Webmasters: Search For Links Posted On Twitter

Webmasters should be interested in comments and links that get posted on the Internet that refer to articles they have published or their website in general.

One very popular platform to post links on is Twitter which recently got more into the focus of webmasters when Techcrunch reported that Twitter was already the third highest traffic source for the popular technology blog.

I have since then talked to a few fellow webmasters like my business partner Everton from Connected Internet who all confirmed that Twitter rose to become a very reliable source of traffic for their websites.

There are obviously two factors that play a role here. The amount of traffic that can come from Twitter depends largely on the Twitter users who post links pointing to a website on Twitter. The more users and the higher their follower count the better. It certainly depends on the content as well but the content is usually of interest if it is posted by a user.

Some webmasters like to monitor the dynamic process more thoroughly. The default Twitter search engine is no real help when it comes to discovering links pointing to a specific url or website on Twitter. BackTweets is a third party search engine that offers more reliable results. A search for ghacks.net would reveal nine results at the Twitter search engine and more than 4000 results at the BackTweets engine.

Results display the Twitter user who made the post, the post contents and the time it was posted. A click on the user icon or name will open the Twitter user page. A good way of finding new users to follow (and to thank them for posting links). An advanced search form is available as well which can be used to search in a specific date range or by Twitter user.

The service displays all tweets matching the desired search term in chronological order, with the most recent tweets displayed at the top of the page.

There is unfortunately no easy way to browse all links in a timely fashion, as only ten are displayed per page. An export option would be really helpful to webmasters who want to analyze the links pointing to their websites.

Backtweets is an interesting service for webmasters who want to analyse and increase the traffic that Twitter is sending to their websites.

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