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Although the success of a viral marketing largely relies on word of mouth through social networks, let’s face it, we’ll take extra traffic from any source. With a large portion of Internet traffic coming from search engines, it is important to optimize your campaign pages for at least Google.

So here are 5 interesting things I picked up from a workshop hosted by Todd Friesen and Greg Boser:

1. The #1 thing to avoid for SEO is AJAX. Perhaps the word “avoid” is to drastic. How about just using some caution. Sure it looks pretty but as far as search engines are concerned the content is almost as good as invisible. The problem with AJAX is that it’s executed client side. Also, although search engines claim that they can read flash, these two experts both agreed that flash websites don’t rank well. Does this mean you can’t use flash or AJAX? Nope. All you have to do is provide the search engines with something they can read…this brings me to the next point (one of my best segues yet!).
2. Clocking is back in style. According the workshop leaders, a Google representative actually said that they want us to give Google an alternative if we use AJAX.
3. Yahoo Search Submit Pro is a great way to get your URL to the top of the page…quickly. Basically it’s paid inclusion. A bribe if you may. Yahoo is actually the only one that is still doing this. However, there is a dark side to this. Like crack or heroin, your page will become depended on it. As soon as you stop paying, your page will disappear from the ranking. As a result, this technique is great for temporary pages such as viral campaigns but horrible for your corporate website.
4. Trust Ranking is big…real big. This has caused a creative phenomenon called Parasite SEO. This is where you take content you want ranked and post it on sites that are more trusted such as Wikipedia or a university site. For example, type in “Buy Viagra” into Google and one of the top results will probably come from a university site. Google is working on solving this problem.
5. Site acquisition can help you rank higher. With a 301 redirect you can quickly acquire all of the purchased site’s incoming links. However, make sure that the purchased site’s links are relevant to your needs. Otherwise it might be one big waste of your budget. To help you prevent this “oops” you can use one of the following tools:
   

http://www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck/
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

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