But what are the lines to cross? Is it taking the risk of being banned from Google? Or is it taking the risk of losing positive brand perception? Unlike the discussion at SES I’m not going to try and find the best definition of blackhat SEO, but I’ll try to open your eyes to new possibilities and their risks.

SES Chicago 2008
The discussion at SES had some great panelists like David Naylor, Todd Friezen, Doug Heil and Eric Enge. The first two not afraid of taking risks, the last feeling they are as white as snow. Most questions asked were about “What defines blackhat?”.

I asked “Is outing your competitor’s mischief, a blackhat tactic?” and even Doug Heil replied that he does it himself. But I’d like to comment that because you do the outing from for instance your Google webmaster central, your sites could also recieve extra investigation. Just be careful.

After a good discussion, where Dave got a lot of laughs, there was slight agreement on good SEO practice. Whenever you get full consent from your customer on a technique after full disclosure on the risks, you’re not a bad SEO just by taking these risks. If an industry standard would be set, this should be the only thing in it.

Is blackhat SEO technical or social?
I believe every method that artificially boosts search term focus or topical authority is a shade of grey. When I do viral link building by getting links to one message and transferring (there are many ways) to another, I would call that less ethical. But does the lack of a negative stance by Google make it right?

“Taking risks is part of being in business”
When you’re active in a competitive industry, you have to be open to taking risks. In SEO there is the risk of being penalised by search engines and you could suffer brand damage. Both pose dangers that can be averted by hiring an experienced search engine marketeer (or reading carefully through my blog . Here are some examples of social and technical blackhat activities.

Problem: A spammy competitor ranks above me
Don’t you hate it when someone ranks above you, but he has clearly used a spam tactic that should be too easy to detect if Google just took the time? I get this all the time as well as many of my clients. But do you then use Google webmaster central to “snitch” on that activity?

I do have a special snitching Google account that I use from specific IPs and other identifiers. I always help Google by also explaining what fingerprint they could use to ban this tactic for once and for all. Otherwise they ban this instance, but other websites using it still get through.

Another way of exposing a tactic and making sure the entire strategy gets tackled is by overusing it. Once a tactic becomes common practice by for instance porn affilliates, Google will definitely try to add some rules to its algorithm. Explaining in much detail how a tactic works on for instance a blackhat forum will make sure it gets overused. Especially when people that are already under extra investigation start using it, this will kill the tactic entirely. Because I didn’t use the stupid tactic myself or out it through webmaster central, my sites aren’t effected in any way. Is this Blackhat? It sure is grey!

Problem: I can not make my site linkworthy
People who intend to link to some interesting piece of information on your website, do look at the rest of the site. If the interesting piece of information is just a small part of your very commercial website, they will either ask for money or not link to it entirely. The solution is a satellite site!

A satellite site is a site under a separate domain and if needed even separate ownership. By using a separate site you can appear less commercial and less branded. When the piece of interesting information resides on this satellite site it is far more likely to be linked to, even by your competitors. For a fun example of a satellite site take a look at JohnBukakke.com. This extreme example shows that you can get links to anything.

“How do I get the linkjuice to my commercial site?”
There are many ways to get the acquired links to have a positive effect on the ranking of your commercial site. Here are some examples.

• Link out to your commercial website as being the sponsor. Make sure there is little link juice leaked to other websites.
• After the links are acquired and few people visit the site, 301-redirect it to your commercial website. A 301 diverts al link juice.
• Use client-side redirects so not the link juice but just visitors are redirected to the commercial site.

So is swapping messages this way any less Blackhat than the tactic listed before? Because there are more legal practices that divert link juice than less decent ones, Google doesn’t have a stance against it. But I think they should! This is a social blackhat trick. Or at least it is a shade of grey.

Problem: I want to influence social systems like Delicious, Sphinn and Digg
There are many ways to influence these networks, but you need real visitors instead of bots. All these techniques are definitely blackhat!

The best way is to open a Digg (or other network) URL unseen while someone visits a page that you controll. This can be accomplished by using various Javascript and Flash exploits. They would have to be logged into Digg while they visit the page, but the odds are in your favour. It works simular to the trick used here.

