vineri, 16 martie 2012

Posted: 15 Mar 2012 01:41 PM PDT

Google's Search Suggest automatically recommends popular searches as you type your query into the search field. Let's examine how Google determines these results and what factors go into influencing them.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests how you can use these instant recommendations to leverage your brand, or business. Please leave you comments below with your own suggestions!

As part of the test mentioned in the video, we'd love to have your help running the query "Does Anyone Watch Whiteboard Friday"

We'll watch the results for search suggest/instant and see what happens. Here they are just prior to publication of the blog post:

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the very exciting topic of search suggest, also known as Google Instant or Google Suggest. Bing actually does this as well. So do search engines like DuckDuckGo. Even places like Quora and Wikipedia are starting to do this so that as you type a query, so I started typing "Does anyone . . . " and Google has suggested things to me that perhaps I might want to search for. Curious things like, "Does anyone still use MySpace?" Well, maybe I am interested in that. "Does anyone use MySpace anymore?" Well, thank you, Google, that's quite repetitive of you. "Does anyone live in Greenland?" Well, yes, there are at least a few people. "Does anyone use Google+?" Nope, nobody. I'm just kidding. Hopefully, at least all of you watching Whiteboard Friday are using Google+.

These suggestions are interesting from two perspectives. Number one, they're interesting because sometimes negative things can show up in here as you start searching for a business name. Things like scam or fraud or, I don't know, illegal activity or criminal or something like that, bad stuff can come up. Occasionally, SEOs will receive calls from clients or potential clients seeking to have that altered. Or you might be trying to control the reputation for your own business or your own name, making sure that search suggest is controlled so that the queries that show up in here, the phrases that are suggested by Google, are good ones.

The second thing, of course, that is really, really interesting is thinking about this from a branding perspective. So I'll give you an exciting example. For years and years, if you started a search, let's make our own little search box here, if I started a search for SEO, the first thing that would come up, at least in most of the United States, was Seoul. Seoul, Korea, which is the capital there and the most common flight destination. Now, that's interesting, but there were other things that would come up - SEO book, SEO guide. Then as SEOmoz started to become a brand, SEOmoz would become suggested in there, which we thought was tremendously exciting and we really liked that. Then, over time, that actually moved up, and today, at least in most of the United States, although interestingly enough not Seattle because we have a lot of Korean-Americans here in Seattle who fly back and forth to Seoul and I think we have a direct flight as well, so Seattle has a lot of searches for Seoul compared to most of the rest of the country. SEOmoz is now the number one suggested result under SEO, which resulted when that shift happened. You could actually see the search traffic, if this was the line in our analytics for how much traffic we were getting for our branded keyword, that actually shot up within a couple days of that becoming the number one term. It went from, if I remember correctly, this was about a year and a half, two years go, it went from number three to number one, which is super cool. Really, really interesting stuff. This search suggest is influenceable, and it is something that over time through branding you can change the words and phrases that show up here.

Let's talk about the signals that Google is using inside of search suggest. So, first off, query volume. If lots and lots of people start searching for "Does anyone else watch Whiteboard Friday," how about we all search for that. Wouldn't that be cool? Should we do a test? Let's do a test! Oh, that's a great idea! All right. So try searching "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" I tell you what. I will Tweet some links and share some stuff on Google+, and we'll see if we can't get some people searching for this particular phrase and we'll track how many. I'll use a bitly link and share it. In fact, I'll put the bitly link in this Whiteboard Friday so that we can actually test this. What you'll see, what you'll probably see, is with a few hindered to a couple thousand searches from across the US, about 50% of SEOmoz's traffic is here inside the US, folks who watch Whiteboard Friday, and the other 50% is from other countries all around the world, which is awesome. What you'll see is that may start to show up inside of these results over time. Now this is happening because query volume is something that the engines look at and they see, hey, people are searching for this. Let's start to suggest it.

