How can twitter help my website? Lots.

As a comment on my post about Twitter Wit, someone queried “How can Twitter help my website?” A good question, I thought, and one that I felt needed more then just a reply in a comment field to answer.

Twitter is, to todays blogger or webmaster, what ping, technorati and perhaps even stumbleupon and digg were to webmasters two or three years ago. A quick, easy way to get your site out to the masses. In fact, in a recent piece on 9 Things to do to make sure your next blog post is read by more than your mom, Darren at problogger.net made his first point “Tweet it”. As he sees it:

one of the most effective ways to get a link to a new blog post ‘out there’ is simply to tweet it. Tweeting a link is quick and easy to do – and if you do it well it can be quite effective at both driving direct traffic to a blog post but also in starting other little viral events on other sites

The key here is that you have to have a good following. By following, I don’t mean you need to have a ton of people who haven’t sent out a tweet before or those that all they do is retweet, but good, quality followers to tweet their own stuff as much as they tweet others. If you engage your followers in dialog they’ll be more likely to check your site to see what you’re saying. They’ll also be more likely to retweet or share your post as well among their followers which is something good.

I’ve noticed on this blog, as well as Blackberryhack that a good deal of the traffic I receive is from twitter. It helps getting the word out there. The nice thing about twitter is that not only will people following you see your links, but also anyone searching twitter for a topic. One of the easiest ways to get people to your site is (and it has always been) to post about one of the current trending (hot) topics. Works for search and twitter alike.

Another area twitter can help your site is coming up with topics. I just mentioned the trending topics. On the right side of the twitter page (when you look at your home on twitter) you’ll notice trending topics. If you’re itching for something to write about, chances are good that you can come up with a post or two about the current trending topics (like the LA Fires, Michael Jackson, John and Kate or weight loss pills). Not only will this help provide you with some topics, but you’ll get visitors as well.

This doesn’t happen automatically mind you. You still have to write the content and it has to get posted to twitter. Fortunately, there are plug-ins galore for WordPress and the other blogging platforms that will do it automagically for you. It is a good idea to retweet it a while later. Change the tag line you use, repost the original, but make sure you have the link in it.

Those are just some of the ways that twitter can help, what are some others?