Friendly means a bunch of different things, but mostly it means functional. First your website should be architecturally impeccable so as to not cause any problems with a search engine indexing your site (spidering it and adding any updates to the index).  Too many child levels in navigation is not a great idea, so try to keep your site flat and broad. A search robot won’t go deeper than three levels usually, so don’t add content that you care about in a deep position.

Your code should validate. A lot of designers are a bit lazy about checking that, but you don’t want any warnings or errors. Everything should be best-practice labeled as well – use alt text, and every tag you can. Embed Flash elements, don’t design in it.

Ask your SEO person what their plan will be.  See if they ask not just what terms they should be targeting, but all about your business so they can offer you ideas that you’ve never thought of before. Ask them what kind of keyword research they do. Do they believe in long tail (niche) keywords or go for top volume? Or a mix of both? Do they invite you to suggest the keywords you’d like to rank for?

Ask about their On Page SEO and what it entails.They should provide a plan that targets no more than 5 keywords per page and includes a mix of URL, tags, content, alt-text and technical suggestions. If they’re really good, the SEO will have some thoughts on your conversion process. What’s conversion? Ask your SEO.

Ask about their linkbuilding services – is it a flat rate per link or a monthly retainer?  Do the links come from quality sites or junk directories? How will they benchmark their efforts? Will you have login privileges for online data collection tools like Google Analytics?  What about maintenance?

Ask your prospective SEO firm if they have their own tricks (they should) and if they ever use black hat tactics (they shouldn’t).  Avoid wizards of the dark side! They can get your site banned (removed from the search engine results).  It can take months to make it out of exile, and you’ll likely never regain your former position.

Just a few questions to ask your SEO strategist.

Actually Dave promised to write three songs about the incident and post videos. Video #1 reached viral velocity this fall after uploading in July.  It’s a classic tale of taking on the Man and winning. It helps if your retaliation video features talent – as his does. But Carroll also clearly had some web smarts.

The video is a catchy song called “United Breaks Guitars.”  The name of the song/video features two important keywords: United and Guitars. He could have sung about My Bad Luck Airline Story. But you capture viewers from what people search for…keywords with volume….so why not make music with an eye to traffic?

To date the video has had over 7 million views, and United is said to have contacted Carroll about a settlement in return for taking down the video. “Good luck with that pal,” Carroll is said to have responded. Haha, just makes the story juicier doesn’t it, whether true or not. So let’s take the campaign apart from what can be found on the web. Step 1, create video and post to Youtube. Now what?

Emails & Initial Comments

My first awareness of this story came via an email and I would definitely hope that Carroll was behind that initial roll-out.

There are 4 band members in the band Sons of Maxwell and that means there are 4 networks plus their significant others’.   The first step in awareness would be a simple email with a link to the video and a bit of tantalizing background on the story. Using personal networks probably garnered the first couple hundred views and comments – all positive. Did you know that studies show the first few comments on any piece of content are the most critical? It turns out humans are a bit lemming like and comments trend in the direction of the first postings. So when posting your content, try to control initial comments.

If each member of an initial network of say 8-10 committed individuals sends to 100 of their friends and shares on Facebook – just that, you’re knocking on a roll-out of 1,000. If you get just 5% partisans who pass it on to their network that’s 50 more people doing your work for you. But likely participation is much higher, since the second round of senders would be able to say they are FRIENDS of the hero of the story so there is personal recognition and validating in it for them. The third round of email senders could say, hey my friend is friends with this guy…help him out…and so on.

Keywords

One of the smart things in this campaign – ok, genius – was using the brand name Taylor Guitar in the song and in the tag of the video. Guitar players are picky about guitars and they’re uh, musicians, who are social media literate and  LOVE TO SHARE MUSIC. What a great core group of people to engage by enraging them at someone’s Taylor being trashed. So they pass the video on to their friends.

Content Submission

A little sleuthing with a “united breaks guitars” G-search reveals the video was uploaded July 6th to Youtube.

On July 7th, the story, video and lyrics were posted at The Consumerist, a ripoff site.  A great way to propagate the story. A simple email to the upper right hand corner tips@domainhere.com should have done it. They bit. Remember, sites are desperate for good content. If you serve it up, they’ll eat it.

Also on July 7th, the LA Times had a blog post on the story, reporting in the first 24 hours the song had 400-odd hits, not earth shattering or newsworthy but those newspaper blogs need content. Who alerted them? The writer mentioned that United was already on it and quoted a representative who said they’d contacted Mr. Carroll to make it right. Perhaps a press release was sent to a number of newspaper blogs. That’s what I’d do.

Next Huffington Post had the story on July 9. Facebook, retweeting, diggs and other avenues were used to continue generating momentum.

On July 24th, Internet Hitler weighed in and I think at that point you have a certified hit on your hands.

On January 11, I am here writing about it, showing the huge potential for proliferation (and people using your success).

On-Page Factors

When you visit the Youtube page, what do you see? A bunch of interconnected links or what I think of as a matrix effect.

• Band site URL rolls before video starts  (REASON: secondary address outside of Youtube to sell, inform, etc)
• iTunes buy it pop up (SALES)
• Sons of Maxwell video channel (ENABLES SUBSCRIBERS, BUILDING DATABASE OF PARTISANS)
• Numerous links in the subscribe area to 1)the backstory  2)the first song  3) a SECOND song just posted as the viral is going through the roof
• Tags: united airlines  broken guitar  sons of maxwell  dave carroll  UA  baggage claim  lost luggage  consumer complaints  damage claim  taylor guitar (These tags reveal targets – people who are enraged at their United experience, Taylor lovers, people trying to learn about the band. Tags are like a honey pot capturing device.)
• Twitter link (Link propagation)
• Personal video on Dave Carroll’s website explaining the story and declining United’s settlement (This is beautiful image management, it says – I’m just a nice, regular guy who intends no harm and holds no grudges)

Managing a campaign like this takes patience – roughly seven months and the energy to write/produce the songs and videos. You’ve got to have a great backstory. The fortuitous breaking of the Taylor provided an incident for exploitation – people want to see the little guy go up against Goliath and win – and Sons of Maxwell was smart enough to realize they had something: a story that would really engage other people. They had the talent to back it up, unlike the Balloon Family. The charming videos are low cost but high quality and with an artfully naive presentation that’s both ironic and still almost believable. Who knows how far they’ll go? They’ve separated themselves from the baying hordes of musicians desperate for attention and that is commendable. Are there better bands? Probably. But that’s not the point.

Watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo&NR=1

Meanwhile,  I am using the same keywords as Dave did so hopefully some Taylor loyalists will be along shortly. It’s basically tag teaming. Thanks Dave!