Because I still use the full technique for a couple of projects, it would be unwise to out it to everybody. The select few who meet me at conferences could probably share in the fun. This way it doesn’t get overused and penalized in time. This is an example of an extreme blackhat tactic that is both technical and social. Links from these networks aren’t worth much for your ranking, but your popularity will result in valuable links.

So?! Is blackhat social or technical?
It is both. Fooling people or fooling Google doesn’t make you any less evil. Most of my customers don’t need any risky techniques, so I just do whitehat. Shades of grey are only used when factors like competition and budget make it a logical choice and only with full consent from the customer.

I happen to like evil and I’ve got a huge network of people that keep experimenting to find the limits in shades of grey. We’re all experts and never put valuable websites at risk. Whenever you touch shades of grey, make sure you have full understanding of the risks and the search engine’s ability to detect things (standard and thorough, algorithmic and manual, now and in the near future). For most of you, blackhat just isn’t the thing. Keep it for the experts and even they lose sometimes.

The best way to get any link, is to create content specifically as linkbait for that link or website. Normally a competitor will not intentionally link to you directly, but here’s where an intermediate site comes in. Use an existing intermediate or create your own one for full controll how the linkjuice is transfered.

Authoritive links
First let me tell you that apart from ranking factors like anchor text, relevance, PR and page location; The authority factor is domain wide. This means any link from for instance CNN.com gives much weight for ranking on many search queries (general authorities. A link from for instance ICANN.org gives some general weight, but extra weight for hosting companies selling domains.

Authority is something you build over time and getting authoritive links speeds it up. Any authority you build can be transfered to other domains without losing any of it yourself. Except when you mainly link to websites with a negative authority (spammers and indecent content) or act spammy yourself. Then you can lose the authority you have.

Finding authorities
You probably know what website is the most authoritive in your field. You probably also know a few more general authoritive sites. If you don’t, here’s where a high PageRank comes in. A site with a with a PR 7+ homepage is bound to have much authority as well. This is not a rule, but I’ve seen little exceptions. Also the first indexed dates in archive.org say something about authority as well. For more indicators see the Relevant Authority Transfer checklist.

Existing intermediates
Once you know on which domain you want the link, you can easily find out where it already links to. Thanks to Live.com’s “linkfromdomain:” you can just enter it as a query. http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=linkfromdomain%3Acnn.com gives you 300.000 possible intermediates so you’re bound to find one willing to link. Just create your linkbait for them in stead of begging directly to CNN. But if you still want a direct CNN link you can always see how all the linkfromdomain: sites got theirs.

Creating intermediates
A huge advantage of having your own intermediate website is “controll”. You can get the right anchor text and the exact right way to transfer the linklove to the right page within your website. The best way to redirect linklove is cloaking, but I don’t recommend any whitehat websites to use it. If you want an example: Cloaking for linkbuilding.

Linkbaiting intermediates
Creating linkbait is much easier with intermediates. You can even create different intermediates for all your linkbait. Here are some examples:

• Create a testimonial or comparison website and give the best review to the website that needs to do the linking.
• Create a seeming authority on a subniche of the industry. And some research or report claiming the unique-selling-point of the baited site is very important for that product or service.
• Create a tool that is ideal to calculate or research something specifically for your industry. A collection of seemingly unimportant tools creates great linkbait.
• Combine al RSS feeds in your industry into one website or feed. Collecting is always a good way to become an authority.

As you can see there are many ways to create linkbait. Just make the bait specifically for the site that needs to do the linking. Know as much as possible about the person responsible for placing the link. You can even meet them in person and become their friends (just for the links?).

You can get the authority of any site shine down on you. Just use intermediate websites to get it from the hardest places.

Matt Cutts (Google’s main spamcop) is back from SES New York and has spoken to too many SEOs. Even with a normal non-spamming website you will need to hire an SEO to check if you’re not possibly breaking any of the “webmaster guidelines”, otherwise Google might ban you from their index.