Now, be very careful, because Google did, in fact, have even a particular relationship with Amazon's Mechanical Turk a few years ago. There was a representative at Mechanical Turk who was contacted by Google and Google said, basically, hey we want to know if anyone's asking for search suggest influencing, that kind of thing. Google has gotten a lot more sophisticated about this, so you can bet that today they're probably using things like unique verifiable accounts, independent users. You know, if I go and search from my computer 100 times, that's probably not going to make a big difference, but if 500 people all around the Seattle area all start searching, you can bet that "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" will probably show up pretty highly in these results at least in this geographic area.

Which gets to the second point, the second input, and that is the geography of the searchers themselves. Now interestingly we actually ran a test here at SEOmoz a while back, where I had about 1000 people around the world search for a phrase, and that was "travel blog" and then the word that my wife's blog actually "Everywhereist." I wanted to see if search suggest actually had an influence on ranking position. So, essentially, does putting the brand name here, will that bump up the rankings of a site? It did not appear to, at least in this example. But what it did do is show me that very quickly this would pop into search suggest, and it popped into geographic areas where I had lots of followers or friends who searched for that, which is really, really interesting. It suggests strongly that the geography is influential but that you don't necessarily need that many users searching for a particular phrase in order to get it included in here.

Now, obviously, there is black and gray hat things you could do with this. Don't do that. Don't try it. You're going to get in trouble. Google obviously does some scrubbing of these results anyway, so it is going to get caught very quickly. But if you can naturally do it, through branding, through product naming, through social sharing, through content marketing, through all sorts of forms of inbound marketing, then this is something you can change.

Finally, and interestingly, the keyword a phrase mentions, and what I mean by mentions is actually mentions on the Web. So particularly in news and fresh content seeing the word, right, seeing the word "travel blog Everywhereist" appear or seeing the word "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear, so this video for example, as this blog post goes out and the phrase "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear across the Web as RSS feeders pick it up and people start searching for it and all those kinds of things. That will influence the search suggest as well.

I am betting that Google does something where they verify both geographically and through unique users, and they look for keyword phrases and mentions. So if something is being searched for, but no one is talking about it on the Web, that might be a little odd. But if something is in the news, especially in news headlines, and it's popular, it's in lots of sources, and it's getting search volume, then it's probably going to make its way into search suggest.

Hopefully this Whiteboard Friday has helped you to understand how Google is doing this stuff, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: a Case Study

Posted: 15 Mar 2012 04:58 AM PDT

Posted by Eppie Vojt

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

You've built a fantastic site full of excellent, link-worthy content. You're actively building relationships in the social space that send quality traffic to your site and establish your authority within your industry. You've focused on creating a great user experience and deliver value to your site's visitors... and yet you're still getting outranked by garbage websites that objectively don't deserve to show up ahead of you.

In short, you're following the advice that all the top SEO experts are giving out, but you simply can't pull the same quantity of links that some of your less ethical competition is nabbing. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from that trash that's pushing you down in the SERPs and start copying their links.

A Prime Example of Garbage in the SERPs

To determine how low value sites are able to rank for competitive terms, we're going to dissect one of the most astonishing achievements in SERP manipulation I've seen in a long time -- a situation where several billion dollar brands got stomped by a low quality site for some of the most competitive (and valuable) terms online. "Car Insurance" and "auto insurance" (and a host of related terms).

Take a look at these search results and I'm sure you can spot the outlier (hint... I put a box around it, wrote something next to it, and drew a big red arrow pointing to it):

You found it? Awesomesauce! There, sitting pretty at #2 for one of the Holy Grail search terms, right in between Progressive and Geico was... AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com? Not the most trustworthy looking domain name but to rank second for car insurance (and fourth for "auto insurance") it must be an impressive site, right?

Surely it's going to be stuffed with linkbait content like lists of the least and most expensive cars to insure, lists of the most expensive cities and states to insure a vehicle, calculators for determining the right amount of insurance to get, tips for lowering your insurance rate, and lists of the most frequently stolen or vandalized cars. It'll be very attractive and super user friendly. Has to be, doesn't it?

