What Are Link Baits Anyway?

Before starting, we answer the question – why does link baiting get hated on anyway, and why the negative connotation on this tactic. It’s important to understand that the tactic, in its most fundamental definition, can refer to any content that is created to attract plenty of links. Looking at this fundamental definition – it does not connote any negativity or positivity—just yet.

What makes a link bait positive or negative is how it used and how the technique is classified. Like a powerful artifact from fantasy films, link baits can either be used for the side of good or evil; it all depends on who uses it. A link bait can be an excellent piece of content that took a number of weeks or months to create or compile, or can be something posted right away, attempting to be something shocking, outrageous, and downright bad. These are the basic extremes of link baiting.

Aside from these two types of link bait, there is a third type, which is a non-link bait. This is a type of content that is called a link bait, but is apparently not as outstanding as the first two types. This third type is usually incorrectly termed as link baits, and is satisfactory at best – and even while comparing it to negative link baits, this type of link bait is the worst.

Why? Because it pretends to be a link bait and seems like one, but it isn’t at all, hence does not provide or produce the desired results of that are generally generated by link baits.

So, Which Is an Excellent Link Bait?

Now that we have the third version (or the pseudo-link bait out of the way), the question is, what makes excellent link bait? Well, most people usually condemn negative link baiting – but people continue to glorify quite a number of distasteful things and content. At the same time, we commend the practice of positive link baiting, but positive content sometimes fails to take off and generate interest.

So, what makes a link bait excellent is not its negativity or positivity. It’s more of how the content is responded to. So, even if we do complain about a negative link bait—those people who get angry about it and respond to it basically link to it, making the link an excellent one in its own right, because it has achieved its goal. People may get angry over a piece of content, may find it disgusting and anything similar – but they will continue to share it, feeding the system.

Positive link baits, on the other hand are of course, better. But that’s only when they generate the desired links. You’ll know a good link bait when you see one, because it’s insightful, inspired, creative and well-thought of. However, the thing is, both positive and negative link baits can get the same amount of attention.

Who Gets to Judge Excellent From Not?

In the end, it’s up to us readers and linkers to choose and decide what’s actually good or not, and this comes in the form of distinguishing the good from the bad. If the content is simply common and mediocre, it’s not a link bait at all. It is just content. If the content is derogatory, insulting, inflammatory and the like – then it’s negative and it’s not worth sharing at all.

And if that piece of content is well thought of, creative, inspiring and the like – well, you know what to do .

Before, PageRank was a metric used to gauge a website’s popularity. If a website had more links from authoritative sources, its PageRank soared, regardless of the relevancy of those pages. This made the task of link building quite easy. Any newbie webmaster can just get links every month or two, observe PR improvements, be satisfied, get links again, and so on and so forth.

Now, the situation has changed. If PageRank was updated consistently then, it is randomly updated now. There are even instances where PR is updated every 3 or 5 months, and even in a year or more. This makes data less relevant than it used to be in terms of how your site is measured. When Google does see your PageRank, it could have either gone up or down. Based on experience, the correlation between PR and placement is approximately .07, which indicates that in terms of being a critical metric, PR is relatively low.

With this information, is it safe to discount PageRank when on the lookout for link partners or websites to link to? No. Logically, PageRank still has some value in terms of link building because it was at one point what Google’s algorithm was entirely based on. However, in order to weigh the value of PageRank in SEO, it is necessary to understand how it is used now.

It is important not to totally cross out PageRank. Instead of framing it as a critical metric, let’s consider it a “collateral metric” for your link building campaign. This means that:

• If you want to look for a site to post or buy links to, you can still review the PR. It’s still a perfect measure of a site’s quality. You can view a site that has a high PR as a strong website, but this doesn’t mean you have to decide to link to it.
• It’s also good to check a website’s historical PR. Before deciding to get a link from a site, ensure that the site’s PR is consistent. A site whose PR changes constantly may be prone to link manipulation and not a good site to link to.
• Of course, it is important to review the relevancy of the content of the website you want to link to. It is better to link to a PR0 webpage which has highly relevant content than a PR5 site with irrelevant content.
• Always remember PR is not the sum total of a site. Look at the weight of the site and not merely the PR.

The important thing in running any link building efforts is to not be tied down to one metric. PageRank is a metric that was relevant then and remains important now to a certain extent. However, you need to look at other metrics as well as basis of your inbound linking efforts.

1. SMBs focus on relationships
Any seasoned SEO practitioner would know that link building is really about building relationships. You have to devote time to introduce yourself to the influencers in your niche and convince them that your site is worth linking to. Many people think link building is soulless but it really boils down to human relationships. And isn’t this is what small business owners are all about? Large company executives do not focus on micro-level relationships and they are not as committed to making friends out of customers as small business owners are. Connecting with people is not merely an idea in the world of small business owners—it’s a century-old practice! An effective link builder looks for organic connections with people; this is why link building is tedious and often time-consuming. But the trait of dealing with others and building rapport come naturellement to the small business owner. This makes link building and owning a small business a natural fit!

