Lady Gaga’s rise to fame has been extraordinary in many ways. She started making waves after her debut album ‘The Fame” was released in 2008. Will it last? Who can say, maybe, maybe not?  Nevertheless, since then she has achieved several notable landmarks. The question I would like to posit is this. Is the secret of Lady GaGa’s success down to good quality SEO, viral & social marketing rather than great music?

A few of Lady GaGa’s achievements to date:

1. Most followers Twitter on the planet
2. Most searched for person on the Internet
3. Huge Internet presence.
4. Billboard named her the Artist of the Year in 2010
5. May 2011, she has sold more than 69 million singles and 22 million albums worldwide.
6. No 7 on Forbes top 100 most powerful women.

#LadyGaGa Queen of Twitter

Let us look at the facts, LadyGaGa is the most followed person on twitter. According to Twitaholic. http://twitaholic.com/ She has 11 667 235 followers  on the 17^th July 2011. To put that into some kind of reality. There are 11,329,618 people in Greece.

Also she has 142 603 that she follows. She joined Twitter on 2008-03-26 17:37:48. Lady GaGa’s stage name and its origin is disputed although a link to Queen’s Radio GaGa is clear.

#JustinBieber King of  Twitter or just a twat?

Justin Bieber is coming up close behind Lady Ga Ga (oo er) with an impressive 11 065306 followers. LadyGaGa’s website has an impressive 360, 000 pages and 74 399 backlinks on Yahoo. Beyonce gets  421,007 pages and 28 519 backlinks. The way backlinks are deduced can vary from one source to another. Another source says there are 46,467 links from 6,432 different websites point to ladygaga.com:

Twitter dominates the backlinks charts.

1. twitter.com 876,805,880
2. facebook.com 710,013,560
3. wordpress.org 348,278,
4. google.com 83,965,242
5. youtube.com 40,892,183
6. maps.google.com 33,007,678
7. en.wikipedia.org 25,914,896
8. digg.com 24,598,421
9. amazon.com17,051,206
10. flickr.com16,034,742

http://staging.seoprofiler.com/statistics/

“The Queen of Twitter”, and vowed to “always tweet and tweet again.” 171,000 new followers on average every week on Twitter.

site:www.ladygaga.com shows a staggering 227 000 results.

But I am sure they are all relevant and worthwhile.  It is interesting to hear that Lady GaGa actually has friends embedded in Google.

So to sum up:

Lady GaGa is the undisputed Queen of Twitter which dominates the worlds backlinks. She has friends at Google and now even does adverts for them.

FaceBook quote

Though Mother Monster has an impressive 40,575,791 Facebook fans at press time, she was just pushed down to #2 in the bid to be the most popular woman on Facebook by Rihanna, who slipped into the lead with 40,616,457 fans, or around 40,000 more Facebook admirers than Gaga.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1667357/rihanna-lady-gaga-facebook-fans.jhtml

WordPress scores badly. It is clear that some bloggers have got wise to Lady GaGa’s SEO manipulations and have blogged on this. It is seems apparent that blog wars have started as a result. Google: ladygaga & wordpress reveals a LadyGaga fan site doing battle with “Lady Gaga is a fraud”

http://thetruthaboutgaga.wordpress.com/

Aside from the odd blogger or two Lady GaGa completely dominates the top 5 of the biggest websites on the planet. Her marketing is super-charged, and her linkbait approach of creating controversy wherever she goes has up until now kept her well ahead of all competition. Occasionally some bad press may emerge but it is so swamped with good press for her that it poses little threat to her Brand. Narcissistic hell yes. But she mixes it with her personal blues to make her more real or is it surreal. Lady GaGa is mix of  the surreal media of the DaDa. (anti-art cultural works). Her music is reminiscent of post modern dada sound poems to a disco big beat, she creates burlesque happenings, performance art and couture fashion are woven together to create a psychedelic collage.

Mother Monster

Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.

