Getting better at this linkbait stuff!
There are many effective methods of linkbaiting such as creating quality content people can’t help but link to, causing controversy, or as I found this week being the quickest with the latest news. My post last Thursday was the first to report the new Google AdWords account snapshot dashboard, prompting many blogs, such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable, to link to the story. Some of the blog links can be found on Technorati and MSN and the large spike in the Alexa stats graph below shows the increase in traffic from this story.
The Linkbait Traffic Effect
This also seems to have already had a positive effect on search rankings with top 10 Google results for Google AdWords manager, AdWords manager, Google AdWords account manager, Google AdWords account, Google AdWords blog, AdWords Blog, PPC Blog and Google AdWords promotional code.
I find linkbaiting very interesting as it’s a great method of gaining large quantities of relevant inbound links for very little effort, in this case a 10 minute blog post and a couple of forum threads to promote the story. SEO has evolved a lot over the last few years and thankfully linkbaiting seems to have replaced the laborious task of submitting to directories. For this reason alone linkbait is a better use of time, but the quality of links can also be much greater with lots of related inbound links embedded within a blog post as opposed to one link amongst many on a directory listing page which may not be as relevant. Of course there are still some such as DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory which are worth submitting to, but maybe the days of submitting to hundreds of directories for hours is over with the use of linkbait and article writing becoming more common.
With a bit more practice and a few more successes I might be able to offer my linkbait services sooner than I expected!
That is so cool. We are an SEO/SEM firm that specializes in building quality links for our clients. Seems more and more we are ending up basing everything on a link bait project. Just add it to our Search engine marketing services!
Comment by IMAutoPilot — November 15, 2006 @ 5:08 am