1. Below in this article: Hidden links Matt says: “As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines.”
2. It seems like Matt believes in devaluating the link in stead of the linker in this post.
3. But he also wants us to know how to report paid links on your competitor’s website.

Do you have ads on your website?
Almost 50% of all websites run ads on them and far less than 2% of all webmasters have ever read the Google quality guidelines that so far mention nothing about paid links being bad. But what is the difference between an ad and a paid link? Are all ads bad because you do not nofollow them?

I hope Matt’s article was misinterpreted by many people, because it seems many people disagree in the comments. His wording wasn’t chosen too well and he makes it look like Google will want you to give more information on your intentions. And therefore make part of your code for search engines and not for users. If you don’t, you can face a penalty! Again, I hope they’ve misinterpreted his words, but that is what he’s saying.

Has Google lost the war on spam?
When there is an ever increasing amount of people gaming your algorithm, you are bound to lose from some of them. Google can detect many paid links just by their characteristics. Link buying and exchange programs can be discounted in their calculation and notorious link spammers can be removed from the index. But Google can’t detect algorithmicly when you “in your own way” link to a certain website and get payed for it. And because those payed links have no common characteristic the algorithm can detect them by, there is no way to discount them. This is why Google wants you to tell them if you are getting payed for a link. And if they find a common characteristic in the future and you haven’t told them you got paid (nofollowed the link), they are bound to reduce the trustfactor of your website in their calculations. So they haven’t lost yet, but using threats to get what they want isn’t a sign of strength.

Websites for users or search engines?
Search engines are increasingly telling us: “We have tried, but without your help we cannot order the world’s information the correct way.” “We need the metatags, rel=nofollow, legal cloaking and other information not intended for your normal readers, so please use them but not for evil purposes.”
With Matt’s article Google has taken the next step and he shows this is probably just the beginning. From now on every webmaster needs to know what a search engine can or cannot read and help the engines rank their website for the right content. Is this something good? For SEOs it is

So when is a paid link bad?
If you read Matt’s article and his comments carefully, you will find out that non-obvious ads and paid links, that the algorithm hasn’t detected automatically, are the ones you should mark. Nofollowing every other link that doesn’t help your ranking can even be good for your ranking, but that might raise some red flags.

In a total strategy I will also continue to buy links as long as there is no characteristic that signals “I’m payed”. When there is such a signal, Google should devalue the link and not penalize the linker. Buying relevant links is good for both your visitors and search engines. How else would they know my site is the most important resource on …

Two years ago
If the last time you read SEO blogs or Google press releases was one or two years ago you can still know enough to get good rankings. Not that much has changed in the algorithms for normal websites. The most important changes have been made in spam detection, so optimized whitehat sites shouldn’t be effected that much. But is this entirely the case?

The last two years search engines got better at crawling websites. So if you still obide by the strict crawlability rules of two years ago your website will be perfectly indexed. If you used normal text in the website with extra focus (with repeats, in urls, in titles, in headers and other important places) on the desired search term, not that much has changed either. Placing extra focus on your most important pages with a good internal navigation was as true back then as it is now. Two years ago search engines had already placed more importance on relevant links compared to irrelevant links, but they just got better at determining relevance. So what did change?

• Two years ago search engines had just begun to include time as a factor in ranking and that factor has gotten more important. Many new authority factors make use of time in their calculation. If you’re still used to old SEO, you will need to do alot of reading to grasp how this influences everything.
• Providing robots with extra information how to index and show your website has changed much since then, even during the last couple of months. Google webmaster central, <meta name=”robots” value=”noodp” />, 301 redirects and rel=”nofollow” are just a few changes that improve your communication with the search engines. How would you know this when you have been out of the SEO loop for a while?
• Search engines have gotten better and better at tweaking the search results for specific searchers. Country, language, device accessibility and content type targeting have all dramatically improved during the last two years. Most search engines are now even including personal history and other personal characteristics in their ranking alorithm.
  How do I rank in the UK in stead of the US? How do I rank in Google maps or mobile? How does someones search history effect my ranking? These are all plausible questions for someone that doesn’t read much SEO news.
• Many new search types have been launched during the last two years. Video, blog search, articles, maps, mobile, code, news, desktop and much more new types of search results have arizen since then. Even a seasoned SEO doesn’t know how to optimize for all of them, but they at least know they exist and they remember where they can find more information when they need it. And that is the most important thing you need to keep up to date.

