SEO and Linkbaiting - April 25th, 2008
A big part of search engine optimisation is link building. It’s no secret that getting good links to your site will work in your favour when you are trying to climb the rankings, Sound SEO advice is when you are link building you should try and get good links from sites that are in a similar industry, use your keywords, aim for good page rank sites if possible. This sound advice still stands, 10 really good links could be better that 100 poor links. However there is another side to this.
As Matt Cutts (the big guy from Google) has commented before link baiting is a good white hat SEO method that can generate 100’s of links to your site. Before i go into what link baiting is i think it?s best to say that 99% of the time any link is a good link.
Link baiting can be achieved in a few different methods. The first method which is becoming more common as more and more blogs appear is to write something controversial or tongue and cheek, give it a title that will make people talk. The aim of this is to generate interest in your blog you need people to react as by doing this you will have people linking to your blog for others to come and see what has been said. I feel the best way to achieve this is with controversy!
The second way of link baiting takes a little more work but could be more beneficial in the long run and this is to develop and host a tool or an application. Just search for example has an SEO Tools section. These great tools are available for anyone to use and as a result could generate many links to the site from other websites and blogs. In the case of the just search tools they could be generating good links as well as the links would probably come from SEO relevant sites.
If you can adopt one of or even both of these link baiting methods then you could be attracting 100’s of links to your site. As i said earlier no link is a bad link in reality. These links may not be using your carefully chosen keywords but Google is not stupid. If you have 300 links to your site and 290 of them use keywords then it is a sure sign of SEO, this would not be a bad thing and you might rank well for these keywords but if you have 1000 links and only 300 use your keywords then it will look a lot more natural. 500 links from link baiting will give your site great strength and is this something you can go without?
Gary
NSEO Programmer
