For those site owners using Twitter as part of their off-page SEO campaign, 140 characters may be a few characters too many.

If you’re using Twitter for your site’s search engine optimisation, then re-tweets should be a part of what you’re aiming for. When using Twitter as part of your off-page SEO, you want your messages to be shared between as many people as possible. In order for this to happen effectively, your entire message needs to be passed forward.

Tweets that use the full character limit may make effective use of the space provided on Twitter, but they run into issues with re-tweeting. When someone forwards your message on Twitter, they generally type RT, or re-tweet, with your username. This is desirable, as it spreads your, hopefully optimised, user name. If your message takes up the full 140 characters, though, then something has got to give.

When using Twitter for SEO, you want both your user name and your full message to be passed on through re-tweeting. An ideal length for tweets is around 115-120 characters. This provides enough room for re-tweeting comfortably, without compromising your message.

Now, Ashley Cole hasn’t done this himself (though that could have been merely due to the social networking ban the England team faced while they were in South Africa, so stay tuned) but it is incredibly common according to US divorce lawyers; so common in fact that divorce lawyers in the US regularly use Facebook as a means of gathering evidence – and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

According to figures from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a monumental (and frightening) 81% of people involved in divorce cases in the US have either used evidence gathered from social networking websites, or faced it! The sites in question include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even business website LinkedIn and video sharing site YouTube – the mind boggles as to what people must be uploading to YouTube.

Facebook is the biggest source of evidence online for divorce lawyers, with 66% of all Internet evidence coming from the website. 15% of evidence from online sources comes from MySpace, and just 5% from Twitter.

Linda Lea Viken is the president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and she commented on how easy it is for lawyers to gather this sort of evidence:

“This sort of evidence has gone from nothing to a large percentage of my cases coming in, and it’s pretty darn easy. It’s like, `Are you kidding me?’”

Some examples of people being caught out online include:

- A man sought custody of his children, while at the same time he created a new account on Match.com listing himself as being childless.

- A husband said that he didn’t have any issues with anger, yet posted in his Facebook status:

“If you have the balls to get in my face, I’ll kick your ass into submission.”

- Another father successfully used the Internet to prove that his wife didn’t spend any time with their children, when records from her World of Warcraft and Facebook Farmville accounts showed her as being online when she should have been with them.

The advice from divorce lawyers in the US is, if you’re going through a divorce; don’t publish anything online that could be used in court. Keep all comments to yourself and whatever you do, do not post photos of you and your new flame online as an attempt to get back at your estranged partner… it will only backfire on you.

Search engine optimisation is important to consider in general when you’re drafting your Twitter posts. One of the more important areas to think about for tweeting is the first few characters of your posts. This is because the first 40 or so characters of your tweet may be used as a title tag if the search engines pick up on any of your tweets.

The search engines have cottoned on to the fact that social media posts can be of general interest. Twitter posts are featuring more frequently in a number of searches, and having your posts indexed should be one of your SEO aims on Twitter. When Google or the other search engines index your post, they generally take the first 40-ish characters as the title tag, which is used as the link in the search engine results pages. This character limit will include your user name and the first few words of your tweet.

It’s a good idea to treat the first words of your tweets as a title. Keeping your first few words in a tweet on-topic, tightly written and optimised is a good way to look good in the search results pages.

Despite what enthusiasts say, there is no guarantee that a social media campaign is going to be of great benefit to your website’s search engine optimisation strategy. If you pick the wrong social media site, if you pick the wrong group, even if you pick the wrong time to make your posts, your plan is in danger of failing. Social media is a tricky area and even those who have studied it from the very beginning can have trouble staying ahead of it.

If social media is so hard to get into, you may ask, why is it so attractive to SEO experts? The various social media sites around the net are tempting to SEO pros because of two reasons:

1. They provide access to specific groups of internet users, meaning that a business can talk to its target users all in one place.
2. Social media sites also present some very tempting opportunities to seed links, assisting a website’s off-page SEO campaign.

Is social media worth all the worry?

Well, at the moment, Facebook is topping Google in terms of traffic. Smart site owners are looking to social media as not just an SEO resource, but as a traffic source. Think about it – there are a lot of potential customers all using Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis. How can you grab their attention?