There are probably many more important changes that I neglected to mention, but for someone that has been out of the loop for some time the specifics aren’t that important. But where do you get the information when you need it?! Someone that was an expert two years ago, may be a layman on all the new aspects. Who do you trust and on what topic? The search landscape constantly changes.

The most important thing you need to keep up-to-date is your network of experts and sources. Without it you have no way to really keep up-to-date SEO knowledge.

What is the long tail?
If you order search queries by the amount of searches they recieve, you would get a curve like the one below.

As you can see, the curve drops quickly after a few very popular seach terms and after a steep drop it levels out. This indicates that there are a few thousand top search terms that recieve millions of searches each month. It also shows that the curve doesn’t drop to zero. If you would continue the curve further to the right you will find that it doesn’t reach zero at all. There are millions and millions of search queries that recieve at least one request and most of them recieve multiple requests each month. The millions of search terms below the drop in the search curve are called “The Long Tail”.

What does this mean?
The problem with popular search terms is that they are just that; popular. They are not only popular with searchers, but also with search engine marketeers. This way the competition gets fiercer because there is a limited amount of top positions with high exposure in the search engines.

This causes higher costs per click for the sponsored results and more tricks and spam tactics for the organic results. Both increase the cost of reaching the top spots and decrease the return on your investment (ROI). This is why search engine marketeers are now aiming for the long tail.

Further down the search funnel
The long tail consists mostly of more specific search terms than queries from the top of the curve. This means the searchers need to know more about what they are really trying to find, are further down the decision making process (AIDA) and are closer to the action.

Long tail search terms will most likely convert better to sales because they are further down the funnel. But you will need much more search terms to get the same amount of visitors than from terms higher up in the funnel.

Ad matching
The long tail is not only defined by what query the searcher uses. Targeting specific characteristics of the searcher gets you further down the curve and decreases competition. Ad systems like Google Adwords allow you to target specific languages, locations, times and much more. Keyword matching options allow you to further specify when your ad needs to show and when not to. But does that mean costs per click wil drop if you match better?

Better targeting of your audience gives you a better conversion and ROI. But many websites target as broad as possible because they don’t have this insight. This causes costs per click to rise for all searches included in that match.
If a search engine bids five dollars on the broad match “search” he automatically bids the same amount on the search query “house search in templeton virginia”, which is not exactly relevant to their services. But it might be to your realty website. To beat the search engine on this query you will need to bid at least the same amount.
Because of bad matching by irrelated websites, the long tail isn’t as cheap as it could be. Long tail ads are cheaper, but not cheap enough to focus on them entirely. How is this with organic search?

Organic long tail
The long tail in organic results is mainly targeted unintentionally. Especially when the search query contains more than three words it is unlikely that someone has intentionally focussed on it in the text of their website. This makes the organic long tail still something that can be targeted with little effort. The only hard part of organic long tailing is incorporating every search term variaty (singular, plural, verb, noun, adjective, superlative, etc.) and every combination in the text on your website. When you include all these variaties of the same text onto separate pages, these pages need to have a viable reason (for your visitors) to exist.

The other hard part of organic long tailing is link point distribution. You need to get every page indexed and search terms with more competition need more linkpoints then others. The internal link structure needs to distribute linkpoints, but also needs to group related topics in the right way. Targeting the organic long tail is something you can do with every website, but targeting large amounts of long tail search terms is something that needs some SEO expertise.

Long tail misconception
The long tail is not by definition cheap or easy to achieve. It isn’t always converting better than other search terms. Depending on the competition in your branche most long tail targeting is accidental, but that doesn’t always make it easier to achieve better rankings.

