It’s all about popularity. In high school, quality of life was determined by how popular you were within your social group. That same principle applies to the quality of life of your website; the more solid your link popularity, the more successful your site will be.

I’ve mentioned this before (and will probably do it again), search engines are mimicking human behavior in order to determine the credibility of a site. Just like voting for the prom queen, search engines depend on us to tell them what we think is cool. The way I cast my vote now is by linking to the site/s I like. If I had a website in high school, you better believe I would have links all over the place to Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Body Glove, and Wilson Phillips.

Chris Sherman defines link popularity as “the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site.” The trick is to actually get other sites to link back to yours. So make your site important, then other sites will want to link to yours. And voila! Your page rank improves.

Link building is one of the most difficult parts of search engine optimization because it is based solely on human labor. You have to find relevant websites that reach your target and ask for them to add a link to your site. The old school way to do this would be to send an email – people are less responsive when contacted by email. Be more creative in your requests to ensure that you are building relationships, as suggested here.

I’d like to relate this to Ronald from Can’t Buy Me Love. He knew what he had to do to become popular and he was willing to put in the work. He made himself relevant (tearing off his sleeves in true 80’s fashion), talked to all the cool kids and, of course, introduced a new dance that changed the school forever. I hope that all of us could put ourselves out there like Ronald in order to gain link popularity.

Before you start seeking for websites to link to, I recommend reading “A Linking-Campaign Primer” by Eric Ward.

One of the simplest ways to find good links is to search for your target keywords and look at the top results. Since the pages ranked well, they are important for the terms you are interested in. You can also look into what pages are linking to your highest competitors’ websites and ask for links on their sites, just like Cady Heron latched onto the “plastics”.

Check out more in our next post about how buzz.io makes it all happen.

Humor
In the 80’s everyone used sex to sell beer. Today they try really hard to be funny, check out bud.tv. Microsoft just announced that they will be doing a $300 Million dollar ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld. Thanks to YouTube, Digg, and other social media sites you can do the same thing for $30.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Evolution of Dance – Almost a right of passage for new users on YouTube.  This video featuring comedian Judson Laipply cost nothing to make and has been viewed almost 100 million times.  Those are captive eyeballs that chose to consume the content, not interruption based media like the Microsoft commercials will be. I am not sure what he charges for his public speaking but I am sure it is more expensive than it was 2 years ago.

Will It Blend – Sure it isn’t laugh out loud funny but it is amusing and completely engaging.  How exciting can you make a blender? There are nearly 100 thousand subscribers to this YouTube channel. The videos have been viewed tens of millions of times.

B-Boy Stance – I thought it was funny

Sex Appeal

Dove Evolution – This isn’t what you would typically think of as “sexy”.  But this is the perfect balance of sex appeal and a relevant message.  I will talk more about the message in a minute.

Good Magazing Porn Video – This one is a little racy but it is still PG-13.  They run through all the stats of the porn industry by writing them on the nearly naked body of a porn star.  Good message, great use of sex. Oh and just in case you don’t make it this far it is an advertisement for Good Magazine – I have never read it but they have an interesting website and a good cause.

Shock Value
Dexter – Microsite – they have had to dumb this down and make it a little more obvious.  When this first came out it really scared people.  Really really scared them.  This little site was emailed millions of times and they never could get that same exposure buying advertising.  It is extremely engaging to see yourself as the next murder victim on a fake news broadcast.

Relevant

The most important thing about all of these video’s is they have a purpose.  They hold some relevance to the audience.  After all it is the relevance that makes you pass along a video.  You might start watching for the other factors but you keep watching or take an action because of the relevant message.

Warning you are about to waste an hour so you better be at work.

Just in case you missed the last couple years on YouTube here is a viral video roundup of must see web cinema