A big Joe Hage welcome to Christopher Angus.
Thanks for the guest post, Christopher.
Linkbait, link baiting, or linkbaiting: What is it? How can you do it? What can it do for your Web site? Well, the simple truth is that “”linkbait” has been around for as long as the search engines have been. However, the term “linkbait” is fairly new, perhaps, only two or three years old.
Linkbaiting is where you create an item of interest that people want to link to, this could be an article, game, widget, picture, guide, resource or anything thing else that would interest people that would want to link.
So, in a word, linkbait can be anything and the trick to creating successful linkbait is to grab people’s interest. Many an SEO Company have tried to create linkbait and many have failed. It’s an advanced SEO technique which takes much practice to master and perfect.
The difficulty in creating linkbait is what to actually create: It’s a blank sheet of paper and it’s hard to conceptualize a great idea that lots of people will like and link to. I would suggest creating an article, possibly a top10 list.
The website www.cracked.com is almost entirely “linkbait” – it’s thousands of highly interesting articles mostly lists of things that are light-hearted entertainment, but highly linkable.
Once you have created your linkbait, the next obstacle to overcome is how to get it out there and get bloggers seeing it. You need people to see the article otherwise you’ll have no chance of getting the links you so badly want. You have a number of options here, the first being social networks, primarily www.digg.com, www.reddit.com, or www.stumbleupon.com.
You need to ensure that your article becomes “popular,” you do this by firstly submitting your article to the networks and then ensure that you get enough votes so that your article gets to the front page and tens of thousands of people will then read your article, visit your site and a handful will link to the linkbait in particular.
Getting your article to the front page is tricky and you need several hundred people to vote for your story. You can do this with your friends (if you have enough) or you could join a “social media voting circle” or you could pay a social media expert to get it there. (However, they charge upwards of $1000 per article usually.)
The second, somewhat easier, option is to create an item that is link worthy and email several hundred bloggers about the article and see if you can get them to link. This is a bit more of a sure fire way to guarantee some links, and it’s easier than trying to spam the social networks.
Successful linkbait creates links to your website, which in turn has an enormously positive effect when it comes to your rankings on Google. It’s 99% of the reason why SEO companies chase linkbait so hard. The traffic value is almost nil; it’s all about the links.
About the Author: Christopher Angus is an SEO and Web site marketer. He can be contacted at SEOcompanyUK.com.
Christopher and Joe,
What about using Twitter to attract visitors to the bait? How many Twitter followers would you need to have to make that a viable tactic?
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I’m also interested to know. I’m finding it more challenging than I expected to garner clickthroughs and retweets.
Chris?
In my experience Twitter traffic is very low quality. Twitter visitors will almost certainly not link. We conducted an experiment, from 60,000 Twitter followers we had about 20 people that followed the link and went through to the website. This is only one example and the number of links also depends on the bait, however, Twitter would almost always be at the bottom of my list for links.