It is possible to target every search term you can think of. Even if every used term is only queried once a year, they are still worth integrating in your texts or ads. The shear numbers have a much bigger potential than any top search term you can think of. Just make sure you offer services that are related to the possible queries.

Top search terms (so called Hits) aren’t always a good investment. Not because they don’t get visitors or don’t convert to sales, but because most of them have a short life span. If you’re one of the first to enter a hyped search category, it can be relatively cheap to target it for a while. But once the hype has started it might be a bad investment for the long run. Choose your search terms (both hits and long tails) based on competition (effort), visitor count and popularity lifetime.

1. Your first ever search engine will be either the default one on your computer or the one someone advices you to use. If you remain satisfied with the results you’re not likely to switch. This is why all search engines want to become the default on new computers.
2. Unexperienced searchers are more likely to type full sentences in stead of only keywords. As people become more acquainted with search they will use only key-words and even start using phrase and negative query options.
3. Unexperienced searchers won’t know the difference between sponsored and organic search results and are more likely to click ads. As experience grows they will sometimes create an automatic ad filter and they won’t even notice the ads anymore.
4. Websites that sell something are more likely to use sponsored listings. And because people aren’t always searching to buy something the sponsored listings are deemed less relevant in most cases. Only when someone is looking to buy, they are more likely to look at and click on ads.
5. The decision phase someone is in determines what keywords they use and what they click. The Search Funnel (pdf) can be used to determine what keywords belong in which phase and shows you which steps need to be taken to end up with a buying customer. Down the AIDA funnel (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action). In which Action can be buying something.

   
   (Click for PDF)

   To get a buying customer someone needs to go through the entire decision making process. If you get your website visitor in the “attention” phase you need to offer him all the following steps and information without loosing him to a search engine which might be able to give him more information then your site does. The further down the search funnel you get your visitor, the more likely someone is willing to buy or take any other desired action. Maybe this article can help: Best landing page layout.

   Target keywords from all phases, but make sure you offer the desired information for that phase. Guide them to the desired action on your site, but in these steps offer answers to possible questions in every decision phase.

6. Most websites are written in only one writing style. They can for instance use commercial language, corporate language or informal language. They’re also written from a specific knowledge level with the presumption that the visitor has that same knowledge. Write your text from all different standpoints, all knowledge levels and every possible writing style that is suitable for your product or service. Just figure out a way to do it all in one website and target all possible search queries.
7. Organic and Sponsored search results are almost always placed in the format Title, Description and URL. Eye-tracking studies on the Google result pages show that it is not only important to be amongst the first five search results, but it is even more important to be have a relevant and attractive result. The second result can easily convert better then the first as long as it is more relevant to what the searcher was looking for or even more then he was looking for.

   
   (Click for full page)

   The different colors show how much time was focussed on a specific region of the page.
   The X-es show where the user clicked.
   The red lines show how far someone scrolled.

   As you can see people don’t scroll much, but that depends on the first five results. If they are exactly what the searcher was looking for, they will click those. If it was nothing like what they were looking for, they will click the search box to refine the search. If it was somewhat what they were looking for, they will scroll to see if there is something better in those results.

   People scan the results for what they were looking for. Having the keyword in your title and description makes them bold. Something bold ate the beginning or end of the line attracts extra attention.

   Make sure your result stands out of the crowd. Titles in search engines are your page titles, the descriptions (snippets) are either: 1. Your DMOZ or Yahoo directory description. 2. Your description metatag. 3. A specific piece of text from your page where the search phrase is situated. Test titles and descriptoins in payed search and reflect the successfull ones in your webpages.

8. The future of search is in personal search, custom result page layouts and vertical search. All of these result types make it harder to predict where and how your result will be shown. Make sure you end up in every relevant vertical search type. In a future post I will focus on influencing personal and vertical searches. It isn’t very important yet, but just realize that this is coming!

These are just a few of my findings. The article would become too long if I continued. Maybe I’ll focus more future posts on this subject.

What is keyword density?
Keyword density is the percentage a keyword is of the total amount of words, a specific piece of text or code, or a percentage of all the characters. Besides density, the keyword prominence is also an important factor in keyword placement. Prominence is mainly how far the keyword is from the beginning of the text or other important spots within the code.

