Google Wants You To Use Your Brains, Not Your Wallet

added November 7, 2007
Marcos Azaro is a Search Engine Marketing Consultant. He focuses onSocial Networks, Blogging, Community Engagement, Buzz-ViralMarketing and Organic SEO.

Linkbait has become a fundamental element of modern SEO. This is mainly because Google is cracking down on the Paid Links market and webmasters are resourcing to creative ways of developing link worthy content.

Linkbait remains the fastest and cheapest way to obtain an explosive amount of links in a short period of time.

The reason why Linkbait has become such an important pieceof the modern SEO strategy is because Google is cracking down on the Paid LinksMarket.

They have made it very clear that they don’t like SEOprofessionals manipulating their rankings by purchasing links. They wantwebsites to gain links due to the quality of their websites. Not the size oftheir wallet.

So taking this into account, the main strategy left toacquire an big enough stream of editorial links from other webmasters isnothing else than Linkbait Development.

Linkbait consists basically on creating link worthycontent that appeals to social media users and to bloggers (many times they arethe same group of people)

The idea is to create a viral piece of content that willmake other bloggers want to give you a link. To achieve this you need to followthrough a series of steps.

Basic steps to a successful Linkbait Piece

1.     Visit the popular social media sites such as Digg,Propeller, Reddit and Del.icio.us. There may be other more relevant to yourindustry.

2.     Look for content relevant to your niche that has been popularin the past in these sites. Understand why they have been so popular.

3.     Write your article. You can start with Top Ten Lists andHow To Articles. They are usually good performers on these types of sites.Funny and/or polemic articles also tend to perform well.

4.     Write an attractive headline. For example: “The Secret Of[your topic]”, or “How To Build [something related to your niche] In 10 EasySteps”. If you are not sure about this I recommend you do some research aboutHeadline Copywriting.

5.     Network. Submissions need an initial push in these socialmedia sites to become visible enough to the rest of the users.

When your submission becomes popular in one of thesewebsites a great deal of users will bookmark it and many of them (alsobloggers) will link to your website in the near future.

As a consequence your website will benefit from an explosive stream ofnew links that will improve its search engine ranking positioning.