Link Building

6 Real Linkbait Examples and the Lessons Learned – Part 1

by Dave Pye on April 2, 2009

Linkbait can be a very effective tool for search engine optimization. Social media is important for marketing your small or large business in 2009. The sky is blue. Women have secrets. Thanks for nothing, Dave. We’re actually dumber for having listened to you just now. You’re so very welcome, and do you know of a bank in the vicinity where I can cash your seminar check?

Preach vs. Practice
You learned absolutely nothing from that first paragraph which you didn’t already know. Simply telling someone to consider linkbait, link building or general social media as a means to drive both direct and eventually organic traffic to their site is like lending them your car and forgetting to give them the keys. A big heap of useless nothing. Don’t be that guy. The interwebnets are already flooded with them. And for God’s sake don’t pay them to tell you all those things. Ask for specific examples of their own linkbait work that can actually teach you something practical about applying the strategy to your own business. Don’t let them get away with simply talking about those damned blender videos again.

One of the reasons I am a fan of Montreal SEO maven Gab Goldenberg’s blog is that he provides real-world examples of work he has done for actual clients. As a result he is never even in the running on those days when I get so overwhelmed by my Google Reader backlog that I decide to start culling the RSS feed herd. I thought of possible ways in which I too could provide something particularly helpful today and dug out six of my previous linkbait project URLs. I’m not saying they’re ground-breaking or even especially good – but I did learn a lot from them and maybe you can too.

What is Linkbait?
Simply put, linkbaiting is the creation of something online which you feel has the potential to go viral. “Going viral” means a piece of content is so engaging, funny, helpful, life-saving, disturbing or a combination of all five that people feverishly pass it around amongst their friends via IM and email. Scores of bloggers link to it because they want to share it with their audience. It becomes bookmarked naturally in tons of social media sites. The benefits are twofold. In the short term the popular webpage gets tons of direct traffic and brand recognition. In the long term the domain encourages many one-way incoming links which is a crucial factor the major search engines take into account when deciding where to rank your site for specific keywords.

Here are some great articles regarding the construction of effective linkbait if you’d like to read more on the basics. I’d rather spend my bloggy time today showing you some real and original examples of linkbait I myself created – and then looking into the reasons they worked, didn’t work or could have been improved upon. I didn’t make these with enormous production budgets or teams of semi-conscious, hungover marketing interns at my disposal – but I did use my imagination with some degree of tangible success. Perhaps this article should be called Linkbait Ideas for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses. Perhaps this article should be skipped altogether.

Linkbait Best Practices
I tried to follow the golden (and vague) rules that I’d been reading about since the term “linkbait” was originally coined. Use media. Make it informative. Make it funny. Put it in a “top 10” format. Include prominent social media submission buttons. Include an “email this to a friend” form. Make sharing easy. Consider paying off some prominent Diggers (did I say that out loud?). Put it in a subfolder on the client’s domain without any branding and then move it under the main template after it has been live for a few weeks to disguise its true marketing purpose. Sacrifice a chicken and pray. Read up on Chaos Theory.

Original Linkbait Examples
I’m going to link to these 6 examples using the specific keyword phrases they were designed to draw traffic for. This is partially because I’d like that strategy to be abundantly clear and partially because this is my blog and it’s my perogative to keep flogging these pieces even years after they were created should I want to. A good, timeless piece of bait can continue to draw relevant traffic indefinitely.

Valentine’s Day History
A client wanted to drive traffic for terms related to Valentine’s Day because they sold many products specific to the holiday. Product terms (“valentine’s day cards” etc.) were understandably extremely competitive. There were some related terms, however, that were far less contentious yet still had reasonable relevant search volume attached to them. I had a glance at the day’s Wikipedia entry and was fascinated to learn how many truly awful things had transpired on February 14th over the centuries. The dim, filthy lightbulb in my head clicked on and thus “14 Horrible Moments in Valentine’s Day History” was born.

The Good: The piece definitely went viral, doing well in networks like Digg and Reddit, attracting many natural links from bloggers and was even linked to by some high profile news sites. It continues to attract lots of seasonal traffic and new incoming links to this day.
The Bad: Not much – this was definitely a success and made the client very happy.
Lesson Learned: The vague advice I’d been hearing was true – Decent linkbait can indeed drive tons of direct, relevant traffic and have considerable ongoing SEO benefits lasting years.