A Look at the Site

AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com

Far from it -- it's a large lead capture form at the top of the page (powered by Sure Hits), some low quality text content below it, and a single navigation item (leading to the site's blog). Nothing else.

The site's blog doesn't prove to be a whole lot better, as it's jam packed with poorly written content, most of which exists only to create a reasonable amount of space in between repetitions of keyword phrases.

When I find a site like this ranking in a competitive niche, my first thought is always that the search result I'm seeing might be an anomaly. I double-checked with my buddy Ian Howells (@ianhowells - smart dude) and he was seeing the same thing. Then I looked it up at SEMrush.com, where I saw this:

SEM Rush data for autoinsurancequoteseasy.com

Looks Like Google Forgot to Take Out the Trash

This was no fluke. In under a year this site had gone from a newly registered domain (December 2010 registration date) to the top of the mountain of search, ranking for some of the most competitive terms online. SEM Rush estimated the paid search equivalent value of the traffic received by this domain to be over $4 million... per month!

That's a lot of scratch generated by a site that's not employing a single one of the methods most leading SEO experts currently preach... so what gives?

Well, to find out, let's head on over to Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO to take a closer look at how a simple lead capture site was able to build up enough authority to outrank the world's most famous insurance-touting lizard... and what we can learn from it to help our sites climb the search rankings.

Link Microscope

From Majestic SEO, I was able to pull a backlinks discovery chart that shows approximate numbers for the amount of new links added per month. It's pretty clear that these guys weren't messing around with a conservative link velocity. They really got after it, adding a considerable amount of new links early in the site's life cycle and became even more aggressive starting in October. This second push correlates pretty nicely with the spike in organic search traffic shown above from SEMrush.

Majestic SEO Backlink Discovery Chart

So we know that this site grabbed top rankings for some super competitive keywords and held the position for several months. We also know it employed an aggressive link building campaign. It's time to dive deeper into what these links looked like and where they were placed to see if we can replicate them.

After running an export of AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com's link profile from OSE, I started to analyze their link profile, focusing initially on anchor text distribution. Looking at the chart below, you'll notice that the site is very heavily weighted towards targeted anchor text. Their top 10 most frequently occurring anchor texts made up nearly 80% of all links.

anchor text distribution chart

Within the subset of links that contain targeted anchor text, there's a fair amount of variety, though the vast majority of the links contain some modified form of "auto insurance" and "car insurance." All interesting information, but before looking at this chart, we all probably knew that the site was going to be ranking based on heavy usage of anchor text. That isn't super actionable data -- if we were looking to compete in this space, we'd already plan on trying to get lots of exact and partial match links.

But what if there was an easy way to burn through this list of links and spot the ones that would be super easy to copy? What if, without having to manually load a single page, we could identify all of the blog comments, blogroll links, author bios, footer links, resource boxes, link lists, and private blog network posts? Wouldn't that be helpful? Even for the ultra-white hats, using this approach could eliminate these cheap links and make it more efficient to identify legitimate editorial links that you might try to match.

Taking Link Analysis a Step Further -- Using Semantic Markup to Identify Link Types

The good news is that we can quickly sift through a mountain of backlinks and reliably segment them into groups. Thanks to the adoption of semantic markup over the past few years, most websites happily give this information away.

"What's semantic markup?" some of you ask. It's code that inherently has meaning. Code that describes its own purpose to the browser (or crawler). In a perfect world, that means elements like <header>, <article>, and <footer>. Those are all available in HTML 5. But since the advent of id and class names in markup, developers have been trying to add meaning to what would otherwise be ambiguous code. Most of the web is now built to look like this:

<div class="comment">My comment goes here</div>

or this:

<div id="footer">Copyright info, etc.</div>

Sadly, it doesn't quite look like this:

<a href="my-spammy-website" class="spam-links">My spammy anchor text</a>

But there's enough meaning built in to most id and class names that we can start to discern quite quickly what most elements mean. Knowing that this is a pretty standard convention, it's not too hard to build a crawler that will analyze this data for us, looping through each line of our OSE export. For each entry it will (this is going to get a little nerdy, so bear with me):

Fetch the url of the page that contains the link to the target site
Convert that info into a Document Object Model (DOM) object
Run an xPath query to find the link on the page with a matching href value
Reverse traverse the DOM, looking for containing elements that contain a class or id value that matches a link-type pattern

In non-geek speak, that means that we check to see if our link sits inside of a container that has a recognizable id or class name.

