Twitter can be a great way to get traffic to your website. Just popping on once in a while and posting a link isn’t going to do much for your cause, though. In order to really succeed, you need to really use Twitter as a social networking tool. That means networking with others should be your main focus, not advertising.

To increase traffic, there are two main techniques which will serve you well. First, focus on making friends. Not just any friends but those related to your niche. Look for the big names in your niche and then take a look at the people they follow and their followers, as well. For example, if you are in the blogging niche, you would follow ProBlogger. Then follow the people he is following (Chris Brogan, Men with Pens, etc.).

Make sure to interact with people, replying to things they say. This catches their attention and if they like what they see, you will have gained another follower. Most people will also check out your website before following you. If you are regularly posting quality content to Twitter, you can be sure that anyone checking out your tweetstream will be interested in following you. Avoid posting junk and try to stick to your niche if you want targeted traffic for your business.

Don’t forget SEO when you’re on Twitter, either. These days, Google and Bing are indexing tweets, so using your keywords actually has an impact on how much traffic you get to your Twitter account. This, in turn, affects website traffic.

Your profile should also contain your keywords and be descriptive. Don’t use just two or three words, make sure you give people a reason to follow you by explaining who you are in the space you have available. Be sure to upload a photo of yourself, which tends to instill trust in potential followers. You want to impress when they click through to your profile to check you out.

Twitter can be a very valuable source of website traffic, but only if you actually participate in the network of fascinating people there. Simply throwing up a link or ad every few days will only show you up as someone who doesn’t play by the rules and you’ll be ignored. Take the time to interact, seek out new people to follow and stay on topic and you will rapidly see a boost in traffic.

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1. Don’t follow a gazillion people

Especially not if you don’t have alot of people following you back.
First of all, there is a thing called “information overload”, which will happen if you follow too many people, and you don’t manage them well in lists.
Second, your follow/following ratio is a major factor for Google to rate your authority on Twitter. Do you want to improve your blog’s rankings using Twitter? Then make sure your ratios are ok, and your tweets (with links to your blog), and your profile (with link to your blog) will be indexed better and ranked higher.

2 Don’t forward unsollicited links via DM

If you need to send someone a quick link for something that you were or will be discussing, no problem, but don’t go around sending links to all your followers via DM. It’s a pain, don’t do it. You’re cluttering up people’s Tweet-inbox, and if they have the mail option set, their mailbox too. If you want to broadcast your url to your followers, do it in the main timeline. It’s easily ignored, and doesn’t clutter things up.

3 Don’t send an automated thank you message.

The thing is a bit the same as the one above. My Twitter inbox is filled with “Thanks for following, looking forward to tweeting with you!”. No, you’re not. You just set up an auto-follow-message, and you will most probably never even look at tweets, let alone reply to any of them. If you don’t have the time to send every new follower you have a personalized DM, then it is better not to send them a DM at all.

4 Don’t make your tweets too long

One of the powers of Twitter is to retweet what others have tweeted that you found interesting. However, if your tweet is too long, near the 140 characters, there is no place to put the RT and username in front of the tweet. If you have to start puzzling which characters or words to leave out to stay within 140 characters, without breaking the message the original tweeter waanted to convey, you mostly just leave the tweet be, and forget about retweeting.
A good rule of thumb to use? Take your own twittername’s amount of characters, ad 5, and make sure you leave that much space in your tweets to facilitate retweeting.

5 Don’t overdo retweeting of contests and giveaways

Unless you want to use your twitteraccount to gather all these contests and giveaways and retweet them so others can see them all in one place, don’t overdo it!
Everybody wants to join a contest, or wants some free stuff, but no one likes their whole timeline to be filled with “retweet to participate in our free cookie contest” messages.

[ad#r]6 Behave as if you’re on a coctailparty

Treat Twitter as a coctailparty, and behave the same way. Do you want to be the popular person on the party? Then behave social, happy, talkative, but don’t overdo it. Don’t scare people. Don’t talk bad about people. Don’t gossip. Don’t yell at people because they stopped following you.
Bottom line: Be Nice!