Is there an optimum keyword density?
Yes, there probably is! But it is a different density for each search engine, each HTML tag, each keyword and the amount of words. The exact percentages change all te time. An optimum density is more a minimum and maximum density to work between, then an exact number that is perfect all the time. What the minimum and maximum percentages are depends on what numbers you use to calculate them.

Calculating keyword density
There are several methods and tools to calculate keyword densities. In my opinion the best way is to take the total amount of words between a specific region or HTML tag. The most important densities are: Percentage of total words within any tag; And percentage of total words within the body tag.

A good tool to calculate keyword density is Ranks.nl (http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html). This tool gives you many options to measure and compare the numbers. The optimum range I will give later in this article are ones you measure with ranks.

What should the numbers look like?
Exact numbers aren’t very important for your ranking. Even the numbers I give here are just indications and a page that has entirely different numbers could rank just as well. The closer the numbers are the better, but in the entire algorithm it is just a small factor.

• The total number of words shouldn’t be too high or too low. Optimum amount for the percentages I give below is between 300 and 600 words. Use as little code besides text on your page because it could all dilute the importance of the main keyword.
• The main keyword should always be represented in the page title (title tag). Other important places are: URL, headers (h1), linktext, bold text, italic text and alt tags. Within these tags the main keyword can and should have a very high percentage.
• The main keyword should have a higher percentage than other words. It is not the percentage that counts, but the focus on the keyword compared to other words. In my opinion this is the main ingredient of good page optimization.
• A percentage higher than 3% and below 10% of the total wordcount is best, but I often keep it below 5%. All unimportant words should be kept under 3%. Avoiding unimportant repeats is more important than repeating the main keyword.
• Stems are the basic words that keywords are made of. A keyword can contain multiple stems. All the keywords posting, poster, posted, postmodern all contain the stem “post”. Keywords or stems that are included in other words are counted in the algorithms of some search engines. Keep keyword repeats including stem repeats below a certain spam threshold.
• If you repeat keywords too often, use synonyms so the theme of the page is still strong. The theme of the page is almost as important as the keyword itself. Some search engines are good at theme destillation (guessing what a text is about) and some don’t do it at all. In the future it will become more and more important.
• The “one page, one keyword” strategy works best, but for words with little competition you can always combine multiple keywords in one page.

My opinion:
Focus is everything! Focus on keyword related text and prevent unintentional focus on another topic. Focussing is done in repeats and accentuated code parts (title, bold, etc.).
The theme of pages (internal and external) linking to a page is more important than having perfect densities. So focus on theme on a wide scale and focus on keyword on a page scale and in linktext.

Please comment because this topic is something opinions vary widely on. How important do you think keyword density is?

The Nofollow tag
The nofollow tag can either be placed within your robots metatag or within the linktag itself.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
 
or
 
<a href=”http://www.vdgraaf.info/” mce_href=”http://www.vdgraaf.info/”  rel=”nofollow”>linktext</a>

All mayor search engines understand your command not to follow te link, but do they follow it? It’s just a directive they all agreed on, but following the link can tell much about your website and may indicate that you’re using any illegal tactics. So in my believes search engines will follow the link! Watch out who you link to, even if you’re using nofollow.

Linkpoints
Any link from one page to another conveys linklove or linkpoints to that page. Will a nofollow tag influence this?
Yes, in most search engines the recieving end of a nofollow link recieves no or little linklove. But the sending end is losing linklove that could otherwise be given to other links on that page.

The number of links on a page influences the amount of linklove that is given to each link. If one of those links is a nofollow most search engines still devide the linklove total between all links. There are certain ways to prevent losing linklove and even prevent search engines from seeing the link. Here’s an example.

