TAG | search engine optimisation
Link bait is an SEO (search engine optimisation) technique that provides something so incredibly useful, other people link to it of their own accord.
It’s a fantastic idea, in theory, because it promises to help a site go from SEO zero to hero with relatively little effort. Simply create the link bait itself, and then sit back and wait for world domination.
Of course it’s not that simple. Here’s what they don’t tell you about link bait…
- It won’t work if the ‘bait’ isn’t truly amazing
- Coming up with something truly amazing (not to mention original) is hard work. It requires a combination of creativity and effort that most people aren’t prepared to invest
- On creation the link bait requires promotion. On average, 1 in 10 people will link to something that’s very good
- If 1 in 10 people are needed to secure 10 links, you’ll need 100 people to visit the ‘bait’ just to get 10 more links. Those links will result in another link. That’s 11 links. Of those 11, an average of one will deliver SEO value (link juice) to your site
- To realise significant benefit in Google, you’ll need to invest time and effort in sending at least 10,000 people to your site to get 1,111 links – 100 of which will deliver useful amounts of SEO value
Of course, once you have those 1,111 links they’ll start sending visitors to your link bait. This will generate more links, and 9% of them will produce SEO value.
This SEO value will benefit your entire site, including the ‘bait’ itself. Which will deliver even more visitors to the ‘bait’. Which will generate even more links, delivering more SEO value, further increasing the visitors you’re getting.
This is a virtuous circle, and is the very thing that is great about link bait. To summarise, SEO link bait…
- Is difficult to create
- Is hard to replicate
If you manage it you’ll own the value that ‘bait’ produces - Requires promotion in and of itself
This makes success even more elusive - Eventually reaches critical mass
The bait becomes a self-running virtuous circle that produces visitors and SEO benefit
It’s not easy to create successful link bait. If you manage to do so the rewards are spectacular, and difficult for others to replicate.
If you’re willing to put in the effort I urge you to do so. You won’t regret it.
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Writing for the web is different
7 Comments | Posted by Ken Munn in Copywriting, SEO, Search engines, Web Marketing
Take your pick
Pick a piece of online copywriting you like. Even some of mine! Cut and paste it into a new document. Then print and read it. Odds are you’ll find it doesn’t work as well in print as it does in pixels.
Is this harder to read?
Writing for the web is different, because reading a screen is different. It’s harder than reading paper, so work to make web copy less difficult to read. Tempt the visitor to keep going.
Yours sincerely
The web is informal – when did you last see a webpage beginning “To whom it may concern”? Use the first person and active constructions. Take liberties with grammar and construction, as long as you know what you can get away with.
Byte sized*
Break a chunk of copy into short paragraphs – it looks less daunting.
Ask a designer
Any designer will tell you about the advantages of white space. That works on-screen too.
Love spiders
Pepper web content with headlines and sub-heads. It leads the visitor on. And it’s an SEO technique for grabbing spiders.
Key words and phrases
Only humans read print. But web pages are read by stupid software. It doesn’t understand what you’re saying, it just indexes words and phrases. So, repeat key words and phrases more frequently than you’d do for a human reader. However, spiders aren’t going to spend money with you so, for the sake of the humans out there, learn to repeat key words and key phrases unobtrusively.
Pixels, not print
Always proof check for typos and grammaticals by reading your copy as a print out. You’ll see more mistakes that way. Then proof read for sense and readability on screen, because that’s where everybody else will read it.
Keep it short
Bored yet?
*deliberate mispelling. But you knew that anyway.
The best keywords in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) pose a great challenge to ordinary mortals with regular websites. How can you or I possibly complete for a keyword phrase that gets 100,000 searches per month in Google?
The plain fact is, we can’t. To compete for a top keyword you’ll need…
- A well-established website with thousands of web pages
- New unique and original content added daily
- Content of sufficient quality to pass Google’s human inspectors
- Thousands of links into your site
- Links to a variety of pages in your site
- Links from sites with high PageRank and Trust
Most websites have none of these things, and never will. To make matters worse, most of the “how to do SEO” articles do nothing more than tell you to get all 6 of the above.
