Back in late January, I had a blog post about how to embed Google Street View into websites, blogs and the RealBird single property websites.

Ever since, we've been receiving a constant stream of incoming traffic to that blog post from all over the world. It quickly became the most visited post ever on our RealBird blog and I could not help but think about why do we get all that attention and such a great organic search results.

The post is about an accidental finding of a hidden Google Street View feature. I was brainstorming with myself about what would be a great addition to our single property website service. One way or the other, I ended up on  Google Map's Street View feature to see if they have any update regarding their mapping API and more importantly, trying to figure out their strategy with this unique feature. For those of you who have not seen Google Street View before, it is a interactive, photo panorama visualization in growing number of cities across the country. You can look around and walk up and down the streets and see the surrounding of a location.

See this RealBird website for a live example about how great it looks on a single property website. Click the "Property Street View" tab:  www.705WickhamCourt.com

So I located a familiar address, clicked "Street View" button, checked out the pano, and with an accidental intuition, clicked the "Link to this map" link on the top right corner. And there it was: on the pop-up, I was expecting a standard Url linking to my current map, but rather it showed both the link and the EMBED CODE. I grabbed the embed code and pasted it into a test HTML page and for my complete satisfaction, the panorama showed up. No Google Map stuff around it, only the compact, interactive Flash widget. Exactly what I hoped for. At this point I knew I am up for something interesting. And here is why:

1. Knowing how smart Google is, I could not imagine that they accidentally forgot to mention that this embed feature iwas available. The fact that it was not yet exposed in their Map API and that they "misleadingly" called the link which links to the embed code, "Link to this map" made me think that this is a very early implementation and they purposefully hide this feature and let only the really curious find it. I have no confirmation about this is what I thought
2. Knowing how much publicity they got last summer when they introduced this feature, I suspected that many people are interested in this feature, in general
3. I knew that since RealBird supports any type of embedded widgets for the RealBird single property website, it is as easy to implement this on RealBird as writing a tutorial about it.

Frankly, I knew that it will be a popular blog post, but I had no idea that it will quickly become the most popular one ever on our blog. What I knew is that there must be a horde of people who would like to embed Google Street View also, and that relatively speaking, only a few would find the hidden way to do it, and probably very few has an immidiate application for it, as we had with RealBird. So I wrote a post about it, carefully choosing the title (important SEO) and tags (also important) and making sure, that the post is visually impressive and long enough to have enough long tail keyword combinations presented. I was writing a tutorial, so the point was to make sure that our members know how to embed Google Street View into the RealBird sites, but I was very aware that this post might be a search engine traffic magnet.

The rest was easy. Once the post was published, some of the leading real estate blogs picked it up (being a huge value in real estate applications), gave us some link love and that's all what Google needed.

See these excellent SERP results for our blog post:
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+embed+google+street+view+into+a+website - RealBird Blog is at 1st position
http://www.google.com/search?q=video+virtual+tour+of+your+neighborhood - RealBird Blog is at 1st position
http://www.google.com/search?q=embed+street+view - RealBird Blog is at 2nd position
http://www.google.com/search?q=when+will+streetview+be+available+for+api - RealBird Blog is at 4th position

At this point, I am pretty sure, I know what led to this high traffic count and the popularity of the post:

1. Very high value subject: Google Street View is very popular topic in the technology and blogosphere
2. Finding a need and the void to fill: People want to put this feature on their site, but Google does not provide easy-to-find information
3. Providing a solution: The accidental find of how to do it and knowing that it is non-trivial enough, that people will search for it

The most important question is, how can one replicate this. There is of course no exact checklist for such, but once you find a topic which meets the 3 criteria above, you can be sure that you are up to something popular. It does help, that our blog already has a Google PageRank of 4, but ActiveRain is highly rated by Google as well, so it is a good platform to post a great find like this. If you find a topic 1) which is high demand, popular and you expect people to search for 2) has some void to fill i.e. lack of relevent information, so that people will be searching for it, rather than the information being delivered to them 3) and you know the answer or solution - I guarantee that organic search engine traffic will follow.

If I can replicate this experiment (the scientific proof) I will share it on AR again.

Happy brainstorming and share with us your most successful post as well.

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com