Classifying the Links

If, during that reverse traversal, it finds a match, we can effectively label that link. So if our link appears inside a div with the id of "footer" we can label that as a footer link. If it's in a div or paragraph (or any other element) with the class of "comment-37268," we can still call it a match and note that it's a comment link.

We can add a second level of information on comment links by searching the DOM for all external links on the page and counting the total. The higher the number, the greater the likelihood that the site is auto-approving comments.

If we fail to retrieve the page or we get the page but the link is no longer present, we can label the link as dead.

We can also do some simple domain matching on known article directories, web directories, and web 2.0 properties, though for this example I only used a few domains for each of these groupings. With larger lists, the "unknown" link types would likely shrink.

With the crawler built and running, I was able to pull the following data for this site (dead links removed):

Link type distribution

Gaining control of other sites

The chart above starts to paint a much clearer picture of how these rankings were built -- blog commenting, article marketing, and sidebar links played a big role in boosting this site's link profile.

What do those links have in common? They are very unlikely to be legitimate editorial links. Instead, it looks like the rankings for this site were built on "link dropping," the process of leveraging control of an independent site to leave your own link without oversight or review.

Since we've been able to automatically identify roughly 65% of the live links to the site, we've got a smaller unknown group to work with now. as a result, we can pull some of those remaining unidentified links for manual review. And that's where we see gems like this:

Not exactly contextual links

Sifting through a sampling of these unclassified links, we see a bunch of web sites like this, which to a machine look like contextual links in the main content area. Obviously, this doesn't stand up to human review and is a completely indefensible link building strategy.

We also spot a bunch of links on sites with posts covering a wide range of topics. They're publishing new content pretty frequently and every post has links in it with targeted anchor text (to highly profitable niches).

These types of posts come from one of the most effective link dropping strategies working today -- the use of private blog networks. So let's start to look into how we can more accurately classify these links by network so we can start posting to them as well.

The Next Step: Domain Matching to Identify Private Blog Networks

Effective private blog networks are built to have no footprint. They look like completely independent sites, don't interlink, and have no shared code. When done correctly, they won't share an IP address, Google AdSense publisher ID, or Google Analytics account. In short, they can't be spotted by analyzing the on-page content.

A truly private blog network (one owned entirely by a company that uses it to get their own rankings), is almost impossible to identify. Blog networks that are open to paid membership (like Build My Rank, Authority Link Network, Linkvana, and High PR Society) are easier to spot -- though not without cost.

The way we can pick out the domains in these networks is to create content with a shared unique phrase (or link to a decoy domain). Once this content is published and indexed, we can scrape Google for listings containing the target phrase. Once we have the list of URLs where our content has been published, we can cull out the domain names and add them to a match list.

With links classified into groups, we can now export lists that all have the same tactical approach to duplication. That makes it super easy to outsource this stuff. Send the list of blog comments to someone (or a team of people) and have them start matching links. If you're particularly daring, you can completely automate this using Scrapebox -- it all depends on your personal ethics and risk tolerance.

Same thing with web directories -- these are links that can be acquired with brute force, so commit lower cost resources into acquiring them.

Sidebar, footer, and blogroll links are most likely paid links, part of a private blog network (hopefully we've matched the domains and reclassified those), or possibly valid resource lists. Contacting webmasters to find out what it takes to get a link in those areas requires a little more finesse, but with a little guidance, junior team members can handle these tasks.

If they match our private blog network list, we can submit posts through on those networks.

