Viral Marketing for Beginners

Viral Marketing for Beginners

Checking the del.icio.us popular page today, I noticed this page, which had already been tagged 923 times and rising. No knock against the person who wrote it but...it's just a list of a half-dozen or so AJAX tutorials.

I mean, can viral marketing really be this easy?

A killer, comprehensive resource like the SEOMoz Ranking Factors page gets 882 del.icio.us tags, and a links page listing seven AJAX tutorials eclipsed it easily in a few days (although SEOMoz's Web 2.0 awards had significantly wider appeal).

And, of course, it's been Dugg.

So what's the lesson here? I guess that getting Del.icio.us and Digg traffic by writing about AJAX is easier than your sister on prom night. I suppose the other lesson is get linked to by Scoble.

Here's something that's both inspired by, and a commentary on, that post. It's a short list of the best viral marketing info I've come across online.

First, a quick rundown on what makes an idea viral by the guy who essentially invented the term, Seth Godin.

Second, Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl) has an excellent post on viral marketing from an SEO perspective(commonly referred to as linkbait).

Third, Graywolf has some good ideas on how to get Dugg even if you're (gasp!) not writing about AJAX.

From what I've heard, Digg traffic doesn't have much commercial value, since Digg users don't tend to buy anything, click on ads, or do anything else that might make you money. They arrive, read your stuff, and then move on (possibly knocking your site offline in the process if you weren't prepare for the influx of traffic). Tech-recipes breaks down what you should know about Digg traffic.

Finally, CopyBlogger has a great free PDF ebook on viral marketing with blogs.

With blogging, going viral doesn't necessarily mean big bucks. The financial benefit of going viral typically doesn't lie with selling to or otherwise monetizing the traffic itself, but rather with the increased exposure that might result in a large number of sites linking to you (especially bloggers).

That boost in incoming links can then nicely translate into your site ranking higher for those keywords that actually will bring in paying customers.

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Site With Delicious.com

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Site With Delicious.com

Social bookmarking sites like delicious.com are rapidly becoming important to search engine optimization, though for a slightly different reason than most people might suspect.

Links from sites like delicious.com aren't worth a whole lot from a search engine perspective, since they use the "noarchive,nofollow,noindex" robots meta tag at the top of the bookmarks pages.

However, these social bookmarking tools can be used to drive traffic to your site, if they're used correctly. The way to do that is to tag your pages with the keywords relevant to them. This especially can be used to increase the exposure of new blog posts.

Let's say you have a blog about ringtones. After making a blog post, post it to your delicious account and tag it with keywords like "ringtones", "cellphone", and "mobile."

A link and description will then show up on the following pages:

http://delicious.com/tag/ringtones
http://delicious.com/tag/cellphone
http://delicious.com/tag/mobile

Each of those pages has its own rss feed, which is usually subscribed to by bloggers and other people interested in tracking the latest about those keywords. That means you increase the chances that those people are going to see the link to your site, a certain number are going to click through, and, if your post or article is a good one, some of them will probably link to you from their own sites..

Also, a link to your post will show up on this page (but only for two minutes):

http://delicious.com/recent

and if enough people find your page interesting enough to tag with their own delicious.com accounts, then it could show up on this page:

http://delicious.com/popular/

Getting listed on the delicious.com "popular" page can potentially send you a huge amount of traffic, but getting there is not easy, since you have to be creating something that a large number of people will find tag-worthy.

As you can see, the link-building effect of a site like delicious.com is indirect.The links from delicious.com confer no ranking benefit in themselves, but they can be used to send traffic to your site, and if you have something good to offer, a certain number of the people coming to your site are going to link to you.

However, the traffic boost will be non-existent if the content is mediocre, and even good content will often be ignored if it doesn't catch on with a large group of people. While a site like delicious.com can be used to increase the exposure of your site, if you're going to be tagging your own pages, you should save it for those pages you find really exceptional. Otherwise, you're just increasing the clutter on the site, and boring pages are not likely to result in any increase in traffic or links.

SEO Booster Pro

SEO Booster PRO – Premium WordPress Plugin

SEO Booster PRO is a Dynamic SEO Plugin for WordPress that automates your blog by tracking, analyzing and utilizing the incoming searches from the search engines.

SEO Booster PRO automatically tracks your incoming visitors from Google, researches the current ranking of the keyword, and then starts promoting the best suited keywords, after installation, you don’t need to do anything else.
Details

SEO Booster PRO will promote your web site to the search engines by detecting incoming traffic through Google; it attempts to boost the keywords most likely to achieve a higher ranking that is specific to each and every blog and article.

