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