A DigitalPoint forum post today about Google AdWords for link building prompted me to write this post. While the idea suggests that advertising on the Google AdWords content network can add incoming links, which is not true despite some backlink searches displaying some AdSense ad’s, it is possible to use Google AdWords to promote linkbait.

Linkbaiting is a very effective method of creating quality content with the sole purpose of building a significant quantity of inbound links. These are generally distributed by creating a buzz through viral marketing and social bookmarking websites such as Digg.com and StumbleUpon, with the traffic generated helping to attract users who may find your content interesting enough to add a link to an article, for example, on their own website.

Using the same method, you could use Google AdWords to target users with the potential to add natural links to your website by promoting quality content as linkbait. Buying AdWords traffic may sound like an expensive method of promoting linkbait, but with many SEO companies charging in the range of $5,000 to $50,000 for linkbaiting projects I would expect PPC promotion for linkbaiting to become more popular in the future. This can especially be cost-effective if cheap keywords can be bid upon to heavily promote linkbait over a short period of time to help to gain more social bookmarking votes and promoted stories to send even more visitors to your content.

In order to make sure you maximise the amount of traffic from linkbaiting it’s important to careful select your title’s so that the anchor text of incoming links can help your site to rank highly for competitive keywords in the search engines once the buzz has died down. Here’s some more linkbaiting advice from Google’s Matt Cutts.

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Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.