Unlike other Twitter plugins which use iframes to embed your feed into your page once it’s loaded, the Custom Twitter Feeds uses server-side code to embed your feed content directly into your page. This adds dynamic, search engine crawlable content to your site.
Could you explain further?
Sure! When a Google bot (or any other search bot) crawls your website they don’t load the website in a browser as we do, instead, they come across your URL and send requests to your web server to retrieve the content of each page.
On a website, most of the content is available on the page as it’s returned from the server – your page content, blog posts, HTML structure (anything you can see when you right-click on a web page and select ‘View Source’). Some content is not loaded or rendered until after the page is returned from the server – CSS/stylesheets, JavaScript files, fonts, iframe content, etc.
When the bot crawls the site, as they don’t view it in a browser, then they don’t see any of the stuff which is loaded in by the browser after the page is returned from the server. They just see what you see if you right-click on the page and view the source.
The Custom Twitter Feed plugin uses server-side code to embed the content into the page so that when it’s returned by the server then the content is already there. This means that a Google bot can see and read the content just as though it was a blog post or any other part of your page.
Many social media plugins will load in content after the page has loaded either using JavaScript or iframes, which means that the content can’t be seen by bots. Another advantage is that Google loves new content, and as Twitter feeds are typically updated on a regular basis then every time the bot crawls the site it will see new relevant content.
