SEO in 2010 – How Articles Go Viral

Before you read anything more – let me say that the course of my life has allowed me to offer this to you now completely free – where in the past I may have gone on to put something on clickbank and sell it for a ton of money. This material would easily sell for $20-40USD, but it’s completely free.

It’s an export of my brains to paper, a strategy that has personally given me hundreds of dollars in revenue and thousands of hits. Properly optimized this exact strategy followed as I explain it could produce you much more than it did me for a number of reasons I won’t get into here.

I had this happen twice, by accident!
I wrote a darn good article on purpose, but did a few things that accidentally gained it immediate attention and in some cases world wide press attention.
(Click the image for a full size copy)

This is a map I drew on a piece of a paper on my desk a few minutes ago, note my amazing artistic talent (Just kidding…) but regardless, if you let my drawing abilities get in your way, you’ll miss this. This map in itself probably has a value in the thousands, but let me break it down for simple folks – step by step so it can be easily understood.

Step 1. Ensure your ‘article repository’ is topic optimized

Basically, what I mean by this is make sure you group your subjects and topics that you cover on your website in a logical order and a logical link pattern on your website, blog or whatever you use to store all your articles online. Ensure they start with a main subject like “house building” and then below that it may cover roofs, structure, foundation etc.. under structure… You might cover screws, drywall, studs etc.

Make sure your site uses a proper URL structure.

I simply mean that it should be http://www.yoursite.com/post-title/ (IN wordpress that’s done by setting your permalink structure to %posttitle% or similar). This way an article’s title might actually be http://www.sermonadvice.com/sermon-on-the-amount/ for example.

Step 2. Setup your article or page for SEO and Viral Success!

There are a number of key elements that are so important to ensuring the page gets a ton of traffic that they are almost more important than the content itself! In fact, in some ways they really are. Things like having an exciting title that explains the benefit of reading it in the first place. Ensuring that title also has a keyword phrase that does get searched for using keyword tools.

Keeping The Humans Happy…

Yeah, they matter too.. Search engines are great, but it’s the humans that link back to stuff! I’m continuging to learn this the hard way, that it’s actually the humans that matter a little more than what Google MSN & Yahoo think. How do we keep them happy? Easy! Keep them entertained and educated with really nice pictures and really interesting materials. When humans find stuff that’s really interesting, really entertaining or educational and they find it super helpful… keyword being super .. They want to pass it on to friends, although some folks aren’t as tech savvy as others… and some are just lazy.. so having sharing buttons on the blog is super important! My favorite tool for that is SexyBookmarks, yeah – i know the name sounds nasty, but it’s totally safe for work and they look brilliant. I also think that the Tweetmeme button (I drew one in the top right of my fake page there) is a great tool.. There are also hacks to make tweetmeme faster too if you find that a problem. I don’t though.

I also mention adding page translation (Support other languages, and also other language search queries! More traffic!) and of course how important it is to have an email address collection box. I’ve always called them “Insurance” because they basically mean if SEO becomes competitive and Pay per click gets too expensive, you’ve always got your list to market to.

Step 3. Get your juicy content out there!

So, up till now all I’ve mentioned is “on page” strategy, nothing about getting your word out there. This isn’t Field of Dreams… “if you build it, they will come”. Fact is i’ve had some content i’ve written that i’d place a $1000 bet it’s the best there is on the internet about that topic, but Google doesn’t care! Google’s a machine with no ability to tell what’s good and what’s not, it leaves that part to the humans (Dumb silly Google!). Sad, what do we know? (kidding!). Anyway…

Get your juicy article talked about! Some markets (like internet marketing and computer topics) that’s easy! Nerds love to share nerdy stuff, so we’ve created lots of nerd link sharing sites, your industry may be different. So you might have to do different things to get your stuff to the masses, but here’s an overall gyst:

• Post on forums and mention your page..
  (if your page really is an article with juicy helpful stuff you won’t get in trouble for posting it… If it sells stuff you will get in trouble).
• Email and comment on blogs
  Interact with the owners and let them know about the killer resource you just wrote. If it’s that good, they’ll link to it too.
• Press Release – Journalists are always looking for new stories
• Relavent news sites – even they want in on this stuff
• Article sites – don’t do 200 of them, but a handful helps a bit
• Universities – Get some .edu links by telling students studying your industry about the article…
  Maybe they’ll click the share on facebook button on your article!
• RSS submission tools get the message to the search spiders if your article is on a blog.
• Socialmarker.com will post to all the social news sites free
• Reddit.com is easier to get the first page on than Digg is, but can help get you ON digg in the first place.
• Email friends, and other people in the industry about your new juice!
• Yahoo answers, I bet your article (if it’s really that good!) answers someone’s question out there!
• Pay Per Click – Yes, it costs money, but getting more people to an article with those share buttons could get it shared more..
  For a few pennies per click, couldn’t you use more email addresses and viewers and exposure? I Sure could!

If this article gave you a new idea, a new insight or helped in *any* way, please… do the right thing…

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