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[ad]Every day it seems microblogging becomes more and more a part of the online experience. Twitter, which encourages you to answer the question “What are you doing?” is the leader of the microblogging craze. Twittering is relatively simple. You sign up for an account, describe yourself in 140 characters, upload a picture, and you are ready to tweet. The simplicity of Twitter is perhaps one of  its most attractive features. Unlike many social media sites, Twitter has almost no learning curve. A few minutes after signing up you’re an expert. 

The simple and uncomplicated interface of Twitter has spawned many sites that offer helper applications. The helper applications allow you to analyze and optimize your Twitter experience.

The Twitter website shows you a list of the people you follow and a list of the people who follow you. You can’t, however, see a list of the two combined. For this you need a helper application.

Your Twitter Karma
Your Twitter Karma is a Flash application that pulls your followers and those you follow from Twitter. Once you’ve entered your Twitter signin and password and pushed the “Whack!” button you are able to see the relationship between those you follow and those who follow you. A reciprocal relationship is ideal in Twitter. Who wants to tweet when no one is listening. Your Twitter Karma allows you to follow back or to weed out those folks who aren’t listening to your tweets.

My Tweeple
My Tweeple works much like Your Twitter Karma. Once you’ve signed in to Twitter your followers and the people you follow are displayed. You can sort according to your preferences. In addition My Tweeple displays the user’s profile and also has a ding feature. Dings allow you to weed out unpleasant tweeters such as blatant marketers.

[ad]Twitterfeed
TwitterFeed automatically feeds your blog to Twitter. Once you have signed in (using Open ID ) you are able to enter information about your blog. You have the option to choose to send the title of your post only or a title and description. TwitterFeed automatically posts according to the schedule you’ve chosen. Along with the title and/or description TwitterFeed includes a TinyUrl for your followers to click.

TwitterPacks
TwitterPacks is a wiki that helps you see who tweets about what. Log in to TwitterPacks, browse to your favorite subject or location, and join a pack or two.

TwitPic
TwitPic makes photo sharing on Twitter possible. The application works from the TwitPic website or a mobile device. Many desktop or web based Twitter clients also have built-in support for TwitPic. But best of all, you can spend many happy hours watching photos pop up on the map on TwitPic’s home page.

Qwitter
Qwitter is a handy tool that notifies you when someone stops following you. The email notification includes the last tweet you posted. This supposedly helps you to keep your unpleasant remarks to a minimum.

Twistori
Twistori is a social experiment that is difficult to explain. The results are fascinating – really really fascinating.

The Twitter helper applications are not affiliated with Twitter at the present time. As Twitter continues to grow in popularity more features will undoubtedly be added. If you find you enjoy any of the helper applications listed here don’t forget to tweet about them to let Twitter know.

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A few weeks ago (on October 21 to be exact), Google and Twitter reached an agreement. An agreement which has quite some consequences for all twitter-users.

Google and Twitter agreed on showing not only the Twitter profile pages in Google search results, but also the individual tweets. What does this mean to us, mere bloggers? This means our chances to create backlinks increase dramatically.

[ad]So the next question is of course: how? Very important to remember: just like Google wants to see relevancy and authority in documents, blogs and webpages, it wants to see the same in tweets. Relevancy is shown by using keywords. In your profilepage, in your username, and in the hashtags. Yes indeed, hashags have kind of the same meaning as the keyword metadata tag in webpages, so use it wisely! Regarding the authority, that is shown in tweets through the amount of followers you have, the number of times the specific tweet has been retweeted, and inbound links to your profilepage (from anywhere on the web, not just twitter).

So, some tips to make the best of this:

- Choose a username and account name that are relevant to the content you want to share

- Make sure your bio and profile page are keyword-rich.

- Make sure your tweets are keyword-rich and have a prioritized sequence of keywords.

- Put backlinks to your content in your tweets using URL shortening services such as TinyURL, bit.ly and others.

But most of all, remember that the golden rule of search, that is, creating content that is valuable to your readers, applies maybe even more to Twitter. If you wish to follow me on twitter, go to http://twitter.com/icantinternet

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