A Word of Caution

Be careful who you copy. The site I referenced in this article has already been dropped by Google (I wouldn't have published this if they were still ranking). I suspect it was a manual action, since the site had a pretty stable three months at the top (even in the age of Panda). Google just can't allow low quality sites to outrank billion dollar brands for high visibility terms, and I believe they took corrective action to create a better user experience for the search terms this site ranked for.

It's possible that they didn't just implement this on a domain level, but instead stripped the sites that linked to AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com of their ability pass juice. That would mean that if you were duplicating this site's links, you'd be out of business too. Always weigh the risk against the reward and NEVER gamble with a client's site without getting approval (in writing) from them that they are comfortable with the risk of losing all of their rankings.

Want to Analyze Links for Yourself? I've Got You Covered

Obviously, since I have the data for the site used in this case study, I've actually built the tool talked about in the "Using Semantic Markup..." section of this post. For my purposes, it didn't need a fancy design or multiple user management, and I ALMOST published this post without bothering to put that stuff together. Thankfully, some of my friends in the SEO community (Ethan Lyon, Mike King, Dan Shure, Nick Eubanks, Ian Howells) pushed for me to make this application usable by other people, so...

You can start analyzing links using Link Detective for your own projects today.

If you want to know when new features get rolled in to the application, just follow me at @eppievojt on Twitter. I'll also make note of it on my (infrequently updated) personal website, eppie.net.

How To Use Memes to Build EASY Backlinks & Traffic

Posted: 15 Mar 2012 01:55 AM PDT

Posted by Takeshi Young

Hey Mozzers,

My name is Takeshi and I'm a Technical SEO Analyst for the in-house SEO team over at Become.com. During my spare time I like to work on my own projects, and lately I've stumbled across a technique that's been working surprisingly well for me involving memes. I hope you can take some ideas away from this post that you can incorporate into your own SEO and viral marketing campaigns!

How To Use Memes to Build EASY Backlinks & Traffic

One Does Not Simply Boromir

Link building. Social engagement. Viral marketing. These are all topics that we grapple with as SEO professionals and inbound marketers, and it can be difficult to come up with strategies to achieve all this from project to project or from client to client. But what if I were to tell you that there's a simple strategy that you can follow to achieve all of these objectives, an easy formula where all you have to do is fill in the blanks, and watch the backlinks and social media traffic roll in? Interested? Read on.

An Introduction To Memes

What is a Meme? Memes, or more specifically internet memes, refer to any concept that spreads across the Internet. This can include stories, quotes, images, videos or audio, but for the purposes of this article we'll refer specifically to images.

The word "meme" comes from the 1976 book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where the term meant a unit of cultural knowledge that is passed between people. On the Internet, the term has come to be synonymous with funny images with clever (or not so clever) captions, first popularized by LOLCats.

Link Juice

So why use memes? Memes have two important properties that make them the ideal tool for social media and link building campaigns.

1) Memes Are Viral

The first property of memes is that they're viral. For all the power and potential of the Internet, most people use it primarily for entertainment and distraction, which is why sites like Facebook and YouTube are so popular, and companies like the Cheezburger Network have built entire Internet empires from funny pictures and videos. Memes are ideal fodder for entertainment on the web because they're quick and easy to consume, which is crucial given how short people's attention spans are.

Memes are also typically humorous in nature, and people love sharing a good joke. Just look at your uncle who always mass-emails jokes to his entire contact list, or your friends spreading the latest "What People Think I Do" pictures on Facebook. People like being entertained, and if they find something particularly entertaining, they'll pass it along to their friends, who in-turn pass it on to their friends, and so-on and so-forth. That's how content goes viral.

2) Memes Are Easy To Make

Ok, so memes have a lot of viral potential, but that doesn't get us anywhere if we can't make them. Fortunately, memes are easy to make, perhaps a lot easier than you think. All you need to make a basic image meme are the following:

1) A basic understanding of Photoshop

2) A sense of humor

3) That's it!

If you don't know how to use Photoshop, fear not. There are free online tools out there such as Meme Generator and Quick Meme that allow anyone to whip up a meme in just a few seconds.

