Tech talk, social media, blogging, computing tips and tricks

← →

Optimize your Twitter feed with Twylah

October 28th, 2011 by David Bradley >> 16 Comments

I discovered Twylah a few weeks ago. It’s a research tool that looks at what subjects are trending on your Twitter feed and creates a kind of paper.li clone but just for your hits. It’s a useful way to find out what subjects you are focusing on, perhaps without knowing it. Adam Dince also discovered Twylah and was given a shout out by the company recently for a neat trick you can do with a sub-domain on your website to create, with Twylah’s assistance a spiderable (and so SEO optimisable) round-up of your Twitter updates on your site.

Here’s Dince’s HowTo summarised:

First sign up with http://www.twylah.com.

Second, create a sub-domain on your website. Call it tweets.yourwebsitename.com (use the CNAME section on your hosting control panel).

Third, email customdomains@twylah.com to let them know you have created a sub-domain and give them your Twitter handle in the email so they can hook them together. It’ll probably take a day or two to be set up and working.

That’s all there is to getting things up and running but now you will want to link to your Twylah sub-domain and get it spidered by the search engines.

First, add a dofollow link from your homepage to for your sub-domain to tweets.yourwebsitename.com or grab a Twylah promotional button and link that to the same URL. I set up a sciencebase Twylah twitter trending sub-domain earlier this week at http://tweets.sciencebase.com and it was Googled overnight.

Second, add the link to your social network profiles – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc

Third, create an XML sitemap specific to your Twylah sub-domain and upload it to the root folder of your server.

Fourth, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add the sitemap URL. Do the same with your Bing WMT accoun. Meanwhile, add a line to your “robots.txt” file in your site’s root folder to point the search engines to the sitemap file.

Dince reckons after a couple of weeks you will have been fully spidered by Google to the tune of several hundred pages within your Twylah sub-domain – How To Optimize Your Twitter Feed with Twylah | AdamDince.com. Obviously, Twylah also gains from this, but it seems that if you’re tweets are otherwise wasted this is a good way to increase reach to the millions of people on the web who don’t actually use Twitter. Twylah is also hinting at a monetization system, and through Google Analytics (inbuilt) you can already track your Twylah traffic.


Leave a comment ↓

  • David Bradley // Oct 28, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    OK. Google had grabbed the main domain and one of the subjects when I checked about 8 hours ago. Now, it’s up to 72 pages of the 500 page sitemap limit…

  • Renato // Oct 28, 2011 at 3:59 pm

    You did it! Another great post!

    Thank you very much. I’ll try Twylah right now.

  • David Bradley // Oct 31, 2011 at 10:51 am

    Now up to 715 pages spidered by Google. Not seen much traffic yet…giving it a couple of weeks to see how it fares.

  • David Bradley // Nov 1, 2011 at 7:35 am

    969 pages spidered.

  • David Bradley // Nov 2, 2011 at 8:37 am

    1150 indexed pages on my subdomain now.

  • David Bradley // Nov 4, 2011 at 11:27 am

    1570 as of 4th November

  • David Bradley // Nov 14, 2011 at 12:04 pm

    3880 as of 14th November

  • David Bradley // Nov 15, 2011 at 10:19 am

    4140 as of 15th November. Still not seeing this “achievement” reflected in traffic to the site, traffic to the tweets domain nor increased twitter followers. Pointless exercise?

  • Heath Copps // Nov 17, 2011 at 6:03 pm

    David — good post. I set up Twylah on a subdomain on our site and we experienced the same sort of Google page indexing trajectory with 3900 pages to date. You mention that you’re tracking traffic to the subdomain and that analytics is built in to Twylah. Where do you access that data?

  • David Bradley // Nov 17, 2011 at 6:27 pm

    They embedded my Google Analytics code into the subdomain pages…I think they do it automatically although I corresponded with the team when I was setting things up and mentioned I’d like that feature, so not 100% whether it was automatic or not…

  • Heath Copps // Nov 18, 2011 at 3:30 pm

    Thanks David! I just looked at my welcome email from Twylah and they mentioned they added the Analytics code to the subdomain. So, yes, indeed our traffic is being tracked. There’s not a lot traffic being generated right now, but the trickle that is coming in is gravy and I think it’s only get better as the content grows on the subdomain. Now, I need to figure out how to put an offer on those pages.

  • David Bradley // Nov 18, 2011 at 4:28 pm

    It could very well come good…eventually. Lots of pages spidered, but few referrals, doesn’t mean people aren’t reading…we’ll see. Good luck with it.

  • David Bradley // Dec 13, 2011 at 8:58 am

    6740 entries in Google for my tweets.sciencebase.com site as of 13th December.

  • David Bradley // Dec 17, 2011 at 3:31 pm

    Numbers just keep going up 7330 entries now.

  • David Bradley // Dec 20, 2011 at 2:58 pm

    8430

  • David Bradley // Jan 4, 2012 at 7:20 pm

    10300 as of today (4th January 2012)