Viral Link Strategies For Search Engine Optimization

Running head: VIRAL LINK STRATEGIES FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Viral Link Strategies for Search Engine Optimization

By: Troy Johnson

Argosy University

MSM program

International Marketing and E-Business

03/04/2010

Viral marketing is an integral tool in achieving search engine optimization. This case study reveals a delegation link strategy designed to improve search engine page rank. I am the founder of Snowbirdseeker.com LLC a seasonal rental advertising website that facilitates communication between snowbirds and property managers. Like all website owners I am interested in search engine optimization. As defined by www.wikipedia.com, "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines." Contracting a SEO professional can be expensive, so this article helps explain how search engines index websites and how they are ranked. Specifically this article describes offsite strategies that are favorable to Google's search algorithm. In years past SEO mostly consisted of writing content filled with keywords, metatags, title tags, and domain names that target a specific demographic or market. A seasonal rental website for example may want to place keywords like seasonal rentals, rental advertising, and snowbirds in their content, title tags, and metatags. Similarly a website describing Sarasota remodeling should target keywords that are relevant to the services provided. However in the case of the remodeling service it is important to optimize for people hunting for service that is within the sales territory of the company. For instance repeating Sarasota remodelers would be better than just writing broadly about remodeling jobs because we know that if someone performs a search for Sarasota remodeling they are searching for remodelers in Sarasota specifically. This type of onsite optimization will help you reach the customers who are already hunting for your services. Onsite optimization will improve ranking on search engines like Bing, MSN, and Yahoo more than it will on Google's search engine. Today, Google maintains 85% of the U.S. search market share underlying the importance of optimizing for Google's search engine. Their patented page rank system values offsite optimization which measures the buzz or link popularity of a given website. During my research I learned that the general consensus on how Google calculates page rank is related more to domain name trust and the number of inbound links than what is actually on the webpage. The approximate search algorithm ranked websites by the following criteria in order of importance:

- 24% Domain name trust

- 22% Anchor text from referring site

- 20% Number of inbound links indicating link popularity

- 15% On page keyword usage

- 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data

- 6% Social Graph Metrics

- 5% Registration and Hosting Data (seomoz.org, 2010)

In order to improve traffic from Google one must consider link building strategies. I looked at what my contractor did to build my website's links and from this I started creating my own link strategy. The process of building links is tedious and time consuming unless you learn to delegate the task through viral marketing. "As the Internet blossomed in the early '90s, people struggled for descriptive metaphors. Was it like print with its "pages," or was it more like exploration via "sites"? Then, in 1996, an animated clip of a dancing baby (aka Baby Cha-Cha) made the rounds, as users on the nascent Web e-mailed it to one another. It took a while, though, to realize why this was significant. In the 2000s, it all became clear: Cutting and pasting a URL was quick, easy and could potentially reach more people than a TV ad." (Brandweek, 2009) Simply provide great content that is useful to others or create something funny and a new link building seed is planted. I am not the best videographer nor am I very funny, but I can write a decent paper helping others delegate their link building through other website vectors. While trying to build my links one at a time I used an article website www.articlesbase .com to publish a paper I wrote "Global Strategies for Search Engine Optimization & Web Marketing". The results of this action were dramatically different from many other sites I had used in the past. The framework of the article sharing website made it easy for anyone with a website to copy the code of my research paper and paste it on their website. There is a reason they call it viral marketing-—because the best social media functions like a virus. It spreads easily, embeds itself seamlessly into hosts and exploits a few critical individuals to achieve global exposure. It may sound terrifying, but you can control it. And if you do, you can reach thousands of people—and thousands of the exact people you want to reach. (Stern, 2009) Many websites enable you to submit press releases and articles describing your services, but only A few transfer information as fast as the contagious movie 28 Days Later. The paper described search engine optimization in elementary terms and I placed hyperlinks using the hyperlink tool that is standard with every word document program. To create a hyperlink within your article simply right click on the mouse when a word doc is open and choose the hyperlink dialogue box. Add your website's URL and in the field where it says text to display use your site's keywords. There are

SEO writing services for those small business owners looking to increase web traffic, website revenues, and brand awareness. Plenty of search engine optimization work goes abroad to places like India, which is fine for website development and most of your onsite optimization. My experience with outsourcing to India went fairly well since they made the site function the way that I wanted, but there were chronic misspellings and problems with subject verb agreement. Any article submission riddled with mistakes is not likely to go viral.

The eventual result of publishing my article with embedded links to my website snowbirdseeker.com was hundreds of people copying the article for its content and pasting it on their sites and blogs. This might sound like my intellectual property rights were violated, but ultimately I benefited from the exponential growth of my back links and link popularity. This additional free organic traffic can be monetized through Google Adsense and membership sales from rental owners. How could additional traffic to your website benefit you?

In conclusion search engine optimization can be broken down into onsite and offsite optimization. Onsite optimization includes using keywords, metatags, title tags, and other on page methods to improve the quality of web traffic. Offsite optimization involves link building which is seen by search engines as website popularity. Implementing viral marketing strategies using article websites with the right framework for sharing can delegate your link building. To improve your articles chances of going viral make sure it is error free and useful or interesting to read.

References:

1.

Sterne, Rachel

CREATING YOUR VIRAL LOOP ON TWITTER.

Publishers Weekly; 10/5/2009, Vol. 256 Issue 40, p24-25, 2p

2.

Marketing Innovation of the Decade.

Brandweek; 12/14/2009, Vol. 50 Issue 44, p28-28, 1/3p

3.

List of seo factors reference url http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/viral-marketing-articles/
viral-link-strategies-for-search-engine-optimization-1943856.html

Founder of Snowbirdseeker.com. The author is an internet marketing strategist and Masters degree student of Argosy University. He offers link strategy and writing consulting service through SEOgainseeker.com