SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

Many companies completely forget to include the following viral strategies or they are simply looked over. The sad truth is that these strategies are almost always EXTREMELY simple to implement.

1. Add to Favorites: One of the easiest tools and effective tools for getting people to come back to your website. There are typically pre-written scripts or scripts easy enough to implement. A must have to start with…

2. Recommend / Email to a friend: Not allowing your customer a route sending your website off to his friends or co-workers could lead to a major amount of lost opportunities. Make sure that you have some form on allowing customers to recommend, and definitely make sure it is EASY.

3. Add to Del.icio.us: Although this is not as easy as the first two, with today’s age of social media and how much it is used, it is crucial to getting recurring site traffic, almost as much so as “Add to Favorites.”

4. Share on Facebook: Customers and site user’s are spending more and more time on Facebook and giving them the ability to share stories, articles, landing page’s, etc. on their profile can get you some major traffic and conversion.

5. Social Media Madness: Other than the above listed items, social media is your friend. If you are a blog or publisher network, then add items like “digg this” or “submit to netscape” and even things like google bookmarks.

Giving your customers and/or users an opportunity to pass the word along and keep coming back to your site can only be an advantage to your overall success. Obviously you don’t want to over do it, with links ALL over the place and scattered that it would drive someone insane. Just make sure that you are giving people the opportunity to spread the word.

Todd Friesen for Search Engine Land wrote an article on this and it was, in my opinion, a great article. Many people like to “de-value” SEO and talk about how its a world full of lies and people like Jason Calacanis making all these accusations.

This article is a great depiction of the hard 5% of SEO:
SEO Is Easy? Let’s Look At The Hard 5 Percent

Yesterday night I had a conversation with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a long time and it has inspired me to write a post about networking. I have found that over the last couple years and as I get older, how powerful and valuble networking really is.

I have attended conferences and networking events since around 2002 and never really found value in this until around 2004. Granted, I was just barely learning the ropes and very “green” at the time, but I had no idea the value of networking almost 5 years ago. I was sent to many vendor related events, many conferences and such, my focus was to try to solicit business for my company at the time. What I didn’t realize is how important it was to build my network of people that I knew and stay in touch with them.

Fast forward to now and the last year or so. I have been trying to attend conferences, networking events, meet-ups, meet and greets, and even inter-company related events. I have goals of attending these events, sometimes its for knowledge and almost always it is to expand my network.

Okay, so it is question time…Why are these events are so useful?!

Answer: Expanding your network is absolutely critical to your future successes, no matter what they be.

Chatting with my friend last night I really stressed the importance in this. Building your networking and laying a foundation for your own personal brand is extremely empowering, at least, in my eyes it is. Obviously, if you are young and shy, that is absolutely normal, but give it a go and try it out.

You might say to yourself, “well, I am still in school” or “I am just starting out.” The truth is, typically people are very understanding and you never know the value you might have until you actually talk to people. I use to be this guy until 2004. I attended multiple events in which I didn’t have a card, I didn’t save the cards and I didn’t keep in touch with those I met. To this day, I think of the relationships I could have maintained and wish I would have.

Of course, being the geek that I am, I will bring in “LinkedIn” and the social media aspects of it into play. Finding a place to stay in touch with people, use it as a “next-gen rolodex” and keep people updated of what’s going on in your world is highly crucial. It all goes back to building your personal brand.

LinkedIn has been a lifesaver to me because I am able to maintain a contact list that is literally in real time keeping me updated with the happenings of the people in my network. Also, not that I am advocating buying a business account, but, business users are able to expand their network through features like introductions, in-mail, etc. Being able to connect with people outside your everyday network or someone that you would never really meet is just one more touch-point in your personal growth.

Truthfully, in the end, it’s all about the relationships you make and maintain, bottom line.

Really understanding the value of good links and viral marketing seems to be a common struggle for many companies. This being the case, it is very easy for these companies to lose out on a lot of opportunities for link building or even linkbait types of opportunities. Capturing links through a means of viral traffic and linkbait is critical to becoming a leader in a specific industry or even a niche within it. Also, if done correctly, this can put you in a position to rank highly or even at the top of most SERP’s.

One of the things that I have found is that organizations completely disregard that everything link-worthy is hosted on their company domain. Creating knowledge-bases or tools that your organization will be using or distributing to various partners are great sources of traffic generation, and it doesn’t end there. Not only can you direct traffic to your domain, but talk about a major viral method of increasing your link-authority.

Creating these tools, knowledge bases or anything of that sort really gives you that edge over your various competitors. It is highly critical though that you ensure a few things are in-line though:

1. First and foremost, ensure that you are creating this tool within your companies domain.  It is massively important that this traffic is being driven to your domain from not only a user perspective, but from an SEO and link building one as well.
2. Appropriate naming and Keyword Research:  You know the space that you are competing in, you know your competition and you obviously know that industry if you are creating a tool of some sort.  Now, make sure you use that knowledge to distribute those links to partners/customers/etc.
3. From a design perspective, you need to ensure that people don’t get the message that you “overly advertising” your product.  You are creating this to drive traffic and become a leader.  For example, do not use your current web templates for this and your XXL logo.  You can subtly brand the page to your company’s liking, just ensure that you are creating a RICH user experience for everyone linking to it, not just you.

Once you incorporate the previous items into the thought process of your tool or what not, you will notice tremendous results.  Many financial organizations do this well with “rate calculators” of some sort.  This can really apply to any industry with any content or tool.  Just ensure that you are doing so correctly, creating linkbait for others to pickup and virally spreading your message!!  You can even do this in a consumer directed and social media type of campaign, but make sure you follow the rules and you will watch your tools spread like wildfire and your rankings on the SERP’s increase at a rapid pace.