Link baiting helps drive traffic

Creating reasons to visit
There are a number of ways in which you can seduce other bloggers and webmasters to link to you.

1. Staying current: Where are you getting your information from? If you are compiling articles by sweeping the web for information, that’s fine as long as you put your own spin on it and don’t directly duplicate content. However, it won’t necessarily get you noticed.
In order to stay fresh and be able to create a piece that will resonate through the web, it is a good idea to spend some time in the online community; searching latest blogs participating in forums relevant to your field and so forth. By properly listening to what people are saying in these forums i.e. what they’d like to see more of, pet hates and current issues etc, you can get some good fodder for your next post. Being active in the social networks i.e. Digg can kick-start your popularity and lend you some visibility to start with.

2. Capitalizing on partnerships: Think about whether you could team up with an expert in your field. This will lend immediate credibility to you and your site. A joint venture or even securing a quote from said expert can work. You could do a feature on them and link to their site. If the article is good, you could get the expert linking back to you for self-promotion.

3. Being funny or unique: Comedy is arguably the primary reason for a web feature to go viral. For example, some of the most highly visited youtube videos have consisted of nothing more than a baby Panda’s sneezing (to its mum’s great surprise). Nothing groundbreaking there, but it did manage to tickle the global nation for a while.

If you can’t think of something funny, or it seems inappropriate to do so, it also pays to be unique. As mentioned above, monitoring blog subjects will help give you ideas, but you could have a personal view or opinion that might spa rk debate. Something that has neither been proved or disproved in the past stands a good chance of getting talked about in the present.

4. Link baiting: While all content designed to get links could be referred to as link baiting, it is more common that you associate the phrase with giving away free stuff. Providing one-stop solutions e.g. complete how to guides/top 10 lists etc, free tools such as BMI calculators, search tools and so on, is a great way to attract links. A website can make itself more useful by providing access to such tools to web users, but even more effective is if you can provide a tool that a blogger or webmaster would be interested in. This will provide an excellent source of links.

5. Avoiding overt commerciality: Websites that feature lots of ads or overtly sell within their content are generally avoided by bloggers or webmasters. A piece that appears purely informative is far more likely to attract genuine links of quality.

While this article only picks up on a few of the techniques that can be employed to generate interesting content, the overall message should be that generating less high quality pages is far more valuable to the virtual community, and your site, than having hundreds of irrelevant filler pages. The goal with online content is to become an authority or reference point for a subject in order to get linked to time and again.

1. Keyword Analysis: The first stage involves analysis of your product or service and identification of the search terms, or keywords, that could most effectively deliver the largest volume and highest quality traffic to your site, dependent on your phase of development.

2. On-page optimization: Once your keywords are determined and you have a development plan in place, stage two involves the on-page optimization of your site for the keywords you are targeting, as well as ensuring it is accessible to the search engine spiders. This includes optimizing content, headlines, URLs, code, meta data and so forth.

3. Linkbuilding: Once you are happy with your site offering and structure, you can move onto the third, and arguably most crucial, stage of development which is building links. The best site in the world will not be visible to the search engines if there are no other sites pointing to it. Securing a mix of inbound, outbound and reciprocal links is a key factor in establishing a ranking in the search engine results.

4. Reporting: And last but not least, monitoring your SEO activity will enable you to spot trends and make necessary or cost-efficient adjustments to your site and keywords in response to the fluid, ever-changing nature of the web.

It is possible to summarise the four stages of the SEO process in a simplified visual representation.

4 Stage SEO Process

1. Keyword Analysis
-Identify search potential (traffic) of keywords relative to product
-Assess competition & ROI projections on keywords
-Recommend keyword targeting

2. On-page Analysis/Optimization
-Assess accessibility of site to search engines including code and meta data
-Optimize content relative to keywords
-Optimize internal link structure

3. Linkbuilding
-Develop linkbuilding strategy to add strength to your site
-Inbound links via content/requests
-Directories
-Link exchanges/buying

4. Reporting
-Monitor traffic generated by keyword
-Track rank in search engine results
-Review user behaviour, conversions, ROI

Keyword research helps spread the risk

Know your product

Assess your business to determine whether your products/services are widely known about. If you are operating in a niche, or emerging market, some level of education may be required. If people don’t know the terms of your business in order to search for you, some keyword manipulation has to be done to ensure you can make yourself visible. This may involve targeting closely related or themed keywords – the key will be keeping content relevant for the search engines and web users.

