I’ve never been big fan of nano and microblogging. However, in the past two days I started playing with some of these tools because I wanted to explore their potential for SEO purposes.
It is too early to report any SEO results. In fact, I have no plans to measure the impact of this experiment. All I want to do is a kind of “proof of concept” that theses tools might be excellent linkbuilding tools. What you need to start?
1. Sign up for accounts at twitter, jaiku, tumbr etc. Use keywords in your screen names whenever possible. NOTE: There may be other tools equally or better suited for link building purpose). Suggestions anyone?
2. Choose RSS feeds from your target site and import them into your micro/nano blog. If you don’t have RSS feeds implemented yet, stop reading and get some html – RSS generator or talk to your web developer to implement them now.
Both Jaiku and tumblr make RSS import extremely easy. Jaiku seems somewhat better, allowing to define update frequency and filters; tumblr is limited and sometime it publishes duplicate entries as if it did not understand the RSS feed correctly.
Importing RSS in Twitter’s case is more complicated, since it does not have any RSS import feature at the moment (though I suspect it will be implemented in near future). You must use third-party tool, such as twitterfeed to achieve the same. Simple, if you decide that you trust them enough since you will have to let them know your twitter access data… Additionally, twitter, due to post lenght limitation replaces the urls from your RSS feed by tinyurls. Don’t worry though; tinyurls work with 301, i.e. permanent redirect, and the target page will benefit from the incoming link as if the link were direct.
3. Get some inbound links to those newly created link directories so that they get indexed by SE. This may happen even without any inbound link of yours if jaiku/twitter/tumblr have member directory of some sort (I did not have time to check).
For this approach to work in the long run, your “creation” must make sense, be interesting. Remember, these are social media, and people will link to your micro/nano stuff only if they like it.
Since this blog has just one RSS feed, I decided to use another website to demonstrate this approach. For one of Spanish local online travel agents here in Spain (hope they will not get mad at me!) whose web has many many RSS feeds I created 1 tumbr, 1 jaiku and 1 twitter space to show what can be done.
The twitter space blends together content from several feeds on recent flight tickets quotes (vuelos baratos in Spanish). The jaiku space vuelos does the same thing (a selection of special flight ticket deals), while this tumblr subdomain restaurantes.tumblr.com is constructed from restaurant and theater RSS product feed to create an alternative product view.
Update: to facilitate comparison of the three tools, I decided to create the implement flight tickets quotes in tumblr, too. Here is the result.
P.S. I am sure there are people out there who have been doing this for ages. If you have more experience with microblogging for SEO and are willing to share it, I’d love to hear from you.
Posted by ubibene 
