A funny thing happened on the way to writing a post about our new Twitter PageRank tool. While looking for keywords related to Twitter to enable you to find this, I found plenty of search volume for the word itself, but then search volume fell off a cliff if it had the word twitter in it.
However, and this is the funny part, terms like home business, make money online, how to make make money, etc. get all kinds of searches for those terms. It seems that if you’re trying to find keywords related to Twitter then you’re probably looking to make some easy money.
Now for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me explain a little about the Google Keyword Tool. Google provides a research tool that allows anyone to search for terms, or keywords, that are related to a subject. For example, if I wanted to write a post about our Twitter PageRank tool, (which I do) I would use the keyword tool to find out which terms have good search volume in order to craft a post that could be found.
So imagine my surprise when I typed in Twitter and found most search volume being about what some might think of as suspicious. Maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, that’s one of the reasons that I wrote the Twitter PageRank tool. After seeing tweet after tweet of ‘build your followers to a billion in a day’, or ‘how to make millions an hour with Twitter’ it seemed obvious that something was needed to determine how authentic the people behind the tweets are.
One way to accomplish that determination is to find out what Google thinks of their authority on the web through the PageRank algorithm. You can find this out with the Google Toolbar or with a Firefox PageRank plugin. Just point your browser at either the Twitter profile for the person making the tweet, or click on the web link from their Twitter profile page and you can see what Google thinks of their relative importance.
Since I always have too many browser tabs open, clicking on a bunch of links every time I saw something interesting didn’t appeal to me. What I wanted was a little application that I could keep open to drop a name in and get the page rank info. Thus, the Twitter PageRank application was born. Now anytime I see a tweet and I don’t know the person, I’ll put their username into the tool and see what the web thinks of them.
I’ve been having fun with this tool so far and I hope you’ll try it out. Just put your email address in the Twitter PageRank Tool signup box over in the right sidebar and the program will be emailed to you. It’s still a beta release and it only runs on Windows at the moment, although a Apple version may be coming soon since I miss having the tool available on my Mac. If you’re an Objective-C programmer with time on your hands, drop me a line if you’d like to help.
Check out the screencast if you want to see it in action before installing it.
