Everything You Need to Know About SEO, You Can Learn on Twitter (Part 1)
Alright peeps, little did you know, but I’ve been faving and bookmarking your SEO tweets for like the past two years or so. Maybe more. (I’ve also been faving and bookmarking your social media marketing tweets, and those’ll show up in a future article.)
The thing I’ve learned most from this exercise? You can learn a lot about SEO by following the right people on Twitter.
Below are 21 great SEO lessons from some smart and excellent Twitter users. If you want more of their wisdom, start following them. Or just wait until I compile part two … but that might be a while, so just follow these smart folks.
(By the way, one rule I had when putting this together: No tweets with conference hashtags. Why? Because a) those tweets are likely the words of someone speaking, not the person doing the tweeting, and b) except for #SMX, I tend to mute all conference hashtags to avoid too much clutter and repetition in my stream.)
So if you’re ready, here are 21 Great Tweets About SEO!
General SEO
We need to ask “How do I improve my rankings?” less and “How do improve my site?” more.
— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) May 13, 2013
Do this. Google the top 3 keywords you want. See those first 5 listings? Are you willing to make a better site than them? If not go away.
— Kris Roadruck (@KrisRoadruck) February 7, 2013
The best SEO is a product that doesn’t suck. Otherwise it’s just manipulation.
— laura lippay (@lauralippay) December 8, 2012
SEO of the past: bludgeon the algorithm until your site ranks. SEO of the future: build a beloved brand. #seo #content
— Arnie Kuenn (@ArnieK) September 19, 2013
You will not make it on high rankings alone. Getting people to convert is the key to online success.
— karonthackston (@karonthackston) July 9, 2013
Traffic for traffic’s sake doesn’t help you. Less traffic interested in what you offer, that is where the money is.
— Melissa Fach (@SEOAware) August 8, 2014
If your SEO is based on one narrow tactic, it's bad SEO. It doesn't really matter what the tactic is.
— Dr. Peter J. Meyers (@dr_pete) September 9, 2013
While you need to trust your #SEO agency you should still *always* be aware of exactly what it is they’re doing for you #ignoranceisnotbliss
— Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen) May 16, 2013
Keyword Research
Keyword research should take place only after a detailed analysis of a website, it’s objectives, audience, business model, and competitors.
— Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) March 31, 2013
Dammit people. SEO isn’t THAT hard. the users are TELLING YOU WHAT THEY WANT. All you have to do is GIVE IT TO THEM.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) February 7, 2013
The more advanced Google becomes, the more SEO feels like a bonus for getting marketing & webdev right.
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 16, 2013
Quit obsessing over Google’s latest algorithmic change. You can “chase the algorithm” or you can write great content.
— Heather Lloyd-Martin (@heatherlloyd) July 26, 2013
when Goog bans something, don’t just add it to the “don’t do this” list. Think: “why?” then don’t do similar things either.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) February 22, 2013
If G announ tomorrow a criminal record had a slight effect on ranks, I wonder how many peeps would throw a brick thru a store window by noon
— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) August 9, 2014
Links & Link Building
Link building is only hard when you want to do it: Cheaply or Quickly
— Lyndon Antcliff (@lyndoman) May 9, 2013
If someone writes a post, and you can tell JUST by the links where they work, it's done wrong.
— Keri Morgret (@KeriMorgret) August 13, 2014
Great digital experiences create links and shares. Don’t ask, “how do I build links?” ask “how do I build great experiences?”
— Adam Audette (@audette) February 13, 2013
The best type of links are the ones that build themselves. #SEO
— Joe Hall (@joehall) July 10, 2013
Content
"Traffic" doesn't make your site successful. People do! Write so you provide what customers want.
— karonthackston (@karonthackston) July 11, 2013
Everyone wants the secret silver bullet. I just spent two hours making a good article better. That’s the silver bullet.
— Brian Clark (@copyblogger) April 24, 2012
Last, But Not Least…
75% of all SEO advice can be boiled down to telling people to STOP BEING DUMB. The other 25% is the valuable bit.
— Julie Kosbab (@betweenstations) May 1, 2013
Hi Matt,
Thank you for including me here. I just feel like I need to say this, even though it should be obvious.
I know a lot more about SEO than fits into a single maximum-lengthed 140 character tweet, or even the blog that I’ve been posting to regularly, about SEO for the past 9+ years. I’m way over 10.000 hours of writing about SEO, and I’ve probably done more actual SEO in the past 17 years than that, by a lot.
I do tweet about SEO, as do many other people, but I think there may be a lot more to SEO than you might learn on Twitter. 🙂
Thanks Matt! I am honored to be included in such great company 🙂
Cool post. I’ll just say that in order to actually learn from Twitter – you have to know where to look. My timeline is just too jumbled with my random follows to properly learn anything from Twitter. Probably best to separate into lists.
Great and FUNNY list Matt. Kris Roadurcks comment FTW.