Link Baiting Your Way to Big Traffic

Writing good articles that people want to link to is called ‘link baiting’.  Link baiting is inherently viral because it relies on many different sources to pick up on it and spread it.  There are a number of ways to get people to link to your articles simply by writing them a certain way.  Articles should always be informative, but it takes a little more to make them interesting enough to be link bait.

The goal of a link bait article is to hook the reader enough that they want to link to the material.  There are a number of different hooks that can be used in your articles.

Informational Hooks – The goal here is to provide very rare or useful tips and news that benefit the reader.  Oftentimes, these come in the form of detailed guides or breaking news articles. This is the most widespread type of hook.

Humor Hooks – Create something funny that catches on across the Web.  This is the hardest hook to develop because people like such a wide variety of things and it can be hard to develop something with wide appeal that will generate a lot of links.  Lately, humor hooks are generally funny videos.

Negative Hooks – These are articles that are controversial or attack something popular.  Negative hooks are not recommended for most business sites because they can also generate negative buzz for the company.  They do however generate a lot of traffic and links.

Widget Hooks – Create a tool that is widely needed on your site or create a tool that can be embedded on other people’s Web sites and includes a link back.  A great example of this is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software.  It is linked to from thousands upon thousands of Web sites so that users can view PDFs.

Keep in mind that long term link baiting is dependent on quality content.  If you are writing content that is not of the highest quality, it will be hard to maintain any kind of long term link bait traffic.  It’s also important to keep in mind that viral sources are generally volatile; meaning they are temporary.  Humor and negative hooks especially are volatile as trends and fads change rapidly on the Web.  So, it is always advisable to work on your link baiting and not rest on your laurels once you have a single popular piece of content.

Opening Up Your Content to the World

The goal of SEO and SMO are essentially the same: to bring content to the masses.  They just take different, overlapping, approaches to it.  To bring attention to our content, we must first generate it.  Text content must be interesting and appeal to your audience.  If it does not, you cannot expect people to link back to it and it’ll be hard to rank the page.  In this case, it can be tempting to go with a 100% paid linking campaign to make up for the fact that no one will link to your boring content, but it’s more effective to simply write the content right from the beginning.  We should be improving the quality of the Web.  Keep this in mind at all times when writing your content.

Once we have some good content on the site, we want to make sure everyone has a chance to read it and direct their friends to it.  One way is to do it through organic search.  This is why SEO works so well with SMO. It ensures we have all our bases covered.  SMO directly targets social media sites, but it also refers to the method of making the content easy to share.  This can be done through some of the following:

•    Company profiles on social media sites such as facebook and myspace
•    RSS feeds of your blog entries
•    Optimized press releases
•    Adding social media submission buttons to your articles
•    Providing incentives for Webmasters to link back to your articles
•    Online photo galleries through Flickr showing your offices
•    YouTube channel for videos
•    Submit your RSS feeds and articles to aggregate sites
•    Add an ‘email this article to a friend’ button
•    Set up a mini PR campaign around a new link bait article

These are all very simple ways to increase your visibility and expose your content to the world, but they are often overlooked.  Individually, they are not the biggest traffic generators, but together they can form a powerful source of inbound links and traffic.  The more eyes you can get your content in front of, the larger number of backlinks you’ll receive generating both authority and traffic.

What is Social Media Optimization?

“Social Media Optimization” or “SMO” was first coined by Rohit Bhargava to describe the method through which sites generate traffic and publicity through social media Web sites. Bhargava deduced that there were 6 rules for conducting Social Media Optimization:

1.) Increase your linkability
2.) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3.) Reward inbound links
4.) Help your content travel
5.) Encourage the mashup
6.) Get communities connected

The idea behind Social Media Optimization is to get as many sites to link back as possible to your site using the readily available tools of the large social media Web sites such as digg, stumbleupon, and facebook as well as blogs, forums, RSS syndication sites, press release aggregators, and article hosting sites. Social Media Optimization goes a step further than the standard SEO best practices because it also incorporates video and images as optimal content. Social Media Optimization greatly benefits SEO though through the generation of organic backlinks and Social Media Optimization benefits from the core concepts of SEO forming a symbiotic relationship.

The end goal of Social Media Optimization is to drive traffic to a site and generate backlinks. Backlinks are links from another Web site to your Web site. They help to increase your authority in the search engines and improve rankings. Organic links, such as those from social media sites, also generate traffic. Organic links are links that develop without payment to the third party Web site. These are ideal links and provide the most value to a site. They provide both authority with the search engines as well as good amounts of traffic. This essentially places Social Media Optimization on the crossroads between SEO, online reputation management (ORM), and general Web marketing.

