet links to your content because Google will view this as a social signal of relevancy

Evidently, we’re just not thinking creatively enough about this. Getting links using Twitter is all about understanding the constraints of the platform and how conversations on Twitter become content with links. Here are several link building tactics I’ve been using and seen used effectively to build links with Twitter.

1. Reclaim Links Going To Your Twitter Profile

When people find something valuable online, they link to it. Since many people get personal value from individuals on Twitter, they often mention these people and link to their Twitter profiles instead of their websites.

A quick look at the backlink portfolio of my Twitter profile page shows that I have a lot of misdirected link opportunities.

You can always request that these people link to your website instead of your Twitter profile, but remember that they may not see the same value in your site as they saw in your Twitter engagement. Here’s how you fix that.

Twitter has a seldom-used feature that allows you to embed your Twitter stream on a web page. I created a page on my site called “Twitter” and embedded my stream into it. (Make sure it looks like a full page instead of widget-size). Now, you have a perfect page of content that replicates your Twitter.com stream and it makes getting people to change their links to point to your site much easier. I’ve already had success doing this.

You can make the process even easier by adding more helpful content on this page, including resources about Twitter, your personal Twitter use guidelines, etc. This is called future-proofing your link portfolio. Twitter may die, but you can retain some of the link equity.

With this foundational addition to your website, you can start targeting links in other creative ways.

2. Push Bloggers To Turn Twitter Conversations Into Blog Posts

This is a fun one. First, create a big private Twitter list of semi-frequent bloggers (Semi-frequent meaning at least once a month) and add that as a column to Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck has a tasty feature for in-column filtering. You can only filter by one search term, but that’s all we need. Filter the column by “?” and you’re left with instances where those bloggers are tweeting questions. (Thanks to Richard Barley at Tweetdeck for showing me how this is done and providing the screenshot)

The secret is to watch for instances where they ask good questions that would be blog post-worthy. These kinds of questions are usually open-ended. Help them out by retweeting the question and providing your own answer. Use Twitter search again to see what kind of other responses the person is getting.

When responses hit “critical mass” (I’d say at least 4-5 responses), encourage them to write a blog post and share everybody’s insights. The power of suggestion works well on bloggers who are constantly trying to find original things to write about. Let them know what a good question it was and that you would love to see the responses compiled and their own thoughts added. You may even consider following up in a couple of days.

When this works, your Twitter profile will probably get linked to from the post, following which you can revert to Tactic #1 above and get that link pointed to your site instead of your profile.

3. Use Twitter Search To Find Blogging Crowdsourcers

Many people use Twitter while writing blog posts to crowdsource their content and give link attribution to the people who help. The easiest way to identify these is with Twitter search.

Search from the perspective of a crowdsourcer. Try some of these queries:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=writing+a+blog+post+%3F
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=input+blog+post+%3F
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=help+blog+post+%3F

4. Find Bloggers Who Use Tweeps For Inspiration

In the same vein as Tactic #2, start by identifying people on Twitter you are similar to, in terms of industry, reputability, and Twitter usage. You could always use something like Formulists to do this, or start with who you know.

Look at the backlink portfolios of their Twitter profiles. Find out which bloggers are linking to these profiles. Create a custom private Twitter list to keep these bloggers on your radar. Make special effort to help answer their questions and encourage them to write.

5. Find and Win Blog Contests

How could I not throw this one in there? Often, if you win someone’s blog contest, they’ll write a special post to announce winners, and even link to the winner’s profile or website.

You can actually use Twitter search to find these types of contests, but remember that they have to be blog comment-based.

You can always search for terms like “blog contest” or “blog giveaway” to start. A very nice feature about Twitter search is that you can put terms like “wordpress.com” or “blogspot.com” into your query and not only will it return results of tweets that mention “wordpress.com,” but it will also return results of tweets with shortened links pointing to sites hosted on WordPress. Very handy.

Will Twitter Be Around In 5 Years?

Good question. If it won’t be, shouldn’t we be exploiting it while we can?

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I hate lists. I’m talking about the list that fits the mold of “92 YouTube videos to get you through an entire work day without accomplishing anything.” A quick glance at my Twitter feed shows three of these monstrosities, including “220 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website & Increase Your Business,” “30 pianos around London for impromptu singalongs” and “40 Great Adobe AIR Applications for Designers and Developers.” Lists are the blogger’s quick substitute for creativity. They undermine the whole point of learning and they destroy family vacations. In that order.

There’s no blogging without a degree of hypocrisy and so I’ll openly admit that I wrote a list once and posted it on another blog I write for (the post was a list of blogging tips). I was lazy and needed to pump something out on a time crunch. The list didn’t have any credibility to it. I had never even tried a couple of the things I was suggesting. It was pointless and idiotic. And then the post got a bunch of pageviews – more than a slew of other posts that I considered more substantive. And because of that, I felt pointless and idiotic. I feel a sense of pity and maybe loathing for a generation of web users (myself included) that cannot identify the difference between quality and crap online, choosing to associate/confuse quality with lists, how-tos, and all the templated garbage that people can spit out without an ounce of thought or research.

Do you really read a list as if you’re trying to memorize it or learn from it? Like with most content online, we’ve learned to scroll the text with our eyes. The brain’s doing nothing with the message. The synapses don’t even have to fire, it’s that worthless.

Lists are a distraction. The writers are merely banking on the fact that your desire for entertainment will trump your desire to learn. I would take a two-item list with enough substance for me to actually learn something over any half-baked list that proves only that the writer can count past the number 20.

Lists have one redeeming factor. They provided me with the contrast needed to enjoy great vacations today. Let me explain.

Lists turned my childhood family vacations into multi-day exercises in impatience and downright malice. My mom has many virtues, but one paradigm she lived by was the need to “check things off the list.” Our family vacations were always structured that way. Mom knew what “tourists see” in any give place and that became her list. (By the way, don’t ever plan a trip in such a way that your kids  conclude that your tastes and preferences are just a carbon copy of TripAdvisor). Our vacation schedule would become so tightly packed with checklist items that she would forget to factor in meals, delays, and fatigue. That is not a vacation. That is a recipe for disaster.

Today, I love to travel. In my married life, I’ve learned how to vacation enjoyably merely by looking at what my family did and doing it differently. I’ll write more about this later. In essence, my vacations have a higher ratio of “exploration time” (with a lower ratio of checklist items). I owe that to lists.

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