Ok, so you've heard about Viral Marketing and you've heard about Link Building (the cornerstones to a bespoke Search Engine Optimisation campaign) - but how about putting the two together and you get a serious SEO monster - Viral Link Building.

Viral link building is a way of building links via a message that is essentially, self-replicating.

Link building is absolutely essential if your SEO efforts are to be successful, but can be extraordinarily tedious and time consuming.

So what is viral link building?

We know what normal viral marketing is, a message so special that people feel the need to spread the message amongst their own social circle, the people then recieving that message become spreaders themselves, almost the 'trendsetter' in their own social circles - and this process continues until the message finally stops.

The normal viral messages start with things like "You will never believe this" or "this is something you have to see" - if the unbelievable message has any credibility, people will direct their followers to the location of the message. If the message is spread via the internet the chances are, people will direct their followers to the message via a link. Similar to link baiting, initiating a message that makes people link to the page directly is called Viral Link Building.

Viral link building, if deployed successfully, can be picked up by news and media sites, numerous social media platforms, blogospheres, forums and chatrooms - there is only one clear fundamental flaw of Viral Link Building - link acquisition speeds.

The extremely quick growth of links pointing to a site can be seen by search engines as 'un-natural', so in the short term, you may find yourself ranking number 1 for a few days before plummeting - but there are some elements of the Search Engines algorithms that can detect this as being 'newsworthiness' and therefore, allows the links and the rankings stand.

So get your creative thinking cap on and get viral, if you nail the right message, you will nail the rankings to go with it.

Posted: 28/09/10 08:47