The Web is a Social Medium

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The Web is a Social Medium

• By Aaron M. Wall

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Mechanical SEO is Dead

• Google has filters for
• Duplicate content
• Excessive reciprocal links
• Excessive low quality links
• Anchor text abuse
• Google does not want to filter
• Great information and conversation
• Real brands recommended by real people
• Easier to succeed giving Google what it wants
• Sustainable SEO revolves around spreading ideas

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The Tipping Point

• Buy Malcolm Gladwells The Tipping Point today
• Mavens
• Share because they love to learn and share.
• Know their industry better than anyone.
• Connectors
• Good at promoting others.
• Much like public relations.
• Lee Odden is always helping someone out.
• Salesmen
• Turn ideas into profit.
• Really get people to believe in something.
• Customers, brand evangelists, affiliates, etc.

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Cumulative Advantage

• Just being popular makes you more popular
• More subscribers see your story faster
• More subscribers link to your stories quickly
• High authority more links quicker indexing
  and higher rankings
• More comments on your blog
• Social proof of value also makes others more
  likely to trust you
• Read more on cumulative advantage

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Publishing Models

• Some people only talk about themselves
• Eventually they lose market momentum from
  participatory narcissism.
• Popular sites with sustainable growth are
  platforms
• Highlight other people brands
• Offline Paris Hilton is a good example of this
• Gawker does not pay much per pageview
• Author needs many pageviews.
• Creates rapid fire posts.
• Need to be first with the news (or have a
  contrarian view) to make that model work
  sustainably.
• If you know what they like, it is easier to get
  referenced than you think.

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Example of Knowing Link Target

• I sent a 10 second email to ValleyWag about
  Mahalo publishing a spammy page
• They posted it right away, even though they
  screwed up my name!
• They didnt know me, but I knew what topics they
  liked

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50,000 SEOs?

• But probably less than 1,000 read the Google
  documents that were leaked
• All SEOs who read it have an advantage over those
  who did not.
• Those who took the time to read it could relate
  it to the broader market.

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Predicting Trends From Past Markets

• Del.icio.us popular list
• Digg homepage
• Bloggers old content
• Subscribe to blogs and learn their biases
• A few years back I read so many SEO blogs I could
  virtually predict who would link at something,
  and write specifically for their link

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Bias

• We are more receptive of reinforcing
  communications
• People who subscribe to your site often share
  your biases (at least on some level)
• We are all really interested in ourselves
• Advertise on sites you want to be related with
• Hire people who you want to be related with
• Interview and promote each other (connectors)
• Ask for help from those you helped when you do a
  big launch

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Best Photographers EVER!!!

• Awards work!!!
• But this guy screwed it up

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Political Blogs
http//research.microsoft.com/projects/blews/blews
.aspx http//www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/Adamic
GlanceBlogWWW.pdf
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What Happened to the Dollar?
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Publicize Your Publicity