If this title sounds awfully familiar, you’re not imagining things. Yes, we did just create a Twitter SEO post 2 weeks ago. No, we haven’t run out of ideas – we’re doing an experiment. As luck would have it, a comment on the older post raised a great question; I’ll include it here.

“Most videos go viral on accident (often at the complete surprise of the maker of the video). The idea that one is going to “create a viral video” is unrealistic. That being said, thanks for offering these ideas on how better promote videos on hope that they *may* go viral.” – Dan from BlueClover.com.

Question: is it possible to engineer a viral video, and can Twitter be used to facilitate the spread of the epidemic?

Partial answer: it appears that if you throw enough money at video production and market research, you can develop something that will predictably spread on its own. I put together a Hub about viral video for business this past Sunday consisting of videos produced by big brands like Honda and Coca-Cola. It’s debatable as to whether these videos can be truly considered “viral,” since their sponsors no doubt invested in a “push” to get them going. It hardly matters; a small business owner can’t cut a big enough check to duplicate this strategy anyway.

There are two sides to this equation. Take the recent case of self-published author Amanda Hocking, whose books have skyrocketed in sales these past 2 months. “Everybody seems really excited about what I’m doing and how I’ve been so successful, and from what I’ve been able to understand, it’s because a lot of people think that they can replicate my success and what I’ve done,” she says in her 3/3 blog post. Later in the same post, she notes that people seem to think she “spent a weekend smashing out some words, threw it up online, and woke up the next day with a million dollars in [her] bank account.” In case you’re wondering how Hocking pulled off an overnight success, she didn’t. “This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day,” she comments.

Hocking’s case seems to indicate two things:

1. If you persist long enough to fail at viral marketing enough times, you’ll eventually succeed (just like anything else).
2. Once you succeed, everyone will try to figure out how to instantly reproduce your results.

What does Twitter bring to the table for SEO?

And how does this affect viral marketing?

If you tweet and re-tweet enough times, can you make something go viral? As far as I can tell, points #1 and #2 above still apply, and Twitter doesn’t change either of them. Twitter does carry a heavy weight with the search engines, and the SEO boost from a high number of re-tweets can boost a video that’s already gone viral. However, neither of these things will make a video viral if it isn’t already.

SEOMoz ties it all together perfectly with two case studies that they did. They did the first Twitter SEO case study in 2010. They asked their users to either tweet one page, or post a link to another page, and they measured which one ranked higher. They found that the “tweeted” page ranked higher for the tested terms, but admitted that the results were not conclusive due to the high number of variables involved.

More recently, SEOMoz also wrote about an “unexpected case study” about the SEO effect of Twitter. The story is similar to Hocking’s, albeit on a tiny scale by comparison. They were surprised to find a high number of re-tweets about their SEO guide one morning when it had been covered by an online magazine. The guide climbed in the rankings for the search term “beginner’s guide” throughout the week, which yielded a sustained increase in keyword traffic. This isn’t the sort of thing they could have predicted or forced.

If you’re a business owner and you want to make viral videos, how do you do it? The bad news is that your first few (or first few hundred) videos probably won’t go viral. When you finally do succeed, you probably won’t understand why. The good news: there are a few Twitter SEO practices that will help you raise your odds of success if you start implementing them consistently.

If you’re excited about something and have a burning desire to make videos about it, the world will share your enthusiasm. If you’re trying to make a quick buck on viral marketing, do yourself a favor and go find something else to do.

How do you go about making a video “go viral” by using Twitter?

You don’t.

You may have heard about famous “viral videos,” such as the classic Honda Accord Ad that received millions of views with its fascinating Rube Goldberg machine. The premise: by investing in high-quality content on the front end, you get people to spread your message for you. If you’re not familiar with viral videos, check out this Mashable post about the top viral videos from 2010.

Unfortunately, a number of marketers still seem to get this fundamentally wrong, and you can commonly see it happening on Twitter. The misconception: Twitter makes videos (and other content) go viral. It doesn’t. Twitter is simply a platform wherein users can easily spread viral content (and ignore non-viral content).

Either your content is viral or it isn’t. That said, here is a possible strategy for increasing the likelihood of making a video go viral, using SEO and Twitter as content-generating tools. Give it a try.

1. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find search-engine friendly keywords. Type in a phrase or two related to your area of expertise, and see what it spits out. Pick out a phrase with at least 1,000 local searches per month and a low “competition” number.

2. Do a search on Twitter to find out what’s getting re-tweeted on your subject. For example, if you want to do a video about ice cream, look to see what people are saying about ice cream on Twitter. Re-tweets are a good indicator of what’s likely to spread. For example, I searched for “viral video” on Twitter before writing this blog post and found that this Jennifer Aniston water promo had received 10 recent re-tweets. I don’t even really like the video, but it worked.

Those two steps are enough to get started. Pick out some strong keywords, put them in your post title, tweet the post, and see what happens. Check Google and see how your post ranks. You should also check out  Timothy Ferriss’s blog post about generating re-tweets.

Leave a comment here if you’ve had any success (or failure) with this type of approach.

If you’re a small business owner who’s spent any time investigating search engine optimization for your business, you’ve probably given some thought to the question, “How do I get links?”

In the old world of search engine optimization, it was a pure down-and-dirty numbers game. The more links in cyberspace pointed toward your web site, the more money you made.

As one can imagine, this didn’t last long. Black hat SEO companies invented a host of dirty tricks to artificially inflate the rankings of low-quality web sites by spraying links all over the internet. Common techniques included things like posting irrelevant comments on blogs and spinning large numbers of keyword-stuffed articles containing links back to the target sites.

The recent Google Farmer update was designed to directly attack this problem, but these link-building tricks have been declining in effectiveness for quite some time now. Why? It’s just common sense. If you fight against the course of nature, you’re bound to lose eventually. If your strategy for winning new customers is to trick them into walking into your store, you might get a few sales this way, but it’s a flimsy strategy at best.

To name two recent examples, retailers Overstock and JcPenney took a recent hit in the rankings over some questionable linking tactics employed by their (now fired) SEO firms.

It’s no different than paying someone to pretend to be your #1 fan. It might work for a little while, but it’s going to be embarrassing if you get caught.

How does one go about building honest-to-goodness links that generate real business results over the long haul? The same way you do it offline in the brick and mortar world. Build relationships with real people by giving value first. When you think in terms of building linking relationships, the entire game changes. Instead of thinking about how you can get 200 links from different blogs, think about what it would take to build a value relationship with a close handful of other online business owners with solid reputations.

What would happen in your business if online community leaders enthusiastically recommended your products and services to people who trusted their opinions? I assert that you’d never have to ask how to “get links” again.