Linkbaiting has to come from the heart

True linkbaiting success very rarely comes from an outsourced article. The most successful linkbaiting pieces are written:

• From within the company, using inside company information and expertise
• From concepts which have developed over quite a period of time. Even if the actual writing and creation doesn’t take long, the thought process behind it usually does.
• With rich media – additional videos, graphs and photos to help explain what has been written
• Very rarely as ‘controversy’ pieces. Picking on another blogger or company works well for some … but for most of us, it makes us look like whingers.

Don’t take yourself for granted

Every company does something that outsiders would find amazing. You just need to stop taking yourself for granted, and see it! If you just can’t, grab a few customers or family members, take them on a tour of your working day and ask them what fascinates them. This is how the ‘Will It Blend’ series on Youtube got started.

The spread of bad information in SEO is fast and notoriously inconvenient. Almost all of us have spent time or money at some stage on an SEO tactic that ended up having no relevance to our real rankings. Unfortunately, bad information continues to be published – here are the top 4 craziest myths about SEO and Google.

1. SEO is something you do once, and then never again
   Unfortunately untrue – if you want to stay on top of the rankings, you need to keep working to be there.
2. Google Analytics sends your company information to Google
   Big Brother isn’t watching you … because they just don’t have the manpower and can’t be bothered!
3. Pagerank is directly linked to search engine results
   Actually, Pagerank is an indication of your link popularity, which is only one element of your Google rankings.
4. Keyword density is soooo 2008
   Google would have you believe that if you write your copy naturally, the search engine will understand what it is about just fine. We know from experience in SEO that this is definitely not the case! There is no magic keyword density number, but ignoring density is a recipe for wasted SEO money.

Lots of links

If there is a single link to a page on your website on the net, search engine crawlers will eventually find it. Create more links to that page, and you enhance the speed of discovery, as well as the link popularity of that page.

Anchor text

People now understand how links on the web work … even my 70-odd year old grandparents both do. You don’t have to link with the words ‘click here’ or ‘please click’. Use anchor text – this is a huge boost to your internet marketing and SEO results, given the (assumed!) current state of the Google algorithm.

Use the hash

If you have multiple pages on site that all have very similar content, use the hash symbol in the URL to avoid being penalised for having duplicate content by a search engine. The hash symbol means similar pages are treated as one.

Caught by linkbait

Linkbait for its own sake is worthless

Your linkbait content must support your overall internet marketing strategy, or it is almost worthless. The point of creating linkbait content is to get relevant links, pushing your site higher in Google’s estimation, and therefore presenting you earlier in the results when someone searches for your keywords. However:

• If your linkbait content is not relevant to your core business, you will get few ‘qualified leads’ clicking through
• If you encourage sites that aren’t relevant to yours to link to you, the worth of the links in Google’s algorithm is lowered.

So, you can’t just publish a controversial rant about Barack Obama as a linkbait strategy, if your company sells medical diagnostic equipment. You must think within the box!

Fake Linkbait could get you de-listed in Google

The best example is a story published at money.co.uk, titled ’13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers’. This FAKE story got plenty of links … but it wasn’t made obvious on the page that it was fake. Matt cutts of Google indicated that the company would view that as dishonestly trying to create links (no matter what the writer’s intention), and could be added to the list of things that will get you banned from Google.

Linkbait’s ROI is unpredictable

This is the case with all activities in internet marketing – you must test and refine your techniques over time to be confident of getting a good return on investment. So just be cautious of investing a lot of money in linkbait content, without an *excellent* understanding of what makes the market tick.