The online meme creator on MemeGenerator.net

Point two is a little trickier, but fortunately a sense of humor is something that can be improved with practice. One resource I've found particularly helpful for honing my sense of humor (such as it is) is the Humor Power blog, which provides excercises, contests, and case studies on how to strengthen your funny bone.

The Meme Creation Process

With the tools mentioned above and a good sense of humor, putting together memes is super simple, but how do you come up with ideas for a good meme? As Pablo Picasso said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Coming up with a completely new idea that goes viral is very difficult, and to some degree a matter of luck. Borrowing an idea that is already popular and repurposing it for your audience is much easier.

One of the best resources for finding memes is Know Your Meme, which is a veritable encyclopedia of internet memes. On Know Your Meme you can find a catalog of memes, popular memes, and the history behind the various memes that are floating around the web. Meme Generator and Quick Meme also have sections for popular memes as well. Take a look at some of the examples, find the ones that tickle your funny bone, and adopt it to suit your niche.

Memes in a nutshell are formulas for jokes that you just plug in with niche specific details to fit your audience:

The "Dating Site Murderer" Meme

5 Tips For Creating Memes

Know your subject - The better you understand your niche, the easier it will be for you to create memes that are funny for your audience.
Study the experts - Before I begin creating a meme, I like to immerse myself in that meme by browsing through 50 or so of the most popular memes of that type. Doing so gives me an idea of what others have done that's worked, and allows me to grok the particular joke formula and create my own variation.
Make several drafts - If you've stumbled across a funny idea, it's helpful to come up with several versions of the joke to get just the right wording. Memes are a little like poetry: word choice is very important. When in doubt, go with the shorter option: brevity is the soul of wit.
Ask for feedback - Sometimes it can be helpful to ask others for feedback on lines you've created to get another perspective on them. They may even have suggestions for alternatives that may be funnier than the original. However, use your own judgement to make the final call: everyone has a different sense of humor, if it's funny to you be confident and go with it.
Have fun! - If you're having fun while creating your memes, it will help keep the creative juices flowing, and chances are your audience will have fun too once they read them. Don't take memes too seriously, they're meant to be silly

Finding Trending Memes

Doing the above is enough to get you some link juice and traffic (using the methods I'll detail below), but if you really want to create a meme that goes viral, you need to identify trending memes, new memes that are just starting to gain in popularity. This is because novelty plays a big part in viral marketing; not many people are going to want to share something that's three years old or that everybody's already seen.

The best place I've found for discovering trending memes is Reddit. Reddit, if you're not familiar with it, is a social bookmarking site where people submit interesting content, which gets voted on by other users of the site. Many memes originate or are popularized on Reddit, and viral content generally ends up on Reddit first before it spreads to more mainstream sites like Facebook. If you check out what's popular on the Reddit homepage today, you'll get a good idea of what's going to be popular a week or two later on other sites. The strategy here is to find content that's gaining in popularity before your fans do, put your own twist to it, and then share it with them.

Beyond that, it helps to just be aware of any funny content or memes that you run across while surfing the web. Are you starting to notice a certain image being shared a lot on Facebook? Is there a picture you've come across that was just hilarious? Chances are if you found it funny, so will your friends. Start thinking of how you can create your own version of that for your niche.

Spreading Your Memes

Ok, so far we've talked about how to create our own memes by taking a popular or trending meme, and then altering it so that it's applicable to our niche. Now let's talk about how you can use social networks to help your memes go viral. As you know, there are many social networks out there, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Let's take a look at the most popular ones, and see how they stack up.

Facebook

You can't talk about social networks without mentioning Facebook, simply because it's the largest one out there, by far. Facebook at last count had close to one billion users-- that's 1/6th the population of the planet, and 1/3rd of all Internet users! If you want to reach the greatest amount of people possible with your memes, you want to put them on Facebook.

The downside with Facebook is that most people on Facebook don't have their own websites, and even if they do, they're probably not going to link to your content unless they're really moved by it. So unless you're lucky, you're probably not going to receive many backlinks from a Facebook viral marketing campaign. On the plus side, it's a great way to build your brand, get likes and fans for your Facebook pages, and drive massive amounts of traffic.

