Boost Your Google Juice with Link Bait - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip#77
Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a list of different types of link bait and key considerations for making sure the link bait is effective.
Encouraging inbound links to your website is a sure-fire way to improve your SEO performance, in other words, to boost your Google juice. One of the best ways to build those high-value inbound links is to produce “link bait” by delivering valuable content that encourages others to link to you.
Nick Wilson, a contributing writer for Search Engine Land, recently wrote about the various forms of link bait that web marketers use to drive inbound links to their web site content. Here’s a summary of the three types of link bait according to Wilson:
- Textual Linkbait: … any kind of page content that takes no more technical skill than being able to type. This kind of link bait is very accessible as the only real cost is time. With good imagination and research, you can quickly devise a series of posts designed to attract links.
- Site Based Tools & Software: … functional scripts that run on a website. These vary widely in nature depending on the site. A good example in the search marketing world is the NetQoS network latency calculator.
- Widgetbait: The holy grail of link baiting in 2007 will be the widget. In late 2005 and early 2006, I came up with a linkbaiting concept to put my previous company, Performancing, on the social media map. That idea was the Performancing Blog Editor Firefox extension that has achieved nearly half a million downloads on Mozilla alone.
I would also add to this: visual or graphics link bait. Bloggers and journalists love visuals and diagrams that help communicate a point. A popular example of this is the Social Media fatigue visual Andrew Shuttleworth created using Mind Manager flow charting software.
Here are a few tips on making sure your link bait is effective:
- Make it relevant and useful to your target audience to drive the right types of links and web traffic.
- Make sure it supports your brand.
- Don’t require registration to use it, but do embed offers for more (this requires a conversion strategy).
While link baiting can be controversial, it seems to me that it has resulted in so many new free tools available to users. How can that be a bad thing?