2. Access to both offline and online networks
If there is one thing a small business owner can do better than anybody, it’s the ability to network. They are master networkers because it is a must in their trade. Potential customers abound in community events, volunteer organizations, local schools, universities, and local chamber of commerce. A regular small business owner carries a long list of contacts built through the years. Some just don’t get that in this borderless world—that offline contacts are potential online contacts, too. Their online presence can be a foundation for link building activity. So whether you have contacts in the local school, community organizations, or your local chamber of commerce, there is a great chance these people have sites or Facebook pages. As a small business owner, you just need to grab the opportunity to get a link back to their site when you transform an offline contact into an online one.

3. SMBs Attract Local Coverage
National broadsheets and media outfits can only accommodate few content, angles, or stories. Local online media however, have plenty of space to feature stories, faces, and places that have a local flavor. SMBs can take advantage of opportunities to receive media coverage when you launch a new product, host a unique local event, or have a local perspective of national stories. The media is always on the prowl for useful and easy content. This is one of the ways you can secure inbound links.

These are only three reasons why SMB owners’ fear of link building is unfounded. Truth be told, small business owners are already link builders in their own way! They just don’t know it yet.

With the demand for efficiency and economy becoming more prominent at present, link builders and website developers have discovered a strategy that combines the functionality of widgets with the purpose of link building.

Widgets Vis-à-vis Link Building

Widgets are simple applications that are embedded in websites to add visual appeal and serve a purpose or another. They can vary from simple games to weather forecasts to calculators. They can be simple buttons, drop-down lists, dialog boxes, selection boxes, menus with scroll bars, etc…

Backlinks to websites can be included in the widgets themselves. For example, you can include blog feeds from authority sites. This will also give you an opportunity to offer your widgets to related websites.

Unlike ordinary advertisements, widgets are more useful and are therefore several notches above the common website décor. Web masters will be more reluctant to let go of attractive and functional widgets. They therefore have higher chances of being retained in your partner websites than plain links.

Important Pointers When Using Widgets for Link Building

The first rule in using widgets for link building is to be straightforward about where the widget link is headed. Deceiving people will only backfire; web surfers hate it when links are not what they appear to be. People will eventually learn to avoid your widgets and not be bothered by irrelevant links.

Widgets inherently have simple codes, which is great since it will be quick to load and won’t affect the loading time of the web page where it is embedded. If you are creating your own widgets, bear this in mind. Another thing: use HTML or any other programming language that search engine bots can recognize and crawl.

There are services offered online dedicated to creating widgets. You may want to hire one if you intend to proceed with using widgets for link building. Having widgets custom-made will ensure that your widget is unique, has the right keywords and anchor text you need for effective linking, and possesses all the qualities appropriate for your website.

Submit your widgets to widget directories. People who are intentionally looking for widgets will have higher chances of finding yours than if they have to search for it through normal search engine inquiries.

Why Widgets?

Seeing as how widgets can effectively capture the attention of website visitors, why not use it for link building? This way you have a higher chance of drawing people’s attention to your backlinks. The visual appeal of widgets also serves as additional advertisement for your website.

What’s great about them is that you only have to copy their codes, paste them on the website, and voila! The widgets will be up and running right away.

You’ll know your widget campaign is successful when people can finally recognize its connection with your main website. For instance, the widgets for social networking sites and file sharing services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube are already so popular that all you have to do is display their respective logos and people will readily—even unconsciously, sometimes—click on them to utilize their links and functions.

When your widgets encourage the same action from website visitors, you will get higher traffic to your website with the possibility of decreasing bounce rates. Those who choose to click on your widgets are already apprised of what they can find in your main website—they may even be truly looking for what your services, products and website content are too.

This is why monitoring incoming links is a worthwhile activity. Monitoring your links is simple: check your links on a regular basis, record figures, and map out the growth of your links over time. Doing this will give you a good grasp of your situation where links are concerned. Of course, the more important thing is not just peer at your numbers but to act upon them. You have to build lots of links, as many of them as possible.

When we say lots of links, how many links would that mean exactly?

Like business planning, the number depends on how many links you want to target. When we talk about targets, we mean realistic and short-term goals that are achievable. So how do we compute how many links need to be targeted? There is no surefire formula but targets don’t come out of a vacuum, either. When we talk about links, our basis of measurement will always be relative to that of another site. For instance, we may say we have “lots” of links but this number may be “very few” relative to another site. This would depend on the nature and the competitiveness of the niche. Fortunately, SEO practitioners have tools that can help us generate realistic targets for our link building campaigns. Some of these tools include Link Diagnosis (powered by iAcquire), Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, and Majestic SEO. All four tools have different processes in computation and will generate slightly different figures. This is because the system of indexing itself is quite arbitrary. Nonetheless, each of these tools can be used in order to establish realistic link targets.

