Wish to increase your traffic 100 times? All you need to do is to get your ranking from page 2 of the SERP (search engine results page) to page 1. Now, that is easier said than done. It can take you hours and hours of effort to accomplish this.

The most common (and indeed most powerful) ways to improve your ranking include, listing on various search engines (like Google Places and Yahoo Local) and on smaller local search engines, creating blogs, listing in hundreds of directories and writing articles for article directories.

While these are powerful ways to improve ranking, you are not the only one undertaking these activities. As the competition gets stiffer, having a presence on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter has become even more important to improve ranking. In fact, Twitter marketing has gained importance over the years. Let’s have a look at how the bird can fly you to the first page of the SERP.

Does Twitter Marketing Impact Ranking?

Yes, it does. But why trust me. Well, you can hear it from the search engines.

In an interview conducted by Danny Sullivan, both Google and Bing acknowledged the importance of social media on search ranking.

Bing: “We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.”

Google: “Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article [NOTE: see the end of this article for more about that].”

Ways To Improve Ranking Through Twitter Marketing

Here are some things that your Twitter marketing initiatives can include to improve your ranking on search pages:

Follow Industry Leaders: Find out the Twitter handle of all the people who are considered to be thought leaders in your industry. Follow them. Most of them will not follow you back. However, if you get lucky, and even one of them does follow you, you can reach out to a large number of people in your industry. If this industry leader retweets your message, you have spread your name among a large, and targeted audience. If the message that has been retweeted has a link to your website, then over time, your ranking will improve.

Include a Share Button on Your Website or Blog: If people read your blog post or visit your website and like it, urge them to share it with their social network through the convenience of the share button. If others share your link, this helps to improve your ranking.

Use Hashtags When You Tweet Something Interesting: Find out all the hashtags that are relevant to your domain. Then post interesting tweets and include the hashtags.

Do Not Market Yourself Too Aggressively: While you do want to share links to your website or blog, do not include links in all messages. Try to share informative, interesting and/or entertaining messages. This will increase the chances of someone retweeting your messages.

Increase Your Followers: Follow people and request them to follow you. Having call to actions in your messages will help in this respect. Having a large following adds to your Twitter profile and boosts your ranking.