SMO as an Integral Part of SEO

The core practices of SEO are sound, but restricting. With any SEO campaign, there is always the subject of inbound linking to consider. There are many ways to go about it, but the very best links are generated organically. These links are much harder to get which is why they are more highly valued. They also make a statement about the quality of your content. Only great content has a lot of organic backlinks. The search engines know this and rank pages accordingly. Because of this, organic linking must be a part of an SEO campaign for it to be truly optimal. For many sites, organic linking and paid linking can be made to work together to maximize the number of backlinks.

If we take a typical SEO campaign that addresses text content, META tags, architecture/URLs, and inbound links, then inbound linking comprises approximately 60% of your rank. This means that it is the single most important aspect determining where you rank in the engines. Of course content is important, but the major engines consider links to be the most accurate description of a site’s authority. The keywords you actually rank for are determined by the text content on the site and the text in the inbound links, but the power and authority of a site is derived from the quantity and quality of inbound links.

This has a very powerful effect on the effectiveness of an SEO campaign. You can write the best text content on the Web on the most search engine friendly site around, but without links you will find it hard to rank for even non-competitive terms. Social Media Optimization dictates that we not get tunnel vision on the search engines and consider the millions of other sites that might also like our content and direct their users to it. In this way, we are really optimizing a site for not only search engines, but Webmasters in general as well. SEO provides what the search engines want and Social Media Optimization provides what other sites want. Together, they provide the most effective campaign possible.

We are proud to announce the launch of our all new SEO packages.  These packages are designed to help small to medium sized businesses optimize their Web site with minimal investment.  We have been surveying users and taking a cross section of our most successful campaigns to create these superior SEO packages.  They come in both consulting (for those that like to do the work themselves) and in-house (for those that would rather us do the implementation) versions.

How do you know if your site is right for one of our SEO packages?

1.) You have a small to medium sized site.
2.) You would like to receive better visibility in the search engines.
3.) You would like to grow your business.

Coupled with our new SEO packages are brand new linking packages.  These linking packages are built to maximize the effectiveness of all of our SEO packages and go a long way in ensuring your dominance in the organic search results.  We highly recommend having your site looked at by one of our professionals to determine which linking package would be most beneficial for your site.

To learn more about our SEO packages and what all they include, please see our ‘packages’ page on the site by clicking here.

The TreeHouse SEM / WebAssist SEO Starter Kit is now available to the public!  Stop by WebAssist’s site and get your copy today!  You can buy online at: http://www.webassist.com/professional/products/productdetails.asp?PID=259.  This Starter Kit covers the basic methodologies you’ll need to optimize your site for the major engines.  Included are the following topics:

• Introduction to SEO
• How search engines work
• Keyword analysis
• Keyword selection
• Code optimization
• Ethical v. unethical SEO
• Text content

We will be following up this Starter Kit with other training modules in the next few months.  We hope you enjoy it and discover a lot of new information.

Our goal has always been to provide the very best in design, development, optimization, and training. To continue this tradition, TreeHouse has partnered with WebAssist to create an interactive training platform that will serve as the new standard in SEO training. This will dramatically improve the quality of our training modules and allow for true interactive teaching. We are very pleased with the progress so far and look forward to showing it off to you all.

We estimate the first module (Keywords and Best Practices) will be completed and available to the public in February 2009. Currently, we plan on building 5 modules that will cover the entire scope of SEO from keyword analysis to inbound linking.

Google has launched the SearchWiki addon to its search results which allows users to re-rank and comment on search results. Of course, this does not affect the main index, but it is a big first step into more personalized search results.

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

This could mean a lot of things for search in the future. I’m very curious as to how popular this feature will be. If the masses are very interested in customized searches, it could mean a whole new era for the SEO industry for both good and bad. This could be used to help weed out poor sites that manipulate rankings, but it could also be used to ensure large popular sites further dominate search results. For right now, there appears to be no plans to use data from the SearchWiki in the main algorithm.

TreeHouse Labs, our training wing, is growing rapidly and nearing completion. We are currently working with a partner to deliver our training material in a fully interactive and engaging manner. Our goal is to have this training material available in the next couple of months. As of this post, the material covers the following main topics:

1.) Keywords and Best Practices
2.) Onsite Optimization
3.) Offsite Optimization
4.) Dynamic Sites
5.) Tracking Results

We are really proud of the material we have so far and are looking forward to getting this out to everyone. There is no reason that someone should have to search 20 locations to get good, trustworthy information on SEO when the knowledge is already compiled in any easy-to-follow training format. No quick overview. No sales pitch masquerading as training. Just the complete story from A to Z on how to get your Web site optimized.

We will continue to bring you updates as soon as they are available.

Here is a great article on the search engine space, spending, market share, and some odds and ends relating to search in 2008. I’m especially interested in their projected spending for SEO. According to the article, 19.3% of total search dollars was spent on SEO and it’s estimated to reach 22.8% by 2011. This of course is at the expense of paid search and paid inclusion programs.

