Using Twitter for Link Building

There has been plenty of discussion about using Twitter for link building, but here is a quick strategy to build backlinks to your blog with the goal of giving your website both a boost in traffic from referring sites and overall search rankings. This won’t work for everyone, but if you have a website with existing, returning visitors and customers this will likely work for you.

Get targeted Twitter followers:

Hopefully you are already on Twitter and have a following but if you aren’t, sign-up now. On your website, direct people to your Twitter profile. Twitter has several widgets and badges that you can use to do this and drive added followers.

Create a list of target websites:

Go through your Twitter followers and create a list of individuals who have blogs or websites related to your website. For example, one of our clients is Greensbury Market. Many of Greensbury’s Twitter followers are foodies, environmentally conscious, or healthy eaters. Another good source where you can find websites to target is your analytics. By going through your analytics, you can identify websites that have previously sent you traffic. Are they on Twitter? Add them to the list.

Outreach:

Once you have a list of people, talk to them! Send them a Tweet and engage in conversation. Ask them if they would link to you in their sidebar, offer them a product sample, offer an interview, give them some information. Many of these people will already be familiar with you because they follow you and you have likely already engaged in conversation with them in the past. A pre-existing relationship makes requesting a link a number of times easier than soliciting people that aren’t already familiar with you or your product.

In short, take advantage of the Twitter relationships you have already built and establish new ones. Ask a “friend” for a link, with love.