If your business doesn’t appear on the first page of a Google search, you don’t exist. That may not be entirely true. Of course, you still have a business, office, employees, clients, customers, and more. But it will be significantly harder for you to expand your business if people can’t find you easily on the web. That’s why optimizing your website for search engines (or search engine optimization, SEO), is so important. If you can optimize your site for search engines, you’ll get a higher rank and have a better chance that new customers and clients will see you and give you their business.

But apart from optimizing your site itself, there are other things you can do to boost your ranking. SEO isn’t just about how good your website is, it’s about how many other people think your website is good. And that measure of popularity is link sharing. Essentially, when people in cyber space share a link to your website on their blog or website which pushes you higher in the search engine rankings. But with the rise of social media, people are sharing links all the time outside of traditional websites and blogs. So, recently, Google and Bing also started crawling public Twitter feeds for links. Now links shared on Twitter affect your SEO as well.

Share Often

If you haven’t ever been on Twitter, it can be a little daunting at first. There is a lot of information, abbreviations, and symbols that can be a little confusing. But all you need to know is that getting a lot of followers is good for you because it means that you have a better chance of getting your Twitter updates shared. For marketing purposes, it’s great to share updates about things that people will care about for your business, like special deals, discounts, and more, that link back to your website. If you share these links on a regular basis to a large following, you have a good chance of getting retweeted (RTd) and shared across the twitterverse, increasing your SEO love.

Get RTd with Authority

But just like on the rest of the internet, who shares links to your website is just about as important as the number of shares you are getting. For example, if one person with 50 followers tweets a link to your website 5 times, that’s not going to get you as much SEO recognition as a person with 500 followers who tweets a link to your website once. It’s all about authority and popularity. The more popular a person is, the more weight is given to the content they share. So don’t be afraid to go after people with big followers, they could boost your site ranking with the click of a button.

All in all, SEO is extremely important, and getting your website content shared across as many websites and social networks as possible is the best thing for you to increase your search engine ranking. So if you want to rise up in the search engine ranks, get on Twitter and start sharing.