—Marc Lowenthal, translator’s introduction to Francis Picabia’s I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocatio

So is the secret of Lady GaGa’s success SEO? Undeniably SEO has played its part, and a very large part in her internet marketing.  It created the hype that she then feedback into and so on, creating a viral marketing explosion. She or her team know the power of backlinks and have acquired vast amounts on all the high PR ranked websites around the world. They create linkbait on a regular basis, daily that maintains their link building strategy. The blog for her analyse her traffic and create hashtags that fly around twitter and create trends that then go viral. She sets the agenda and defines the market around her like the fashion she parades. I am not sure about her music but I have to take my hat off to Lady GaGa because she is a more than a bit DaDa and she sure can do SEO.

Why are Header Tags are important to SEO?

Header Tags are used in HTML markup and are important in SEO. There are 6 Header tags. Header tags were traditionally used to style the text and indicate the taxonomy of a web page.

Header tags vary in size  and the amount of words that they convey. So the H1 is always the biggest Font on the web page. Similarly the H2 is the second largest font and so on. Header tags were traditionally HTML markup, but with the advent of CSS they became forgotten by many. But web pages that lack Header tags are missing out in one of the vital ingredients in any SEO strategy.  Header tags can however been re-defined using CSS but should retain their relative sizes.

The hierarchy of information.

H1 = Title

H2 = Subtitle

H3 = Sub Sub title

H4

H5

H6

The H1 tag should only be used once on a page and two-three words, The H2 can be used more than once and is 3-5 words.

The H3 tag again has more words and so on .

So web pages lacking in header tags fail to show the importance of the information that the web page is conveying.

Can the comments on wordpress be deactivated?

by Jonathon Blakeley

Yes they can be switched off in specific locations or globally. In this way the comments system is de-activated. Comments can be very good if they are genuine and worthwhile. Unfortunately there are many spambots impersonating humans and back link grifters looking for a comment to drop a link on. So comments are great but they do need monitoring and managing. There are some very good plugins that offer very good defenese against spam bots and hackers.

WordPress does not have to be a blog. WordPress is just a web CMS (Content Management System). Because it is built from php and CSS it is very easy to modify and develop powerful web sites that can be updated and maintained easily by its users.

WordPress has some very powerful SEO features which allow one to get very good results on Search Engines by using organic SEO methods and smart permalink settings.

Some customers don’t want it to have any worpdress signs/logos on their website. All these can be removed and customised to develop a unique wordpress theme for a clients website. This in turn can be used as a base from which the client can make changes to CSS styles.

How many words in the English language never make it into dictionaries? How has the nature of fame changed in the past 200 years? How do scientists and actors compare in their impact on popular culture?

These are just some of the questions that researchers and members of the public can now answer using a new online tool developed by Google with the help of scientists at Harvard University. The massive searchable database is being hailed as the key to a new era of research in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences that has been dubbed “culturomics”.

The database comprises more than 5m books – both fiction and non-fiction – published between 1800 and 2000, representing around 4% of all the books ever printed. Dr Jean-Baptiste Michel and Dr Erez Lieberman Aiden of Harvard University have developed the search tool, which they say will give researchers the ability to quantify a huge range of cultural trends in history.

“Interest in computational approaches to the humanities and social sciences dates back to the 1950s,” said Michel, a psychologist in Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “But attempts to introduce quantitative methods into the study of culture have been hampered by the lack of suitable data. We now have a massive dataset, available through an interface that is user-friendly and freely available to anyone.”

via Google creates a tool to probe ‘genome’ of English words for cultural trends | Science | The Guardian.

by Jonathon Blakeley

I have to confess I am addicted to Google Analytics. I am coming out of the closet and admitting it. I have never been a lover of the Goliath that is Google, but with Google Analytics,  I must confess, I am impressed.

It’s updated daily, so one sees what was happening yesterday and the previous month. As well as lovely graphs of recent highs and lows it also provides detailed analysis, hard numbers, facts and figures galore. Aimed more at Marketing people rather than Webmasters, it is just the kind of information which one can use for market research purposes and creating effective internet marketing strategies.

