Promote your site in a quick and easy way!!
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Promote your site in a quick and easy way!!
THE CONCEPT OF LINK BAITING
In simple terms, link baiting is simply the act of publishing something on your website that captures the attention of your website visitors and perks enough interest that they link to it from their own website. Whether it’s merely an article containing useful information or tips, or media, such as a unique image, funny audio file or some unique video file; creating content or media for the purpose of link baiting can be one of the most advantageous, and low-cost, forms of search engine optimization for a website
BUILD THE LINKS AND SEE THE RESULTS
Aside from being a viral link building strategy, link baiting is a natural link building method as well. Link building strategies such as directory submissions, blog postings, forum postings and buying links are considered “artificial” link building strategies because the inbound links obtained using these methods require effort on your part, whereas a natural link is something that just happens; kind of like a free bonus for sharing useful or interesting content on your website.
LINK BAITING IS AFFORDABLE
When you regularly post useful or interesting content on your website or blog, whether it is for the purpose of link baiting or not, it can be one of the biggest assets for you in terms of your websites search engine optimization. People, in general, love content and media that grabs their attention. Whether it’s funny, informative or just plain weird, other website owners will inevitably pick up on what your website has to offer, and because they found it beneficial for them in some way, these other website owners will talk about it on their own websites and blogs…and this is how the cycle starts. Buzz-worthy content and media is the most affordable form of link building simply because it costs you nothing other than the time it takes to add this buzz-worthy content to your website.
Now, many website owners don’t even know the first thing about link baiting, yet they experience the benefits every day of the week. Since you’ve been introduced to link baiting, at least through this article right now; you can start to incorporate this viral link building strategy on your own website.
Link baiting does not have to be expensive or even time consuming; it just takes a little bit of imagination and the willingness to share useful and interesting content. The whole point of link baiting is this: when you take the time to add something to your website that is worth talking about, people will talk about it. Not only does link baiting provide useful and interesting content for your website visitors, it can work extremely well to increase your website’s link popularity and increase its position in search engines as well
Guide for a proper link baiting:
1. Figure out what appeals to those you want linking to you. This is not necessarily the same as what might appeal to your target market. When you’re doing this try to think about the types of people they are (likely very similar to you). Are they funny? Do they just want quick solutions to their problems? What do the people who own websites related to your topic want to provide for their visitors?
2. Build it. If you want to provide a solution to an information gap, write up a great article. If you want to provide something humorous, do that. If you want to provide a useful tool on your site, write up your specs, hire a good developer and get it made.
3. Test it. If you’re unsure as to how your new link bait will be received, test it. If you’ve written a great article on a subject you know people are interested in, try visiting a few forums and posting a link to it and see what the reaction is. You can do the same for humorous content and tools as well. Find out how they’re going to be received by your site visitors and site owners you are hoping will link to it.
4. Launch it. Now it’s time to add it to your site. In the Testing stage we put it up on the site but didn’t link to it internally. Now it’s time to link to it from inside your site. If you feel your potential clients will enjoy it, why not add it to your navigation? If you feel it’s better for the people you want to link to you but not as useful for your potential clients then perhaps you’d be better of to build a resources page and link to it from there. Or, if you have a blog you can simply announce its launch on your blog.
5. Promote it. Now it’s time to get the word out. There are a wide variety of methods for doing so and the most effective will vary by site category and who you want to reach. Here are some of the methods we have found most effective across a wide array of subjects:
- promotion on your site: large buttons on the homepage, in the navigation or other prominent spots
- press releases: if it’s a service or information that a wide variety of people will be interested in a press release is a great way to get the news out quickly
- forum posts: if what you are offering will help then why not tell them about it in related forums. Chances are there are people looking for the solution you are providing - post a link to it for them, and others, to see. This will provide you with a link from the forum and potentially many more as people find the information and feel it may help their visitors too
- newsletters: take out an add in an industry newsletter
6. Monitor it. Now all that’s left is to watch your stats and backlink counts to monitor the success. If you find you’re getting solid traffic, or backlinks, or both it’s a sign you just might want to do more of the same. If the results aren’t as spectacular as you were hoping then you’d do well to consider how well you performed the five steps above, how they might be adjusted, and what else you can do.
Link baiting tries to create content that is useful to the audience in their respective niche industry and thereby it invites webmasters to link to that content voluntarily. Link baiting is becoming one of the most popular ways of achieving link popularity for a website because there are many advantages linked to this approach.
Primarily, it is one of the cheapest ways of building links for your website. All that you need to do is to create link-worthy content or product and people will automatically consider your website resourceful. Secondly, the links you get here are pure one-way links and it does not require you to exchange links with any third party website. In most cases, the links you get through link baiting are permanent links. The number of links to your website will increase gradually as more and more people discover your link bait. All these will help your website in getting better search engine rankings.
One of the essential aspects of link baiting is popularizing the content that is link-worthy. It is not sufficient to create compelling content but it is important that the online community is aware of the presence of such content. Therefore, the page or the content that you are using as link bait has to be promoted well. Link baits are normally promoted in social networking websites, forums, content related sites such as Digg, Delicious, etc.
Link baiting is becoming one of the most preferred ways of building a website’s online popularity because once the link bait is promoted well; it will also attract highly targeted traffic to the website. Search engine spiders too will frequent your website because link baiting tries to keep the content fresh by adding new content regularly to increase the number of websites that link to it.
This is also one of the most search engine friendly ways of building links, as it does not use any unauthorized promotion techniques. Link baiting has thus become a very popular SEO strategy.