What’s better is that to the trained or observant eye, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer or Link Diagnosis can be used to check out the competition. Strategic advantage in the SEO industry also comes from gathering intelligence and information on your competitors. Analysis of your competitors’ links can be done by looking at the raw numbers of the links and the linking domains of your rival sites. Looking at these figures can also give you an inkling of what realistic targets you might want to set for yourself.

Start weighing the competition by knowing who they are first. You need to differentiate who your competitors are in the “virtual” world from those in the “real” world by poring over the sites that currently rank for keywords you’re already targeting. As far as link building goes, the sites that inhabit your desired spots are your genuine competitors. After you finalize your roster of competitors, just plug each site to your preferred link checking tool and get the numbers for analysis. Sites that occupy the top position in terms of number of links and linking domains are your true rivals.

To find those valuable links for such opportunities, here are some highly valuable link traits that you may consider useful.

•    Links that connect with a targeted audience. They need to be relevant so that the audience will find the link contexts convincing enough to click on them.

•    Links that deliver traffic continuously. Links that have great value send targeted traffic daily. Normally, traffic from such links comes in small quantities, but it eventually builds up. This is due to the linking page ranking highly or earning its own relevant links. 

•    Links that are on a promoted, shared and reliable page. These links go on a page that the publisher markets and shares through email newsletters, or by their social media connections.

•    Links that provide “brand juice” to your website. Such links put in a good word for your site, which in turn make it worthy of an “As Seen On” label or something that you can brag about.

•    Links that direct visitors to a conversion or other significant brand interactions. While home page links deserve credit, having a deeper page that can result to a sign, a sale or a conversion that has the potential to grow into a sale soon after is more important.

•    Links that are positioned through your trust/relationship/reputation with the publisher. To establish yourself with several people in your market more or less results to simpler link building.

•    Links that are followed and have targeted anchor text.

Keep in mind these qualities to find significant links. Make this your own guide to getting better link building opportunities for your business or website to grow, rather than a strict set of rules to follow for link valuation. Of course, you should likewise take into account your business goals, as well as that of your clients’.

Ethical SEO: High Quality Paid Links and Building Link the Organic Way

A great way to build inbound links is by creating relevant, original content. You can gain links by sounding like an authority in certain fields. This can be done by creating text that entertains and contain informative details and resources. In addition, make sure to use inbound links because they provide votes from other websites.

Another way to create inbound links is by publishing excellent, search engine friendly articles or press releases. Scraper sites can identify many of these links, and other links may show up on news websites, blogs and social media networks.

One more tip involves making an external blog and using it to add links that point back to your website. This tip is very helpful, especially if your blog contains useful information and is popular.

Lastly, consider companies that offer links for advertising purposes or for gaining Web traffic. These companies specialize in this kind of SEO service and shouldn’t be confused with companies that build links for manipulative purposes.

Services and Link Building Methods That are Best Avoided

Constant contact with the SEO services provider is very important. As much as possible, stay away from companies that don’t have direct phone numbers and other contact details. Transparent SEO firms are those that return and answer their clients’ calls. Another thing to note is that if the company is located in another country or continent, you may make a lot of overseas calls.

Of course, it’s important to check the company’s website. A website is great for doing a background check. If the company website isn’t updated and only contains an online contact form, consider moving on to another SEO services provider.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines contain invaluable tips that can truly help with building links. While Google’s guidelines are worth the read, the tips suggested above addresses issues that you have yet to encounter.

Link building methods that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines can significantly hurt a website’s search engine ranking. Remember this guide to stay on the safe side.

Although most of you might already be familiar with the existence of such signals, most of you have various perceptions as to what those signals are and how these signals can be changed, manipulated, or at times misunderstood.

One of the main things that often lead to confusion is the fact that there are over a hundred signals to consider. Moreover, these signals may also change and their level of importance may also vary. The changes and the difference between these signals can be confusing for a general web marketer whether he/she specializes in link building or not.

One particular search engine signal that can confuse a lot of web marketers is the level of importance of a link’s age. There are people who assume that old links are better than newer ones. Although it is only logical to assume that a link found in an older site is more relevant especially if the site predated the biggest search engines like Google. This only makes sense because the links placed in older sites have totally nothing to do with increasing pageranks. During those times, links were not yet used to improve a particular site’s search rank. Although that is a reasonable argument, it is still wrong to generalize all types of old links. Not all old links should be regarded as having high value simply because not all sites are reliable. Age alone does not guarantee the link’s quality. You must consider that there are a bunch of SEO link builders who do buy old sites to gain control of the links embedded in those pages.