So what is a small business owner to do, if s/he wants to get to the top of Google?
I suggest you focus on getting quick wins. There are a number of good reasons to do this, but the main one is that you’ll experience SEO success within 10-20 days. This is especially useful for beginners.
For a start, give up the idea that you’re going to get to page one for a heavily contested search term. Instead, refocus your efforts on keywords that…
- Have a lot less competition (e.g. 1,000 searches/mo)
- Are highly targeted (e.g. battersea dentist versus dentist london versus dentist)
You can probably get to page one for such a term in 1-2 weeks. Once you’ve achieved it, find another keyword and focus on that.
Doing SEO Keyword Research is one of those things that sounds difficult, but is actually very easy. Click the link for a one-page quick-start guide that explains everything you need to know.
Once you’ve settled on a particular keyword, it’s time to optimise for it. The easiest page to get to the top of Google is your site’s homepage. However, if your keyword naturally sits inside another page on your site, optimise that instead.
Content Optimisation is something anybody can do. You can find a brilliant beginner’s guide to SEO on the site I’ve just linked to. It includes links to many excellent guides, tools and SEO resources.
So there it is in a nutshell. Pick an achievable keyword phrase, and focus on getting to page one for that. Then pick another achievable phrase, and apply it to another page on your site. In 6 months time you could rank in the top 3 for 25 keyword phrases that collectively attract 25,000 searches per month.
This is almost certainly more useful than getting into the top 3 for a single keyword phrase that attracts 25,000 searches per month. Why? Because each of your terms will be highly focussed, and take people to a well targeted page designed to receive its own term. This greatly increases your chance of converting a visitor into a lead.
Google’s PageRank is a number from zero to 10. A new site (such as this one) starts life with a score of zero. Over time, this score will tend to rise in value. Here’s how Google describes PageRank (as at 20 November 2009)…
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
It all sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it? Especially as Google go on to give valuable clues about how to acquire PageRank…
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.
In addition to the above clues, you can find a lot of detailed information that explains how to earn PageRank all over the Internet. And until recently, I didn’t really question what I thought I knew about PageRank. After all, when I put in the effort I tended to see the results I expected.
Then I read an interesting blog entry on SEOCO. This article essentially accuses Google of punishing the web’s leading SEO sites by deliberately suppressing their PageRank scores.
Of course, I have no idea whether or not this is correct. Yet a quick look at the 4 sites in question shows they have the things normally associated with high PageRank…
- A lot of inbound links from external sites with high PageRank (i.e. many votes from important sources)
- A lot of well optimised and relevant content (from an SEO perspective)
- Deemed by professionals to be the best resources on the web for their specific areas of interest
For an example of this last point, type PageRank into Google. The #1 site on the list is Wikipedia, a source of unimpeachable knowledge (ahem). You won’t find SEOMoz on page one, despite offer over 1,000 PageRank-related articles. Faced with a choice between Wikipedia and SEOMoz, I know who I’d turn to when I wanted up-to-date and useful information about PageRank.
All 4 sites mentioned in the article have relatively low PageRank given their status. Could Google have some undeclared beef with these sites simply because they help people to understand search engine optimisation? And if so, why on Earth would the company take issue with such sites? What else does Google have issue with, and what am I missing out on as a result?
The single most important tag in SEO is the HTML title tag. The content of this tag is used by Google for at least 2 purposes…
- To allocate keyword phrases for which your site will be indexed
- As a headline that appears in Google’s results pages
For example, the lead generation site ASureImage has the following title tag: Lead Generation – Online Marketing – SEO – ASureImage
Take a look at what appears in Google for this site…
As you can see, Google is using the text in this site’s title tag as it’s headline. What’s more, Google is using the meta description as it’s description for the site.
This alone tells us the title (and meta description) tags are important. When you add in the fact it uses the words in the title tag to index the site, it’s clear it has a big role to play in content optimisation.