As an example, this is a little image I put together for one of my salsa dancing websites:

I had noticed that this meme was trending on Facebook, so I created my own version and posted it on our website's Facebook page. Within three days we had over 600 comments, 900 new fans, 3800 shares, and 6500 likes. This is with zero promotion, for something that I whipped up in Photoshop in 15 minutes. According to Facebook's analytics, the image has been viewed more than 400,000 times by over 200,000 people over the world. Now that's viral!

A couple days later I made another image for a different niche and posted it on my wall. Within days it too had garnered 100 comments, 570 shares, and 1100 likes. Again, all I did was identify a trending meme, create a version of it that resonated with a specific niche, and posted it on Facebook. The magic of social networking did the rest.

With a good meme, this is a simple feat to replicate. If you have a big enough social circle or fan page, just posting it there may be enough for it to go viral. If you don't have many connections on Facebook, then just seed the meme to the the top Facebook groups and pages for your niche. Then sit back and watch it spread.

Twitter

Twitter is a smaller social network than Facebook (roughly 300 million users), but it can still be a significant way of spreading viral content. Twitter is the social network I have had the least amount of experience with, so I won't say much about it here, but from my experience it can be difficult to spread content on Twitter unless you already have a big following. On the flip side, if your content is picked up by a big influencer, then it has the potential to spread far via retweets. Twitter has the same problem as Facebook concerning getting backlinks (unless you believe Tweets influence search rankings). Also, many niches don't have active Twitter users.

Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon users LOVE images and other quickly digestible content, and memes fit right into that category. Do submit all your memes to Stumbleupon. At close to 20 million users, Stumbleupon can send you thousands of visitors a day if your meme gets picked up, although the traffic tends not to be of very high quality. If you're monetizing with CPM ads, that's no problem, otherwise try to get them to subscribe to your blog so you can get them coming back.

I don't really use Pinterest because I don't meet the requisite number of X chromosomes, but Pinterest is hard to ignore because of its massive growth and 10 million+ users. Like Stumbleupon, Pinterest users love images and humor, so memes are a good a fit. The majority of Pinterest users are women, so keep that in mind as well. The only downside to Pinterest is that like all of the aforementioned social networks, all link back from Pinterest are nofollow.

Where Are The Backlinks??

So far the sites I've mentioned will get you viral traffic and social engagement, but few backlinks. Let's take a look at a couple sites that will get you both.

I already mentioned Reddit earlier as a place to spot trending memes, and it's a great place to submit them as well. Reddit has usurped Digg as the largest social news site in the world, with over 35 million unique visitors per month. You can submit memes to Reddit by submitting them to the appropriate subreddit (read: subcategory). If your submission makes it to the front page of that subreddit, you stand to get a lot of traffic, as well as a dofollow backlink.

You can submit your meme to multiple subreddits, so do make multiple submissions as long as they're relevant and not spammy. Reddit users tend to be savvier than web users as a whole, and they don't like links that are overly self-promotional or commercial in nature, so keep that in mind when considering your submissions. Also, you have a much better chance of making it to the top of smaller subreddits and getting a backlink, however larger subreddits have higher pagerank and more users, so it makes sense to submit your memes to both.

Tumblr

Ok, I've saved the best one for last: Tumblr. If you don't have much experience with Tumblr, don't worry -- I hadn't really used it myself until recently (I'm a diehard Wordpress fanatic). However, after seeing how easy it is to spread content virally and build backlinks with Tumblr, I'm hooked.

So what is Tumblr? The best way to describe Tumblr, is that it's a hybrid of a blog platform and social network. It's similar to Pinterest in many ways-- you can post content on your tumblrog (blog/pinboard) which other people can then like or reblog (re-pin/share) on their own tumblrs. The main difference is that with Tumblr, reblogs are DOFOLLOW.