If your products or services can be localised i.e. an additional geographical search criteria is added to the search term in order to show results within the region of the user, it makes sense to add locations to your keywords. Similarly, if your products fluctuate in popularity according to season, the addition of seasonal descriptors is going to be advisable at these times.

Look at the competition

Spend some time assessing the competition. Enter a few search terms and have a nose around your competitor’s sites. Checking the keywords in urls and primary content will give you an idea of what they are optimising for and help you appreciate the level and angle of the competition. Apply learnings from trend analysis and keyword tools to add a clearer picture of what web users are most commonly searching for. Consider this in terms of your offering – are those competing in your arena big brands or small companies, are their websites large, polished and well established and how do you compare? A certain degree of honesty is required in adequately assessing your business. You need to determine whether you have the power at this particular point in time to target keywords that may be monopolised by stronger companies. Knowing your limitations will help you select more realistic keywords.

Assess user error

It sounds very simple but when you are considering your keywords you should remember to consider popular misspellings of words. Keyword tools can help you assess this by showing the volume of searches performed on similar or misspelt words close to your own. It is good practice to optimize for these words as well as your key term.

Measure your success

Importantly, once you have assessed and selected the most appropriate keywords for your site and optimised for them, you should still monitor the above factors. Competition is constantly changing and fads, latest news and seasons will always affect searches. As your site grows and the market changes you will need to tinker with your keywords and keyphrases (known as keyword stemming) and even change them to ensure you stay relevant and effective within your marketplace as time goes on.
Search for free keyword research tools.

Find out more about effectively optimizing your page using your selected keywords in our On-page section.

From the top

When a web user enters a search query into search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and so on, a cascade of activity is triggered. The search engine’s spiders are sent out to crawl the entire worldwide web using links to hop within and in between sites. Their task is to bring back all the HTML or textual information that they deem relevant to the initial query. This information is stored in the search engine’s database or ‘index’ where it is ordered in terms of relevance and importance and presented back to the web user. Search engine optimization works to feed these spiders information that makes them rank, according to that search engine’s algorithm, your site as most relevant to the initial search query and present you at the top of the search results.

SEO keywords

In order to appear at the top of the search engine results, search engine optimisation concentrates on the interface between your site and the search engine spiders. This includes working strategically to identify the search terms, or ‘keywords’ that will yield the greatest return on investment for your products or services e.g. assessing search potential, competition and relevancy of those keywords. This enables the spiders to match your site more easily to the search query.

SEO strength

Keywords alone won’t give you a good ranking. SEO also aims to ensure that your site is considered more important than other sites on the same topic or theme. This importance comes from the strength lent to your site by links from other sites. When the spiders crawl the web they jump sites by using the links embedded in those sites. Quite simply, the more links that point to your site, the more visible and important you are to the search engine. A good linking system within your site is also important to ensure the spiders can access all the content and keywords it contains rather than quickly jumping through to another site.

SEO structure

Search engine optimization irons out all the kinks in your site structure to make sure it can be fully spidered. This includes improvements to coding, content, page structure and so on. Framed sites and sites that use excessive flash for example are far less visible to the search engines and may require complete rebuilds in order to be effectively optimized.
The beauty of SEO is that it is so highly measurable. All of the above can be tracked and analysed to provide webmasters with a clear picture of their website’s performance, what keywords are generating the most traffic and conversions for example. This facilitates further fine-tuning to increase the profitability of the site by manipulating SEO features or adapting products and services accordingly.

To find out more about the different stages of a search engine optimisation project, check out our article 4 Steps to Successful SEO.