In the SEO world today, it’s not just about , and a few more for good measure. There’s the wealth of adjusting and tweaking that has to be done deep down in a site, within its site structure and metadata alongside the multitude of off-page promotional SEO techniques that might bore the legs off a sloth if we told you them all.
When you become one of , you needn’t worry about all that nitty gritty and the mind-numbingly mind-numbing stuff tthat comes with being expert SEOs. What you can consider is how to target that viral style that web surfers love so much. We’re not talking about (sponsoring swine flu jabs might have mixed marketing success to be honest), but instead the comparitevely harmless internet variety.
The success of has sky rocketed in the last five years with the advent of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and the like. Having an entertaining or thought provoking advert, no matter how cheaply made, can give your company the means to spread its name without anyone on the payroll lifting a finger. Often once the snowball starts running it’s best to get out of the way. The very fact that the video has been seen by everyone and their dead cat – over 120 million views – is frankly petrifying.
One of the best examples of successful viral marketing on a grand scale is that of the film The Blair Witch Project. Made in 1999 the low budget horror generated vast buzz around its release with debate over the truth of the tale of three filmmakers being lost in the woods. Sites sprung up everywhere promoting the film and the first widespread internet viral marketing was born. Films like Cloverfield and The Dark Knight have since tried to recreate a similar online fervour, but none have reached the Blair Witch levels which saw the horror film gross close to $250,000,000 on a $500,000 budget. Hard to beat that.
There’s hundreds of other examples of money making viral promotion around. Some have gone for the online adverts/videos option, spreading an engrossing or hilarious video with their brandname attached. Other web marketers have attached a link to a post or article that has “gone viral” to huge amounts of success. But you have to be able to get these articles out into the web world, and that’s where SEO can come in.
Having said that, it’s not enough to just write a boring keyword-loaded page full of meaningless prose that will bring traffic, for these come hand in hand with a crazily high bounce rate and severely miffed users. It’s also a long shot aiming for a video or tool that will sweep the internet world into your pocket as for every one that makes it big there’s thousands of other unfruitful projects. However, by engaging a reader on specialised sites you can get those page impressions you’ve been looking for, and you’re much more likely to see returning users as a result.
Here’s an example for your persual. For the book social networkign site we made a to drive traffic to a “”. To fit with the market that the site wanted, we had to make it fun and interesting enough that users would want to click through to the next question or at least onto the site to find out more but of course it needed the SEO stuff to bring the traffic in the first place. And so(Book Recommendation Instant Algorithm (k)Nowledge) was born.
Now “he” might not be gaining 120 million viewers but drives large amounts of traffic to the site at over double the normal registration and page visit rates whilst also attracting returning users to find out how “he” has changed over the weeks. And the bookarmy team don’t even have to go anymore.
The importance of writing relevant and interesting text cannot be overrated. Search for “chinese wedding traditions” on and you’ll find endless pages with recycled content and dull prose that a good deal of readers will reject for the more official and reliable pages of Wikipedia. It might be that they are wholly accurate but they simply don’t grab. Try any such long tail keyword and you’ll often find the same.
So don’t treat your users like they are some kind of technologically-able zombies – they (hopefully) aren’t, and if you do treat them as such they’ll be off quicker than Michael Schumacher’s trousers. So to speak.
If a site can be search engine optimised user-engaging you’re onto a winner – combination is key. can help you find the right means to target an audience through Google – !