Think about that for a minute. Tumblr has all the viral potential of the other social networks mentioned above (they're closing in on 20 million users), but whenever your content is shared, you get a dofollow backlink. Imagine if every time someone shared your stuff on Facebook, or retweeted your tweets, or re-pinned your pins, you got a backlink. That's exactly what happens with Tumblr.

It Gets Better

But that's not all. Tumblr is the first blog platform/social network that I have seen where tags actually matter (ok, hashtags sort of matter on Twitter, but on Tumblr they're even more powerful). One of the main ways that users can browse for content on Tumblr is by searching for tags. They can also subscribe to tags so that any content that's tagged with their interests shows up in their dashboard (Tumblr parlance for news feed). As an added method of discovery, Tumblr shows a random tumblrog in the sidebar of everyone's dashboard.

This is very powerful. All these features make it incredibly easy for your content to get shared with other people, even if you have a brand new blog with zero following. Case in point: just last week I started a tumblrog called Salsa Memes, and literally within three seconds of making my first post, I had two reblogs (read: backlinks) and one like. This is with a completely brand new site, with zero followers, and zero promotion. That something you just can't do with any other blog platform.

As of this writing, the tumblrog has 87 reblogs, and another salsa dancing tumblrog that I put together a few days later currently has 42 reblogs. That's a combined 129 backlinks for two sites that are less than a week old, all completely white hat, without any effort or promotion on my part (there are some greyhat methods for exploiting Tumblr, but I won't go into those here).

Now the one caveat about these links, is that they're not necessarily of the highest quality. Many blogs that reblog your content will have no pagerank, and will not be related to your niche. Additionally, reblogging by its nature generates a lot of duplicate content, so a lot of the links you may be getting may not even be indexed.

However, these concerns aside, these links in sufficient quantity can add up. I started another tumblrog about a month ago that quickly went viral on Tumblr and Twitter, and within weeks had acquired a PageRank of 3. The tumblrog that inspired it, called Programmer Ryan Gosling (which was started only a few weeks earlier), currently has a PageRank of 5. Not bad for a two-month old blog full of geeky pick-up lines! Granted, both these blogs also have links from outside Tumblr, but that's the thing about memes, they spread like viruses (and the hundreds of Tumblr backlinks certainly don't hurt).

Ryan Gosling bears a resemblance to a certain Mozzer in this pic

One more thing about Tumblr before I wrap up-- like I mentioned earlier, Tumblr is part-social network too, which means people can follow your tumblrog to receive the latest updates from you. That means that the longer you keep producing memes, the more of a following you gain, and the further each new meme has the potential to spread. If you acquire enough followers, people will start submitting their own memes to you (just check the "Let people submit posts" box in your settings), allowing you to use UGC to build even more backlinks.

Wrap-Up

This post ran a little long, but hopefully it's inspired you to try your hand at creating your own memes to further your linkbuilding and viral marketing campaigns. And sign-up for Tumblr, you'll love it! Here are a few closing thoughts:

Submit your content to ALL of the social networks mentioned above. Once you have something good, seed it on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr. By spreading your memes wide, you have a better chance of going viral
Feel free to explore other social networks beyond the ones I mentioned in this article to further your social reach
If you create video related memes, you can submit them to YouTube, another massive traffic source
Beyond social networks, use traditional outreach like e-mail and blogs to build solid backlinks
Try not to overuse this tactic. Like anything else, the novelty wears off if everyone does the same thing over and over again (infographics, anyone?). Be original, be funny, create something of value, and make memes just one of the tools in your link building and viral marketing toolbox

That's it! Happy memeing, and if you have any questions, please post them in the comments!

Health Care: What's Your Story?

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, March 16, 2012

Health Care: What's Your Story?

Two years ago, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act -- legislation to improve our health care system -- into law, and millions of Americans are seeing a noticeable difference in the cost and quality of their health care.

That includes the 23 year-old looking for a job who can now stay on her parents' insurance plan, and the mother whose insurance now covers a pre-existing eye condition for her son.

But we need your story. How has the health care law made a difference for you or your family?

West Wing Week: "Leveling the Playing Field"