What is Link Bait
Link baiting is a very popular way to give your search engine optimization efforts a boost. The process of creating an effective link baiting campaign is fairly complex but I'll try to break it down to the simplest level. Link baiting is a term used to cover a lot of different methods but the goal for each process is the same: get more incoming links to your website. A piece of link bait is a page or series of pages that are designed to attract those links.
With link bait you are not really trying to get people to use your desired anchor text on a landing page that you want to rank highly in the search engines. In fact, you shouldn't really care if these pages rank highly for any particular keywords at all (unless that would help you generate more links). The most important goal of link baiting is to simply build more authority or trust in your site by gaining quality of links from external domains (preferably from quality, trusted sites). Of course, it wouldn't hurt if you build up your reputation, gain traffic, increase your subscriber or follower counts, or sell some products with the process either.
Different webmasters have different views on link bait. The problem is that with so many different types of link bait out there it's easy to like one way of doing it and despise how other people do it. I'll go over link baiting techniques in a different article, but if you are creating quality content like lists, polls, breaking news, or in-depth research then you are making the web a better place and should be rewarded.
Other people out there spread false rumors, bash people without reason, or run bad contests. Those sites and webmasters I do have a problem with and would never reward them with any kind of a link, even if it's to tell everyone what a scam they are.
To summarize, link bait is simply a section on your site that you create to generate incoming links to in order to build your site's reputation. You don't worry about what anchor text is passed.
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Why Article Marketing?
If you are looking to get more traffic then you probably want to increase your rankings in the search engine. A great way to do that is with article marketing, but why does it work so well? Can it be effective across every niche or is a different tactic needed for your market? Is it considered black hat by the search engines?
Why It Works
Search engines want and need content. They don't provide any of it on their own so in order to provide answers to the queries that are posed to it by users, it needs to index and serve up content that others provide.
Search engines aren't the only ones relying on content to make their money. Publishers also want and need content. Content is how they show up in the search results to get traffic. It's also where they post their ads in order to make money off of their sites.
If you are able to drive traffic to the publishers site by giving them quality content that people link to, talk about in social media, and visit, you are going to be even more popular with them and the webmaster is going to want more content from you.
Why Do Article Marketing
The reason is that you want links. Not just any old link either, but a quality link that uses the anchor text you are targeting and that points to the landing page you want to rank for. You are doing the work to provide the content for another site and in exchange you want a link back to you.
You can also get traffic from the links. This traffic should be highly targeted because it clicks through a link from an article that you provided. While the traffic is nice, the real goal out of article marketing is to accumulate links with the anchor text you want to rank for.
If you get enough links to your site with the keywords that you want to rank for, eventually you will climb up the search engine results and get to No. 1. That is where the high volumes of traffic start coming in to your site.
The best part about article marketing is that it is as white-hat as you can get. This isn't toeing the line, approaching black hat status. Search engines aren't out trying to target article marketers to de-list them from their indexes. Quite the opposite in fact! They want and need the content to serve to their users so you are actually helping them out.
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Article Marketing Tips
Article marketing is an effective way to get links to your site with the anchor text that you want to rank for. Myself and many others have been using this technique for years to improve our SEO rankings and even though it's been abused by some, it's still a great way to build your site if done right. If you follow a few of the article marketing tips I've included below, you are going to be on the right track to increasing the returns on the effort you put in.
Get on Real Sites
A lot of beginners think article marketing is great because they found this list of 100 different places that take their content with a link back to their site. While there is definitely no harm in posting your content in a lot of different places, the real goal here is to get picked up by quality sites that are maintained and managed by real people. Sure, the articles you post with get picked up by automated sites and you'll get a few links out of that, but it will be of low quality. So, how do you do that?
Quality Content
Don't make the mistake of writing articles for the directories in the hopes of getting them ranked. You don't need to include keywords in the title nor do you need to stuff keywords into your content. What you want to do is write about topics that appeal to a wide range of people. The only time you have to worry about your keyword is with the anchor text of the link back to your site. That's it. Other than that write good stuff that people wouldn't be embarrassed to show real visitors.
