pageoneresults - 1:32 pm on May 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Here's are a few tips on optimizing your Tweets for search...

1. Front Loaded Tweets - Think of your Tweet like a META Description, you have 140 characters to make your mark. Be sure to put the most important part of your message at the beginning of your Tweet, Front Load it.

2. Anchor Text - Pay careful attention to how you construct your URIs for Tweeting. If using a shortening service like bit.ly or j.mp, use the Custom Naming option and get your anchor text in there. Use hyphens to separate words. Don't overdo it.

3. Custom Named URIs - I like to use URIs that blend in with sentences. When using bit.ly I might take the first three words of title, if appropriate, and use them as the custom named URI. I'll then start off my Tweet with the URI and lead into the rest of the title and/or sentence, like a precursor. I'll also do them where they reside in the middle or end of a sentence, it all depends on the document title.

4. Retweets - I Front Load Retweets. I'll place credit at the end of the Tweet instead of at the beginning like most others. I treat Retweets exactly the same as a Tweet.

5. Retweet Scrubbing - I'll scrub Retweets fixing case issues and typos. I'll use an appropriate title if the originator changed title based on destination document. I see this happen all the time, it fragments the meaning of the Tweet in some ways. The new RT feature prevents this from happening but doesn't allow scrubbing and/or commentary.

Those are just a handful of quick tips to get you started. Even though you only have 140 characters to work with, you'd be surprised at what you can do. Use those to your advantage, I have been and I think it works, common sense tells me it would. :)

Sidenote: I also use trademark symbols e.g. ® or ™ where appropriate. Don't ask me why, something just tells me that they enforce branding at some level. Twitter support most HTML Character Entities.