Building links to your website or your clients website is essential in any search engine marketing strategy.
Getting links to a website is hard work. One relatively easy way used to be to buy links on other peoples websites. However, with Google and Matt Cutts waiting in the bushes to jump on the head on any link buyer or seller, it becomes an increasingly tricky tactic.
A great piece of linkbait can build a truckload of backlinks. This blog is built mostly with linkbait and has earned thousands of links in just a few short months.
Great linkbait takes, time and skill to produce. It must appeal to users of social media, your own readers and those who just love to link. You can take the pain out of trying to come up with that killer headline and exciting copy, by hiring someone else to do all the hard work for you.
One of the problems with paid links is that they exist only whilst you are willing to hand over the cold hard cash.
A great piece of linkbait can go on for years earning links and increasing your ROI.
SEO is a constantly evolving practice, techniques come and go. It’s a battlefield where weapons are developed and used until they are no longer effective. The smart warrior quickly adapts to the changing state of the battlefield.
You do not bring a pointed stick to a fight when your opponent has brought a M1A2 Abrams main battle tank with smooth bore 120mm gun and reactive armour.
Linkbait is not new. It’s a crusty old technique force fed crack until it goes like a jet car on ice.
Unlike paid for links, linkbait hangs around the place. Grabbing links whenever its content seduces the reader. As long as it can be consumed and linked to it will continue to attract links.
Directories are also fading. Whilst many directories market themselves as reviewing websites, rather than accepting money in exchange for listings. You can’t help thinking that maybe the combined brain power at the Googleplex have figured out this attempt to get round the paid link rule.
Is linkbait the most effective way of earning links these days?
In the white hat world, most definitely. People who instantly denounce the technique usually have a vested interest in some other established technique which feels threatened. As the world of online marketing rapidly changes do we want to be using increasingly ineffective techniques, whilst your competitor takes up the new methods with relish.
A newish element in the war of links is Social Media. The ability of the crowd to decide to determine what is hot rather than a machine based algorithm. Gone are the days when the SEO could simply try to figure the algo out . It is up to the hordes of socially challenged teens to make or break you.
The purpose of linkbait is not to have thousands of socially challenged teens tramping through your shiny new website leaving childish and bitter comments. The idea is to attract the crowd and the crowd attracts the Linkerati. The Linkerati are desperate to link to cool stuff which everyone likes and when it spots a huge crowd trying to get a look at a blog it knows it’s on to something.
When the Linkerati have to push through the heaving crowds to get a glimpse of your linkbait, you know you have earned your link.
Linkbait must appeal on a number of levels. It must be clever enough to call out to various social tribes. The socially challenged teen, the Linkerati, the regular users of your site, the bloggers and website owners within your niche.
Can you create linkbait for your own blog or website? Of course you can, all it takes is time, research, writing skill and the ability to pull a killer headline out of the hat.
Failing that, you could always hire me.