No Twitter campaign will succeed without a good number of followers. A decent following always takes a certain amount of time to build up, no matter which social media site you’re operating on. The main ingredient for any decent Twitter campaign will be the usual SEO standby, namely time. For those impatient site owners out there, there are luckily some other things you can do rather than sit around and wait.

The number-one rule – give

Some site owners aren’t happy with just waiting around for followers on Twitter. If this is you, you need to do something proactive to draw in followers. When pushing for more Twitter followers, the principle to follow is that of giving, rather than taking.

Internet users are used to having things offered to them freely. Anything that comes with a catch is going to give them pause, and scare them off. On this note, it is a good idea to offer something to draw followers in on Twitter. This something might be a prize in a competition, a newsletter if they join and subscribe to your site, or downloadable guides. Whatever it is, it has to be something that is clearly in the Twitter user’s favour, with no obvious strings attached.

Think about what would make you sign up to follow someone, and then offer that.

England’s players will only be able to share their thoughts about the World Cup with online fans via the official England website.

The Spain manager, Vicente del Bosque, has also banned his players from using social networking websites to ensure that the players are fully focused on the task at hand, and don’t fall foul of any online mistakes that could be highlighted through social networking and SEO. Liverpool striker Fernando Torres, and Arsenal’s Cesc Fabregas are among the Spanish players who will be without Facebook for the next month or so.

Social networking websites have also caused trouble for other players on the world stage, including Real Madrid’s Kaka, who is the star of the Brazil squad. Kaka revealed recently that he was banning his wife from using Twitter after she attacked Manuel Pellegrini, the coach of Real Madrid, because he wasn’t playing Kaka enough.

Labour election candidate Stuart MacLennan insulted several high profile political figures on the social networking site. Those under fire include Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg – a ‘b******’, Labour MP Diane Abbot – a‘f****** idiot’ and Speaker for the House Of Commons John Bercow, who was labelled a‘t****’.

Mr MacLennan, who was standing for the Moray constituency in Scotland, also complained about being ‘up North’ and branded the elderly as ‘coffin dodgers’.

In a statement MacLennan, 24, said:

“Some of the things I twittered before I became a candidate were very, very silly and I can see they are offensive.

“I have let myself and my friends down and am really sorry.”

He was sacked and replaced with a new candidate who will contest the safe Scottish National Party seat.

With the number of people logging on to social networking sites hitting the stratosphere, Facebook has over 300m users, and in the first quarter of 2010 4 billion tweets were sent, and as such faux pas have increased significantly. Such a slip for a company with a large online profile could be disastrous, and the hapless Mr MacLennan highlights the need for watertight online reputation management.

As businesses increase their presence online, it’s not unusual to see them building a following on Facebook or Twitter as a means of enhancing their reputation. They may attempt to connect with customers by tweeting the latest news or offers, but without a clear policy and guidelines such calamities can and do happen.

If it does, then you may need more than ninja SEO skills to repair the damage.

Followers of UK politics are well used to the major parties undertaking ‘dirty tricks campaigns’ in the run up to general elections, but Labour MP John Prescott has gone a stage further in the run up to this year’s election.

Prescott has urged followers of his Twitter to go to Google and to type in terms related to the election so that the Tory party’s Adwords Ads appear, and then to click on them to waste the Conservatives’ Adwords budget.

Clicks on Adwords cost the advertiser every time a click is a made, and once the daily budget is exceeded, the ads will stop appearing. However, clicking on Adwords Ads deliberately to stop a competitor’s ads appearing is click fraud, and Google takes this very seriously. Also, there are measures in place to detect when multiple clicks are coming from the same source, or patterns of clicks are emerging just to use up an advertiser’s budget. It is therefore likely that Labour’s efforts wouldn’t have dented David Cameron’s Adwords budget too much.

According to the Financial Times, the Tories were bidding on parliamentary search terms, such as ‘budget’ and ‘hung parliament’. The FT also stated that the Tory party was bidding on specific geo terms for local constituencies, which would work out much cheaper as geo targeting your ads is a better way to get results. For example, searching for ‘General Election Cheshire’ or ‘General Election Wirral’ would produce far fewer results, and as such would be less competitive and cheaper on Adwords, than appearing for ‘General Election’.

Labour meanwhile has a smaller advertising budget than the Tory party, so has reportedly been spending its money on SEO and an effort to become a Google News Publisher. Hopefully Labour started its SEO campaign some time ago, as in an area as competitive as politics it can take a long time to garner natural search rankings.