Sexy Titles
I've already mentioned how you do not want to use keywords in the article title with the hopes of getting it ranked. If you want your article to get picked up by someone, make sure that you write a compelling title. Instead of "Golf Chipping Tips" you could try "3 Ways to Hole More Chip Shots".
Use Others
There are authors in the directories that are getting picked up by real sites. You don't have to wait around until you are one of them. Do Google searches of author names and article titles in your niche to see sites that are picking up that content. If you see a quality site, don't hesitate to contact them and show them a portfolio of your work. If other articles are getting a lot of action, you can probably write a spinoff that is even more interesting.
If you use these four article marketing tips, you are going to get higher quality links and more bang for your efforts by getting picked up by real sites than if you just post to the directories themselves.
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Website Content Development
It doesn't matter what kind of site you are running, if you want traffic then you need content. I would even go as far as to say if you are not getting enough traffic to your site, then the quick and easy solution is to build more content. With each additional page you will get more long tail traffic and you'll build the pagerank of your site.
Kinds of Content
- Short-term (relevant for less than one year)
- Evergreen (long-term content which is relevant for more than one year)
So why do we need content anyway? What purpose does it serve for us? Here are the three main reasons content is so important.
Attract Searchers
Each page on your website has the ability to attract searchers. Even pages that you write that aren't targeted for specific keywords will generate long tail traffic. Why worry about the long tail? According to Google around 50% of the searches they process each day are unique, meaning they have never been used before. This means that you can't specifically target them because you have no idea what terms these will be. However, the more content that you have on your site, the more likely you will draw in long tail searches based on your niche.
When building content you want to start to your most sought after terms and then spread out from there. The further you go from your main targetted keywords, the more long tail searches you will gather. For my established sites with more than 200 pages, over half of the traffic I receive comes from keywords that I am not actively targeting.
Creates PageRank
Each page that you create on your site adds Pagerank. The more pagerank your site has the more you are able to influence where it goes on your site. Directing Pagerank to pages build for high traffic keywords will help you rank near the top of the results for those terms.
External Links
Quality content will draw links from other sites. These external links can be used either for traffic (nofollowed) or for ranking (passing link juice). Even though you want all links to your site to be dofollow, you can't really complain if a nofollow link is giving you visitors, especially if those visitors are converting. Links that are dofollow help pass pagerank and allow you to go after higher traffic keywords.
Each article that you write will help fill one or more of these purposes.
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Why Links Are Important for SEO
Back in the early days of Internet marketing search engines used meta tags, meta keywords, and a lot of on-site factors to rank pages in the results (SERPs). Then Google came along and found a better way to do it that depended in large part on links. It's not just how many links you have, but the quality of the links that matter. Let's take a look at the two main reasons that links are important for your SEO strategy.
Gets Your Site Indexed
This part of the equation is overlooked but I wanted to list it first to show just how important it is. When you create content, you want to make sure that those pages get indexed by the search engines so you can show up in the SERPs. More reasons on why content is important, it gives your site authority and pagerank that you can sculpt to the pages that you want to show up for the keywords that you are targeting.
The more links you have pointing to your site, the more times that a spider will leave someone else's site to crawl yours. Link variation plays a big role here. If you are getting all of your links to one page then the spider starts in the same place each time and goes from there. If you get links deeper into your site, the higher the chance that you are going to get more pages ranked. That is why when getting links to your site do not only worry about a few pages, but get links deep into your site so more of your pages show up in the index.
What Your Site is About
The anchor text of the links pointing to your site tells the engines what your site is about. It is very important to getting a high ranking, but the search engines know just how important it is too. That is why they are so against paid links, because that is just a way for marketers to game their system and get their site ranked high even if they don't "deserve it" naturally in the search engine's eyes.
