If you define SEO as “doing anything ethical to acquire free traffic,” then Twitter is for you. Here’s why: you get to link back to your official site. Twitter provides several great opportunities for your brand. Here are some of my observations regarding Twitter and SEO:

• Another top result in the SERPs
  If you can build a strong following for your Twitter profile, it will likely rank in the top results for your brand name, potentially moving one of your competitors down in the rankings. This is especially helpful for brands that have to fight with affiliates, distributors and re-sellers for top rankings.
• Increase free traffic to any and every current promo and/or deal
  You know how your company has an email list of 50,000 people? And every month that email blast goes out and your company makes a ton of money in a span of 1-3 days from the deals in that email blast? Just as that email blast drives free traffic and revenue, Twitter can be used for the same purpose. Currently, there are a lot of big name brands building respectable Twitter followings, and they are seeing the benefits when they use Twitter to promote a 24-hour-only special deal. Again, it’s free traffic from people you know enjoy your brand.
• Don’t count on any link juice
  In 2008, Twitter implemented nofollow tags for every link on a profile page. Twitter was becoming a search engine spammer playground. People were creating accounts in massive numbers, and you would see links for viagra, online poker, weight loss, etc.. Spammers were leaving Twitter spam comments on profiles. To provide a disincentive for this, Twitter implemented a nofollow tag on all links. While we agree that it is still a good sign to have an increasing number of links on the internet, the nofollow tag ultimately kills any hopes of using Twitter to increase rankings for competitive search terms and phrases. Sorry folks.
• Reputation Management
  Remember how I said that your Twitter account will likely rank in the top SERP results for your brand name? Twitter is also a great tool for reputation management. It’s an indirect way of keeping other potentially negative websites out of the top SERP rankings for searches on your brand name. On a related note, Twitter can also be a great way to quickly communicate with users who have complaints about your site, your products, or your brand. Publicly resolving a complaint on Twitter has the potential to make your brand more appealing to customers, and it could also lead to more followers. That’s even more traffic!

Twitter is another social marketing tool that is getting buzzed and bashed all over the internet. No matter what people are saying about it, it just might be a great tool in your overall SEO strategy. I’ll let you decide.