Facebook suicide

I used to be addicted to social networking sites, Facebook and Myspace. The primary hit/buzz that these sites provide is watching the rise and fall of your friends, comments and mails. But I gave all that up and I committed Facebook suicide, which I heartily recommend. Since then I have been killing myself off on  the social networking sites that I once used to inhabit.

Viral content

These days I get a kick from watching my Google Analytics reports, seeing what people read, what bounces and why. One can burrow right down into the data and see exactly what people are reading and how many times. One can see high points where you write some content that goes semi viral and you have a peak of usage. This allows you to see what you did right and adapt your marketing strategy accordingly. It is also more gratifying because ultimately all the social network sites do is create html pyramids, with rich CEO’s at the top of these pyramid schemes. It is much better to create web content for yourself and promote yourself rather than making some American Oligarch even richer.

The Google Analytics Dashboard is divided into 5 categories

1. Intelligence
2. Visitors
3. Traffic Sources
4. Content
5. Goals

Intelligence allows you to program various alerts, to notify you by email if certain thing happen on your web site. Such as

• over 100 new visitors in a day.
• Visitors spending over 10 minutes on your website
• Alert period – Daily, Weekly, Monthly

Visitors – tell you how many, where from and what they looked at for how long. Loads of great data here and you can download the reports as PDF, XML or CSV, how good can it get.

The traffic Sources overview is particularly cool. It tells you where your web users come from.

1. Direct
2. Organic – Search Engine
   1. Google
   2. Yahoo
3. Referral

What a lot of ‘SEO’ companies will tell you is that 90% of people use search engine to find what they what.

That is partially true, it is true if you don’t know what you are looking for, then you search. But if you do, you go there directly. And no I am not being Cornish with my choice of words there.

That is ultimately how you build a user base. You get them to bookmark your site and come there directly. Not through the search engines.

Referrals come from back links to your web site.

Content Overview

From the Content overview one can see

1. the total amount of Pagviews
2. Unique Pageviews
3. Top Content Titles
4. Keywords and Drill downs

GOALS Overview

From the Goals section one can program various parameters. For example. I want people to stay for more than 1 minute on my site. I enter that in as a goal. I also want people to look at 10 pages or more…..and I enter that as a goal. Because I have set these goals I can now measure how effectively my website is performing. By monitoring whether or not the goals are being achieved or not, I can adapt content, SEO and design to maximise the websites effectiveness.

via Apple buys out $1bn data center squatters • The Register.

“SEO is like sauce, it’s what makes web sites sticky and binds the web elements together.

But it’s no good on its own.

It needs steak, chips, fried onions and broccoli to be any good. In other words – it needs juicy, fresh content, tasteful design, multi-layered media and organic memes.

You can’t have sauce on its own……”

JB

6. See what the French have been searching for recently using Google Insights

You can easily figure out what are the most popular search terms for any country (Google is the #1 search engines in most of the world’s countries) by using one neat tool called Google Insights. Let’s say I want to find what the French have been looking for recently:

via 6 Things I Bet You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Google.

I like having a blog, but I don’t like spammers. Or Fake people pretending to be friendly or interested in my content. When all they really want is for me to accept the comment and approve their backlink to their site selling sunglasses or cheap insurance.

Get a life and get lost. If you have something useful to say or comment then fine otherwise take a hike.

Obviously people are really eager to build their link popularity, but it is just so fake. Also it doesn’t not provide a quality backlink. For that there must be some match between what I am writing about and the site wanting the inbound link.

There must be a name for this type of fake internet cruiser, someone who fakes friendship or interest in the hope of getting one more backlink.

Backlink Vampires
They say stuff like ” hey that was real interesting” . Damned idiots, they can’t tell you why, they just assume stroking your ego is enough to give up the backlink they so eagerly hunger after. I can only assume they exist in some backlink generating sweat shop, with a list of customers who have bought 1000s of backlinks, and it is their job to acquire them by any means necessary.

Someone who shall remain nameless once said to me about SEO Search Engine Optimization : – It is in essence – standing on the shoulders of giants. In doing so one arrives at the top of the search engines. Its is just a metaphor for the nature of back links and their power.