Custom BBQs
In the middle of Summer 2007 I was asked to create a linkbait piece designed to attract grill and barbecue related keywords to a client’s bbq review section. I wondered if I’d be able to find photos of some custom made rigs having recently seen a homemade beer keg smoker at a friend’s house. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. Yeeee Haaaa! You’ve got a pretty mouth.

The Good: Although it had a disappointing social media run, it resulted in quite a few links from blogs.
The Bad: In retrospect the subject matter probably had a very limited audience. Again, failed virally.
Lesson Learned: If possible focus on a subject related to your client’s goods or services with the broadest potential appeal – men and women, old and young, kids and adults. And never, ever launch a linkbait the day before one of the biggest holidays of the year.

NCAA Buzzer Beaters
This time last year March Madness was upon us and I had a client with a lot of tournament tickets to move. Being more of a hockey/football fan I researched some popular online NCAA discussion topics and quickly decided a list of “buzzer beaters” would be a good idea. I’d yet to use videos for a piece and got myself all excited about it. Everyone from the Director of Marketing to the CEO approved my final piece which took several days for me to write, research, collect and code. Then the NCAA (who were partnered with my clients in some respects) refused to let us use it. “Why on Earth did you even show it to them?” I remember asking them in frustration. I ended up using a revised, non-video version of it on my own semi-related hockey fights site. Cause hockey is a sport too, get it? I really just didn’t want it to go to waste. You can see the original video linkbait preserved for all time on my personal blog.

The Good: It was a good exercise in incorporating video into linkbait and I was able to repurpose it as an NCAA article (with SEO-friendly links) on several blogs and free article directories without alerting any ambulance chasers.
The Bad: It was nipped in the bud. Also, I found out that the client-side resource who offered to help with my bulletpoints and research completely plagiarized them from another website and had to re-write the entire thing the night before it was supposed to launch.
Lesson Learned: Let the CEO, Directors and lawyers see your proposed idea before you spend 20 hours putting it all together. Also, with a little re-writing many linkbaits can be repurposed in text form for alternate uses.

I have three more examples to share with you if you’re still awake, but regret I must get back to my company duties for the rest of today. Namely – plotting my next big viral ~~failure~~ success. Stay tuned for part two and I would love it if people shared their own linkbait creations with everyone right here in the comments.

{ 17 Comments }

11 Business Networking Sites Suited for Online Reputation Management and SEO

by Dave Pye on June 16, 2008

Is it a business directory? Is it a business networking site? Is it an overzealous hybrid destined to over-extend itself and die on the vine? For our purposes today we’ll refer to them as “biz sites” and it can’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the wide range that are available. They’re free to use, easy to sign up for and potentially helpful to your company or agency in a wide variety of ways you may not have realized.

Although LinkedIn and Plaxo have an imposing headlock on the B2B and B2C business networking space, there are a lot of others jockeying for position whom you likely haven’t even heard of – let alone begun to utilize. Although taking the time to register your own company or that of a client on these “2nd-tier” networks probably won’t result in the flood of direct traffic, leads or new contacts that the major players may have driven – there are still very tangible and numerous benefits to taking the time to build yourself a presence on each. These are listed in no particular order as I recommend them all as part of any comprehensive ORM or SEO effort:

Social Networking Sites for Business

My Cubicle Space: Their stated mission is to provide a search engine platform where any business can promote their product or service in a creative way to the fore front for millions of people. Free to use and includes press release submission, blog and keyword targeting capabilities. HQ: Watertown, MA.
Ryze: Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special networks related to their industry, interests or location. The local features are particularly impressive and should be perfect for businesses with physical store locations or service areas. Both free and paid options exist. HQ: San Francisco, CA.
Ziggs: A definite fore-runner of the emerging LinkedIn competition, Ziggs allows you to build a profile, network, post jobs and other classifieds and is strongly marketed as an online brand management resource. HQ: Boston, MA.
Naymz: Naymz’s solid tagline “Empowering Reputable Professionals” relays their understanding of ORM’s massive importance. If you maintain a decent “rep score”, based in large on how many people you get to vouch for you and therefore refer to the site, they will create a Google ad for you with a budget of $10. HQ: Chicago, IL.
FastPitch: Billed as a “professional social network”, Fast Pitch has added an impressive amount of useful features during their short existence including a press release submission option, blogs, event calendars a helpful tour, some early integration with other social networks and the ability to see a list of other online members. HQ: Sarasota, FL
Spoke: I like the fact that Spoke features rotating member profiles on their home page. They heavily tout the lead-generation potential of their network as a strength, possibly making it more apt to attract those with B2C lead generation as opposed to networking priorities. HQ: San Mateo, CA
Zoom Info: One of the more established sites on this list, Zoom Info has been around since 1999 and according to the home page has over 42 million people and 3 million companies as part of their database. The site is clearly defined for three specific purposes: searching for people, searching for companies and searching for a job. Personal profiles are free to create and company profiles are apparently coming soon. HQ: Waltham, MA.
Konnects: No identity crisis here. Konnects is a B2B networking site with a very human-oriented feel. Lots of headshots, rotating newest member list on the homepage and a big focus placed on physical events. Free to sign up and you can request via email a “group” for your organization which I am assuming means an eventual quote on a branded community. HQ: Tacoma, WA.
Upperz: The “social network site for professional use” has a long way to go before nipping away at anyone else’s market share, but the latest member blog postings and media gallery featured on the front page are a bit of differentiation. A serious lack of company (I can’t tell for the life of me where they are head quartered) or feature information puts Upperz on my “maybe someday when I have a lot more free time” list.
Direct Matches: It sounds and frankly looks a lot like a dating site, but Direct Matches is aimed at business people. Their mission states that they are the first site to “deploy a multi-matchmaking system that helps people locate everything from business contacts to finding friendship and dates online”. I spoke too soon. Perhaps they are over-reaching but the dating angle is certainly unique – and potentially the basis for an equally unique sexual harassment suit. HQ:
Xing: The “first Web 2.0 site to go public” definintely looks the part. The clean design, mobile capabilities and numerous mentions in top trade publications make it 2.0 all the way. Purporting to transcend all countries, languages and industries – Xing is definitely a must for professionals who do a lot of business internationally. HQ: Hamburg, GER.

Business Networking Sites for Direct Traffic
How many of today’s most successful web entities started in a dorm room? What is small time today might be huge tomorrow and even if you don’t start immediately having your door beaten down by contacts and customers who find you via Zing – you never know. It’s also important to take into consideration where some of the new or lesser business networking sites may have a strong foothold internationally. Even if a given biz site is only big in Asia it’s still going to provide you with a brand new link. Considering the supplemental benefits we’re discussing today I believe they are worthwhile if well designed and well intentioned – regardless of a site’s current popularity.

Business Sites for Search Engine Optimization
Unless you’ve been exiled to Siberia for the last two years you know that building one-way, incoming links to your website is an enormously important facet of SEO. All of the aforementioned sites allow you various levels of link inclusion. Some limit you to a URL, some automatically link the URL with the company name you input and others allow for the embedding of links in HTML-friendly summary sections allowing you to craft the hyperlink text to your target keyword specifications. A few hours spent creating presences on all of the aforementioned sites is going to be of better SEO value than a week of submissions to crummy “directories”.

Business Sites for Online Reputation Management
On many of the sites I list below you can get your company or personal name into the URL, header tag, title tag or a combination. As these three elements are held in very high regard by search engine algorithms, biz sites can be tremendously helpful for online brand reputation management. If someone Googles the name of your company, for example, and finds your dedicated page on Spoke – that could mean a negative blog post from a critical customer being pushed down to the second page of the search results for a potential one.

Do you use a similar biz site that hasn’t made our list? Am I using terminology or descriptions that can be tightened up (one of the things that perplexes me about this space is how to properly categorize the different sites)? Do you represent one of the sites listed and want to provide a little more info? Please let me know and we’ll keep this post evolving. Get networking/SEOing/Reputation defending and I look forward to your additions and comments.

