If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss. Little over a year ago, before Twitter was the tech/pop culture phenomenon it is today, doctors had a problem: how do you identify other health professionals on Twitter? At the time, there must have been at least dozens. A month ago, Twitter finally debuted the “lists” feature, allowing each user to create subscribable lists of other users.

Microblogging like Twitter.com is search engine friendly and not over done, yet. This lens is to show you how to use Twitter for SEO to help your position on the SERP and drive traffic to your site. Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its SEO value has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google. But using Twitter for link juice is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

Once you see a Tweets interactive map you will start seeing how absolutely incredible twitter is and how TV stations are using it to broadcast breaking news, traffic stations are using it to tell people about accidents to avoid, regular people are using it to promote products, people are using it for conversations, doctors use to prescribe, people are using it to make introductions and so on. It is an absolutely incredible thing. It isn’t perfect because sometimes the volume of traffic shuts the service down temporarily, however, anyone with good content or something positive to say can build a small following rather quickly. When you have what you think is a great post – put it on twitter. Although the traffic hasn’t been massive, you do get a fair amount from twitter.

There are also other benefits from using twitter. The key is to use your domain name if you can and post about things that are on your front page. That way the people who capture twitter’s public timeline via the API will also capture the link to your site. That way you can market your post, build backlinks to your site and market yourself. If people don’t want to hear what you have to say, they simply won’t subscribe. Everyone needs to be doing something with twitter!!