Span links 
The <span> tag is used for inline grouping of HTML elements (just like a <div> is used for blocktype grouping). With a stylesheet you can indicate what it should look like, and you could make it behave like a normal link:

The solution

<span id=”link” style=”cursor: hand;cursor: pointer;text-decoration: underline;color: blue;” onclick=”location.href=’http://www.vdgraaf.info’” onmouseover=”document.getElementById(’link’).style.color=’#FF00FF’;” onmouseout=”document.getElementById(’link’).style.color=’blue’;”>linktext</span>

linktext

(an even better example is placed in the comment) 

This way you make links that aren’t even an <a> so absolutely none of the search engines sees it as a link. Use separate stylesheet and javascript files to keep the code clean, so you only need the empty span and an onclick url opener.

Use span links for links you want no search engine to follow. This way you won’t be associated with the linked site and you keep all linkpoints!

Don’t trust a faulty nofollow condom, but use a sturdy unfollowable link. Look for an even better example below!

So here are five things:

1. You probably don’t know that I’ve been in SEO for ten years now and I used to try everything that was forbidden by search engines and online legislation.
   In those days none of the illegal practices could be detected by algorithms and SEO was easy. After my Blackhat days I turned lighter and at the moment I’m white for customers and grey for some other projects.
2. I love SEO, but I love marketing even more.
   Knowing how to influence people is one of my main interests. I love to see good viral campaigns and how people react to them. I plan to study psychology in the following year, because that’s where it all starts.
3. Did you know I have a son named Coen?
   Coen is 2,5 years old and the main reason I like to work as little as possible. Every hour I can spend with him and my wife makes me the happiest man alive.
4. You probably don’t know about my plans to take over the world either.
   I always liked pinky and the brain and got inspired by his megalomanic desires. As long as I can do it in 40 hours a week, I’m going to take over the SEO world.
5. I bet you don’t know I’m having troubles finding SEO people that haven’t already been tagged.
   I will update this post as I find more tagable SEO’s, but now there’s only one.

So here’s my tag to the next people in line:

• Mathieu Burgerhout
  He’s kinda my protege and I hope he gets to be an even better SEO than me.
• Saku
  By day an accountant, by night an SEO superhero.
• Ulco Wierenga
  Dutch SEO blogger. Click on the link to see how crazy Dutch looks to you.
• Robert Cabri
  A programmer that does a lot of SEO work.

In viral or buzz marketing you try to motivate people to talk about you. But is this form of PR a safe way to promote you brand?

Viral marketing takes insight into the behaviour of groups of people. How they react to certain things dictates how you should try to influence them. There will always be stray sheep that can’t be herded into a flock, but humans show herd behavior and should be treated as such.

How do you start a buzz?

• Good buzz starts at the influencers. People or websites that are known to spread alot of word-of-mouth are good places to start your news. If they pick it up and are motivated enough to pass it on, your news can spread like wildfire. You need only a few influencers to start a good buzz. They will probably reach other influencers.
• Have a story that creates alot of emotion! Not only humorous news is spread by people. If someone is angry or sad about something they will even be more likely to share it with other people. The more emotion, the better.
• Have a story that influences the lives of your audience. If the emotion involves something personal, the emotion will be greater.
• Include a reference to a current event or existing hype. This makes your story more newsworthy. If you can get your story associated with a popular newsitem you could hitch a ride to the top.
• Have content for all media. A good story needs audio, video and text coverage. If you have a website to serve the extra content, people will link to it.

Watch out!

There are alot of tips how to start a good viral campaign, but it is more important to watch out for backfiring buzz. Because you cannot predict how everybody will react to your story, you should secure your reputation and don´t waste it all to launch the story.

• Limit the connections between the story and your commercial activities. If the story backfires you can always walk away and try another day. Create a seperate website to recieve your links on. After the site has outlived its usefullness place a 301 redirect to your normal website.
• Use both the positive and the negative opinions to your advantage. Have an alternative story angle for the negative ones.
• Make sure the story gets picked up including your own message. Make sure the story is useless without it. Editors are always good at removing any commercial messages.

As you can see viral marketing isn´t easy, but I believe everyone can do it. I´ll try to give some examples tomorrow.

My tip of the day is: Viral marketing can backfire. Make sure you benefit whichever way the story goes!

draadloos internet