Say there are two sites are competing for the top spot for a certain keyword. One of them has 25 backlinks with the keyword as the anchor text and the other has 100 links of the generic site name or URL. Most likely with all other things being equal, the one with the targeted anchor text is going to win out.
Getting backlinks from relevant websites is also important. It used to be that you could get any old site to link to you and Google would give you plenty of love. Now the spiders are smart enough to realize that a golf blog linking to a golf tip site is a better indicator of relevance than a link to a golf tip site from one about dinosaurs. The link from the dinosaur site isn't worthless, but it isn't as powerful as from a relevant niche.
Don't get me wrong, you are going to want to concentrate on getting your keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to your landing pages, but don't make that the 100% focus of your off-site optimization.
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SEO Keyword Competition Analysis
When deciding what keywords that you should go after it's important to analyze how difficult it will be to get ranked for those terms. Often times, the highly profitable, high traffic terms have lots of competition making it more difficult for you to get a high ranking. If you are just starting out with search engine optimization (SEO), then it's best to go after terms with less competition. How do you know how much work it is going to take to earn your ranking? Here is what I look at when breaking down keyword competition analysis:
1. Find Your Competitors
Go to Google and do a search for the keyword that you are targeting. Now make a list of the exact URLs that are listed on the first page. These are the competitors that you are going to be analyzing.
2. How Big Are the Sites?
Big sites have more authority and can do a better job of going after search terms with internal linking strategies. To determine how big the sites you are competing with are, go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the domains (not the exact URLs, just the homepage like www.jamiefaidley.com) of your competitors. The first page of the results should show you how many pages the site has. You may have to enter or remove the "www." depending on the structure of their site.
3. How Many External Links to the Site?
Now click on "Inlinks" then make sure you select "Show Inlinks: Excetpt from this domain to Entire Site". The number by Inlinks is the number of external links the competitor has to their entire site.
4. How Many External Links to the Page?
Next, enter the exact URL that is showing up in the search engines. If it's the home page it should be the same as the URL you searched for in part two. Under results, click on "Inlinks" then in the dropdown box by "Show Inlinks:" select "Except from this Domain". If the URL you are searching is the home page the make sure the dropdown box is changed to "Only this URL".
5. How Many Internal Links?
You should have the number of links from question three written down, now change the "Show Inlinks:" option to "From All Pages". If you subtract this total by the number of external links you will have the number of internal links pointing to that page.
6. How Many External Domains Linking to the Site?
Head to MajesticSEO.com and enter the domain in their backlinks search box. On the following page you will find "Domains" in their "External Backlinks Stats" section. That is how many different domains link to your competitor.
After doing that for all ten listings on the first page of your targeted keyword's search results you will have a general idea of what you are facing. Can you produce enough content to as many internal links pointing to your planned landing page? Can you get enough external links pointing to your page? Are your link building efforts diversified enough to get as many different domains linking to you? This is what our SEO analysis tells us.
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One Day SEO
I know that a lot of you don't want to put a lot of time into marketing or SEO, but instead want to focus on running your online business. Hiring someone to come on board isn't for everyone, especially if you are just getting started and don't have a lot of cash to throw around. For those of you looking for a quick fix, Conversation Marketing posted 9 quick SEO upgrades that you can make today in order to help you make a jump up the rankings. Let's take a quick look:
1. Directories - If you can, get yourself listed in Yahoo or other major directories. The important thing is an editorial review so spam sites are not included.
2. Reduce Links - Every page of your site probably does not need to link to an about us page, contact us, privacy policy, terms of service, etc... This wastes valuable link juice that you could be sending to paging you actually want to rank well.
3. Set up Google Webmaster Tools - this will help you find any errors Google has seen on your site. From duplicate titles and meta tags to crawl errors. Plus you can add your sitemap to help get more of your pages indexed.
There are six more valuable tips over at Conversation Marketing, but these were my favorite three. If you have anything to add, let me know in the comments.