{ 13 Comments }

Fisher Price: My First Link

by Dave Pye on July 19, 2007

Arranging reciprocal link partnerships with other websites used to be an extremely effective tool for bolstering your organic search engine rankings. As webmasters figure out how to manipulate algorithms, however, those algorithms will inevitably be updated by the powers that be. Currently, search engine algorithms give far more credence to one-way incoming links, and the art of facilitating these is commonly referred to as link building. Link building methods are extremely diverse, and the term should only be considered as an umbrella over a variety of specific strategies, including:

Paid links: Links can be purchased through link brokers or manually sought out one at a time by webmasters or web marketers. Brokers will provide you with a network of sites to choose from whereby you can customize the ever-important anchor text and select publishers relevant to your subject matter for a monthly fee. Doing it the old fashioned way is a long process, involving many emails or phone calls to prospective publishers, but may ultimately lead to the best value.
Link baiting: Writing original, catchy content and submitting it to news sites and social media sites has become a popular way of garnering one way incoming links, and is commonly referred to as link baiting. Particularly effective are how-to articles, top 10 lists and video clip collections. The catchier the title, the better. Should you strike gold by becoming the next viral marketing darling, the huge number of links you’ll receive from other sites, blogs and news sites will be priceless.
Topic and content networks: Sites like Squidoo, HubPages and WetPaint can be categorized in a number of ways content site, social media, etc. but one thing is for sure they are free and easy ways to create links pointing back to your website. If, for example, your website sells cell phones, you can build a resource lens about your company or a relevant topic and link using your choice of anchor text. The more your lens, hub or canvas is perceived as being an objective resource, the more traffic and incoming links it will get from other members of the network and people who stumble across it via search engines, passing the link juice on to your main site.

These points are a high-level starting point, but specific examples help paint a good link building picture for the uninitiated. Simply put, high quality and original content, coupled with a base knowledge of the emerging social media and voting sites that have been rushing onto the scene, can do wonders encouraging the outside world to link to you. Build it, and they will not come. Build it and make it helpful or entertaining enough to the right person – and they will gladly link to you in a heartbeat.

{ 2 Comments }

Don’t Dilute the Potential of your Press Releases

by Dave Pye on March 13, 2007

If you’ve been using press releases for direct online marketing and search engine optimization, you probably have a few favorite networks bookmarked by now. Some are pretty pricey (PR.com, PRWeb.com), but pack a lot of SERP punch depending on the keyword phrases you link back to your site with. Other sites aren’t quite as effective (SanePR.com, PRLeap.com, PRLog.org) but allow you to post releases for free, with as many outgoing links as you want, making them a sensible part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. Every time I create a press release for a client, I utilize a combination of these paid and free sites/networks – with great results.

There’s one important thing to remember – take it easy on the outgoing links. I follow a rule of thumb that I only optimize for one phrase per press release, and never have more than two outgoing links. It is generally agreed that the more outgoing links a web pages or a press release has – the more diluted their effect becomes. So call your shots carefully and don’t get greedy.

This logic also applies to valuing paid links. If you contact a webmaster about purchasing a text link and they have already sold links to 100 other websites – the value of that link is greatly reduced. The potential influence of a text link from a page is lessened the more links there are on said page, so don’t get taken for a ride.

{ 1 Comment }

SEO with HubPages

by Dave Pye on February 23, 2007

Google absolutely adores Squidoo, and I have discussed several times how the network can be used for the purposes of search engine optimization. But Squidoo has a few younger siblings that shouldn’t be overlooked in a comprehensive link building effort, the most advanced and spidered of which seems to be HubPages. But what is HP, and how exactly can it complement your online marketing efforts?

After you register and open an account, pick a topic and create a new hub. The process is pretty self explanatory, but make sure you choose an objective topic and name for your lens so that it doesn’t appear like a blatant marketing ploy. Also, as you are allowed to select your URL, get some keywords or your brand name in there. If your first choice is taken, try a few different variations or use hyphens between words (pinkrhinocerousbattery can be pink-rhinocerous-battery).

Back to the subject matter of your lens – people are more likely to visit or link to your hub if it is perceived as an objective resource. If your company sells mixing bowls, create a hub with free recipes. Do you offer gym apparel? Build a lens which focuses on workout tips. Somewhere within your hub, likely one of their text modules, hyperlink to your company site using the word mixing bowls. Make sense?

But where else can you get content for your new hub? HubPages can pull in RSS very well. Build a custom RSS feed filtered to your key term or subject matter. Or visit a relevant site or blog and see if they offer a feed for syndication. You can also utilize photo, link, news and Amazon modules – with more being introduced all the time. You can get a decent, content filled Hub off the ground in under an hour. Once it is spidered by Google and Yahoo that’s another prominent incoming link working in your favor. Give it a shot, use your imagination and add HubPages to your SEO arsenal and best practices.

{ 5 Comments }