Does Twitter have any SEO value?  Or asked a little differently, does posting links in Twitter help you in targeting keywords in Search Engines.

In a nutshell, NO.

Links posted to Twitter can be done in two forms, url literals and tinyurls.  Tiny URLs is a mechanism that squashes your long literal URL into a tiny number based format so that your link looks nicer… sometimes.

FACT:  reduced URLS may look nicer in some instances but search engine spiders and bots see them as redirects which in some cases are viewed as deceptive linking practice.

FACT: literal links e.g. http://www.blahblah.com/blah/blah don’t have any anchor text assigned to them and in my experience don’t benefit your link building processes when targeting keywords for search engines.

The Pros to Twitter:

If you have a tremendous following with your Twitter account, Twitter has a great social media marketing arm.  However, the experience that I’ve had with Twitter thus far is most followers follow you for one of two reasons.  Your a friend or the person is interested in what you talk about which is usually reflected from your Twitter profile.  Attempts to leverage Twitter from an SMO perspective seem to be futile with personal accounts.  However, creating a Twitter account in representation of a client could potentially go a long way.

Agree?  Disagree?  Lets hear it!