Twitter your inbound links via RSS and Twitterfeed

Here’s a little experiment I set up last week to see how I could broadcast new inbound links to SEOgadget as they’re discovered by Google:



As you can see these two Tweets are displaying content links to my site, so anyone linking in to me is automatically featured on my Twitter profile with a Tinyurl link back to the post with the featured link. Potentially, there’s some coolness in this idea. Anyone who sends you a link will get some traffic back to their own site as soon as Google picks it up. If someone in the blogosphere knew there was an additional exposure and traffic benefit to linking out to you, they’d be a bit more likely to do it, right? Here’s how it’s done.

Set up an inbound link Twitter alert and post it to your Twitter profile

Start by setting up a Google Alerts RSS feed for inbound links to your site:



If you select “Comprehensive”, you’ll get a snapshot of everything be it News, Blogs or general web. According to Google Alert’s help section: “A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.”.

Right on, but you might want just to go for the Blogs alert for more relevant Tweets. You can always make changes to the feed from the “Manage your alerts” console, like this:



Next you’re going to need to be able to feed your RSS into your Twitter profile. We’re going to do that with Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed can post directly to twitter, identi.ca, custom laconica installations, and via HelloTxt or Ping.fm. Could be used for spammin’, could be used for useful stuff. You decide.

First, you’ve got to register with Twitterfeed. It’s a touch laborious, in that you have to register via authentification services such as Vidoop or OpenID. Once all that’s done, you’ll get to your account panel. Select “Add new feed” to see this screen:



As you can see there’s a huge range of options including the ability to filter for specific keywords, add some text to the beginning of the Tweet (eg: “Linking to SEOgadget:”) and how often the Tweets are published.

There are lots of ways Twitterfeed can be used (and abused) – but I think that this is a pretty reasonable way to add to the conversation with your followers on Twitter. If they don’t like it, I guess you’ll find out pretty quickly