Link building remains a powerful strategy in modern SEO, and Twitter’s reach and conversational nature provide unique opportunities to earn those ever-valuable backlinks. While you might be familiar with traditional link-building methods, Twitter presents a slightly different playing field. Let’s explore how to unlock its potential.
Guide to Use Twitter for Link Building
Twitter may be nothing more than a social network, but it can actually be used for link building purposes too.
When you fill in your profile, you get the option to add a link to your website in the “website” field:
While this does link back to your website, it’s a “nofollow” link, unfortunately (meaning it won’t help you to rank whatsoever).
Luckily, many websites actually “scrape” your Twitter profile information, which means that the information on your Twitter profile gets mirrored on other sites.
With some websites, both your “bio” and “website” fields are scraped from your Twitter profile, which means that you’ll get a link no matter what.
But, some websites only scrape the “bio” field of your profile (not the “website” field), which means that you won’t get a link to your website.
For example, Buzzstream scraped Rand Fishkin’s Twitter profile for their new Discovery tool, yet they only scraped the bio, not the website field:
Because of this, there’s not link to Moz.com on the page itself.
This issue is easily solved by simply including your website URL in both the “website” and “description” fields on your Twitter profile.Here’s how to do it:
- Go to Twitter
- Add your website to the “website” and “description” fields
Here’s what it should look like:
Now, when any website scrapes your Twitter profile, you’re pretty much guaranteed an extra link without doing anything at all.
Note: When you add your website to the “description” field on your profile, you’ll notice that it doesn’t appear as a direct link on Twitter itself (it actually re-routes it through a URL shortening service). This isn’t a problem, as when most other sites scrape Twitter, they make this a direct link on their site.