It does this by several neat tricks; it collects all the search terms your visitors has used to find your web site through Google and then it researches the current ranking of those keywords and starts promoting the best suited keywords for your blog.

We eat our own dog food by using SEO Booster PRO on all of our WordPress based web sites; so you know it perfectly safe to use.
Totally 100% white head

SBP is one hundred percent white head; in reality, it does everything that you could do yourself if you wanted to spend the time to research, update and track every single incoming search engine visitor manually and then cross-promote all that data and updating links pointing to your articles – day in and day out.

Doesn’t sound like much fun does it? Well, that’s where the dynamic beauty of SEO Booster PRO comes into play.
Keyword boosting techniques

We all want our sites to rank #1 in Google, but being listed on the first page (top 10 rankings) is basically just as good; but for each additional page, the value of the ranking diminishes.

So what SEO Booster does; it figures out the search terms that you are currently ranking for between 11 and 35 (you can change the ranking positions you feel best suits your blog on the setup page) and puts those keywords into a widget that links to the same article that Google links to for that search term.

So if you had a blog about Apple iPad and one of the search terms your blog ranks for is Apple iPad protection and it’s ranked #15 on Google; SEO Booster PRO will then add the keywords Apple iPad protection to your SEO Booster PRO widget linking to the article on your blog about Apple iPad protection, thus boosting the keyword relevance.

This has the effect of reinforcing the link between the search term and the landing page on your site, and it will improve your sites ranking for that search term; when SEO Booster PRO notices that your ranking has improved to position #7 for instance; it will automatically drop it from the widget and replace it with another search term,dynamically improving your Search Engine Ranking Pages.

You can set how many keywords to boost in the widget – 10 search terms are the default and works great for most sites, but you could chose to boost 15 or 20 or more.
Keyword Tracking

However, SEO Booster PRO does so much more than just collecting the incoming search terms; it ranks them for you, letting you know if it has moved (up or down) on the Search Engine Ranking Pages and it can auto-tag each article with the search terms that your site ranks for automatically so you can even have those keywords and search terms added to the page titles for added boosting.

The best part is that it is all automated; hands off. You set it and you can basically forget it and it will churn on in the background boosting your site’s keyword ranking automatically.

There are settings available to fine tune things and you get a list of search terms you are ranking for and their position; that alone can be very useful information in promoting your web sites.

Blackhat Techiques Information about

Here's about some techniques that someone can called BLACKHAT Methods.

Keyword Stuffing: It is by repeating keywords on your page in a un user friendly way usually hidden from the viewer. It is an attempt to manipulate your page ranking and search engines takes note of this.

Invisible Text: Exactly as the heading suggests "invisible text". Example: using a white background with white text. Once more the user can't see the text because it is hidden and it is focused on search engine bots and crawlers

Cloaking: Search engines knows what is on your website as their spiders crawl your pages periodically and adds them to their index. Cloaking means showing a page to the search engine crawlers and a completely different one to the users browsing the site.

Doorway Pages: A doorway page is a web page built specifically with the intention of ranking well in the search engines without any real valuable content of its own. Doorway pages usually links to the real destination page with valuable content or redirects there.

Selling Page Rank: Selling of text links to advertisers/web masters on a high page rank page that passes the page rank value onto their website.

Buying Expired Domains: There are link spammers that monitors (must be boring) DNS records for domains that will expire soon or that has recently expired. The link spammers then buys the domain and replaces the content and links with their own. Most search engines resets the link data on expired domains.

Link Spamming: Link spamming similar to link farming (see next heading). Link spamming takes advantage of link based ranking algorithms, such as Google's Page Rank (PR) algorithm. It gives and passes a higher page rank (PR) to a website the more other highly (PR) ranked websites links to it.

Link Farming: Link farming involves the linking to websites that are not relevant for the purpose to increase the websites link popularity and PR (page rank) value.

Spam Blogs: Spam blogs better known as "splogs" are similar to link farming. Spam blogs are fake blogs created only for spamming.

Page Hijacking: Page hijacking is achieved by creating a copy of a website which shows the content similar to the original content of the hijacked website to a web crawler but redirects the user to unrelated websites.

Mirror Websites: Mirror websites is the hosting of multiple web sites all with similar content but using different URLs containing keywords in the URL. Most popular search engines gives a higher page rank (PR) to pages where the specific keyword searched for appears in the websites URL.

URL Redirection: The URL Redirection method is used by taking the website viewer to a different page without their intervention. For example using META refresh tags, javascript or another server side method.