I have to admit, I’m a little shocked by the statistic that 80% of SEO spending is spent on in-house initiatives as opposed to outsourcing to SEM companies. It’s apparently become very commonplace for medium to large businesses to hire an SEM team in-house to take care of their organic SEO needs.

Another thing to note is that according to these figures, people are becoming more and more search savvy. Longer keyword searches are up while single term searches are down. Searchers are realizing more and more that looking for more specific information provides better results.

Every Web designer attempts to target their sites for visitors. It’s the whole purpose of having a Web site in the first place. There is a second audience however that is often ignored: search engines. When initially designing a Web site, it is important to consider both. I’ve reviewed hundreds of Web sites planning SEO strategies and there are three extremely common errors made by designers that can drastically limit the search engines’ ability to properly index and assess the site.

1.) Flash / JavaScript Navigations

It’s no secret that search engines have trouble spidering certain links. The goal should always be to make things as easily as possible for the search engine spiders. Though Flash navigations may look nice, they generally are not spidered well. Links in JavaScript are not spidered at all. The engines do not render pages, they only look at code. As a rule of thumb, all links on the site should appear as standard HTML. Text links are optimal. Image links are spiderable, but not as effective for SEO. Image maps are spiderable, but are sometimes a unpredictable.

We always recommend drop down navigations to increase internal linking, but is it important that the links themselves are not in JavaScript. It is always ok to use JS to power animation or appearance, but the links themselves should be in basic HTML. Usually, a good dropdown menu will use CSS in conjunction with JS to provide a good, spiderable menu system.

2.) Poor Architecture

There is nothing harder to change after-the-fact than poor architecture. If the site is built on a poor foundation, there is only so much you can do to fix it without redesigning. It is of dire importance that good internal linking and prominence be considered prior to designing a site. Because the search engines try to view a site’s architecture as a user would, this should be Web marketing 101, but some sites still struggle with this. Here are the rules you should always abide by:

• Ensure that all important pages are easy to get to and are no more than 3 clicks from the home page. If pages are hard to get to or involve a lot of searching, the search engines will see these pages as unimportant to the site. They’re not stupid. They know if it takes 10 clicks to get to, it’s not being pushed to users.
• Ensure that all links to important pages are in prominent locations on the site. It is not enough to have easily-accessible pages. Important pages will always be linked to from a high position in the code. For example, a link to a category page from the top navigation will get more internal authority than a page linked from the footer. This is why CSS dropdown menus are so effective in a top navigation.
• Main navigations should be site-wide. If you decide to make mini navigations that apply to individual sections of the site and use no consistent main navigation, you run the risk of creating bottle necks on the site. This essentially causes certain pages to be accessible only through specific other pages/sections. All main category pages and important pages should support each other; not just the pages in the category they are in.

3.) Splash Home Page / Splitter Page

Splash pages can completely kill a site’s internal linking. The home page of a site is given the most authority and links on them are very valuable. The rationale is that any page linked from the home page (which has limited space) must be a very important page for users. If you place a splash page on your site instead of a home page, then you are dramatically reducing the potential internal link authority of the site. The home page should be a portal to the site…not an intermediary page in front of a pseudo home page. This is compounded even worse when the splash page is really a splitter page with an HTML form. Pages like these attempt to split incoming traffic into mini sites.

For example, a site that has a consumer and corporate section might place a splitter page in the root that asks the user to choose which version of the site they want to visit. If we were to place this choice inside a dropdown HTML form, we would literally have the worst possible home page. HTML forms are not spiderable. This practice is commonly seen with sites that have international/language versions of a site. When going to the home page you are prompted to choose a language with an HTML form and redirected to the applicable version of the site. VERY bad idea.

4.) Non-spiderable / Non-existent Text Content

It is not that uncommon to find sites that have the vast majority of their text content in Flash, JavaScript, images, called via an IFRAME, or just completely missing. It’s nearly impossible to rank (with the exception of using heavy inbound link manipulation) a page that doesn’t even mention the keywords once in a form that is visible by the engines. It may look good to have your content written in script through the use of images, but the engines cannot read it and you won’t get credit for it.

If you cannot determine what is visible and isn’t to the engines, use one of the many online spider simulator tools. They basically strip out the visible text content and show you what the spiders see. Some good ones are:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

Most SEO people already know about ranks.nl, but I wanted to share it just in case some of our readers here were unaware. This is a GREAT tool for finding out keyword density, if you have broken links, comparing two files for changes, and a ton of other things. Most of the tools are free to use to a point and can really help you determine problems with your site.

I would take special note of the keyword density and proximity tools. I haven’t found a better tool for checking keywords on the Web yet. Most software packages don’t even include that level of detail when checking densities. Definitely take a look at their tools. I find them really helpful during the optimization process.