Building Backlinks Tip 5: Linkabait

Backlinks is what a site needs to perform better in the search engine rankings and to be able to compete in the SERPs of search engines once we are done with the on-page optimization of our site. To learn SEO better first we need to understand how search engines work, thanks to previous seo experts we now know that backlinks with our desired anchor text from a related website to ours is what search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo give value (each of these search engines have its own way to determine the value of a backlink). So we continue with the building backlinks series (maybe should of have created a category for this, but would not make sense).

Link bait

Since SE’s give value to backlinks it has became a must to have backlinks in order to perform better in the SERPs. The nature of backlinks has changed over the years, I remember when I first was linking to another site on my very first site was just because I would find that information useful and rather than copy it on my own site would prefer to link to the exact URL, this is what we call natural linking or linkbait.

To build a quality linkbait campaign we first have to build a good, unique and rich of informations content that people will like. If people like your informations they will most probably be happy to link back to your site. But to create a successful linkbait campaign you also need to have the reader audience that reads your blog, the more readers read your quality post the more chances you get to get people linking back to your post.

What happens when you don’t have the right audience that reads your blog? Most probably you are reading and partecipating in communities that are owner by bigger guys and to a certain point they know about you and you know about them. In case they don’t ready you on daily basis like you read them, you can always drop them an email when you have a interesting article published or a top story that you think they will like it. If they do, most probably they are going to share that story and link back to you (sometimes Is really cool to be one of the first that shares a new story). This same thing happened when I wrote about a guy going to jail for googlebombing and ranking his presidents profile URL for a offensive keyword. I felt this story was going to create some buzz, but I did not pushed it too far I just sent one email to Aaron Wall “Sheesh this guy goes to jail for googlebombing”. It did not took long, apparently Aaron liked that story and posted about on his blog linking back to my site.

The sweet part, Linkbait as conveyor chain
Featuring on a popular blog such as Aaron Walls gives lots of advantages. Apart the amount of traffic that link brought to my site (and I was stupid enough not calling for new RSS subscriptions or even submit a new post the day after) it also created a buzz of backlinks on my seo blog. The article was grabbed and added to Sphin and Digg from some other users, a decent amount of backlinks was built from readers that found me through Aaron Walls SEO Blog and I was like a happy kid with a new toy.

The total cost
In money the cost of that link bait was 0 (I actually benefited for some decent clicks on my adsense), in time it was less than nothing according to the benefits I had and the amount of traffic I received.

Tell me about your successful linkbait story, I would love to hear.

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