subject: What Does A Good Viral Look Like? [print this page] SEO experts talk a lot about viral campaigns; these are near-mythical, unstoppable avalanches of publicity that come from a tiny investment. They even provide handy tips on how to design a campaign for search engine optimisation. What they don't do is tell you how you know that your potential viral has a good chance of success. There are three basic things you want this kind of content to achieve for your search engine optimization plan:
1. You want people to pass it on.
2. You want people to like it.
3. You want it to boost the reputation of your site.
If your content achieves only one or two of these things, it hasn't worked properly. Following some of the tips around the net on how to design a viral could get you these things, but you need to know what good viral content is when you're looking at it.
The signs of a good viral are related to the three points above. If you want people to pass it on, you need a viral that works wherever it goes. It needs to easily scale from its existing size to fit any computer. It needs to work just as well whether one person is viewing it or one hundred people are looking at it, and it needs to be transferable. This means compact but solid, lightweight and adaptable content.
If you want people to like it, your viral content needs to be appealing to a set of common emotions and motivations. That set should fit your target market, but it will still be fairly broad.
Finally, if you want your site's reputation to benefit, you need to weave your brand markers into your viral. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about the SEO elements of a viral. Your site will benefit if the content contains your keywords and links back.