Therefore, instead of focusing or giving more importance to a link’s age try looking for additional signals that will conveniently clue you in on the quality of the site where the link is posted as well as the site where the link points to. A link’s value, regardless of how long it has been on a site, depends on who created the site’s content as well as to the main reason why the link was placed in there.
 

-    Submitting Your Site to Authority Directories

Though there are plenty of directories, not all of them can give a good ROI. For directories, one should at least try to submit their links to big players like Yahoo!, Best of the Web, JoeAnt or Business.com. These directories have been proven to generate quality backlinks that actually help in the campaigns of their customers.

Directory submission can cost quite a lot. But once you get through, you can expect at least a respectable return on the money you spent. One thing to remember, directory submissions are not for websites that are still being constructed. Submitting an incomplete site is a sure way to get your application rejected.

Moreover, since getting listed is actually a privilege, you may not be able to refund the payment you made.

-    Actual Outreach Activities

This may not be a usual SEO strategy but it still is a legitimate avenue in establishing a connection with your customers. The only important thing here is how you will be able to translate your outreach into online customer traffic.

You can orchestrate outreach activities in many ways. The most common of these is through giveaways and/or promotional sample products. You can offer a free sample on your website just to entice some visitors in clicking through your online ads. You can also employ agents who will help promote your business by making phone calls and the like.

-    Web Content Publishing or Link Baiting

The most traditional way of building a link network is through web content publishing. Visitors click through a website maybe because it was first on the SERPs. What makes a website sit atop the rankings? Excellent Web content. Publishing quality web articles can be time consuming but it definitely is the surest way to life your website’s ranking and rep.

You can produce your own articles but for most companies, especially the bigger ones, hiring an external partner to produce the content may be the best way to go. This strategy is definitely more time and effort consuming but it is one of the most natural ways of acquiring backlinks.

You can use other tools though as link baits aside from web articles. You can use viral videos, graphs, photos, comic strips, and many more. You can post ads of your company in reputable and high-traffic websites.

-    Link Buying

Though a very common practice nowadays, link buying is a link building strategy that has been discouraged. However, many companies, especially some start-up ones, that turn to paid links just so they can jumpstart their link building campaigns.

Several businesses online offer their services for a fee and guarantee a certain number of backlinks back to their customers’ sites. The downside of this strategy mainly comes from the fact that you never really know where the links are coming from or if they are even relevant to your site.

Some of these paid link companies even give out spam links. These will definitely not help your campaigns. This dangerous possibility is the prime reason why this strategy is inherently flawed. You are better off sticking to strategies that will get you quality links in a natural way.

Link building requires time and effort. Do not hesitate to invest your time and a little bit of your funds to your campaign. The returns of your effort may dwarf everything that you spent to make it happen.
 

The SEO industry is no different from any business: quality is still the main focus rather than quantity. Search engines put emphasis on the quality of the links that on your site rather than sheer volume. If you can strike both quantity and quality links at the same time then link building will be a breeze for you.

If you do not know what to be wary about, there are plenty of potholes your link building campaign could be mired in. Here are some of the common ones:

-    Buying or selling links

Some people have already made legitimate businesses out of buying and selling links to people. However, most search engines (especially Google) frown upon this trade and consider this an easy way out of the whole link building process.

Many of these link-selling businesses advertise that their service will only be costing a very affordable price while helping your website achieve higher ranks in the SERPs. Most of these sites are fraudulent. Yes, they do offer a certain quantity of links to your site but sometimes most of them are from sites with bad reputation, which can impact your site in a negative way. Your website can even get banned by search engines in the process.

-    Getting links from sites with bad reputation

In the process of link building, this is just as bad as paying for your links. As a rule, never link to disreputable websites. The link building process is like a popularity contest: the more websites link back to you, the better as it means more sites are considering you as an authority. However, if the majority of those voting for you are unpopular themselves then the volume of “votes” you got is irrelevant.

You want to make sure that your website has links to—and from—websites that are also authority in the eyes of search engines. In this way, web crawlers can at least get the hint that your site has quality content since it keeps the company of sites with good reps.

-    Linking to sites with low PageRanks

Similar to linking with websites with bad reputation, low Page Rank sites have the tendency to pull you down in the search engine rankings instead of pulling you up. In the process of link building, it is better to get links from sites that have pageranks equal to that of your website’s.

The progress that your website makes is dependent on the links it contains. Also, outbound links—provided they are relevant to your content—are good too; the more you link to sites that have higher PageRank, the better for your campaign.

-    No Follow linking

No Follow Links can be used in order for your website to avoid being linked by disreputable sites. They can also generate traffic for your website. However, in terms of search engine rankings, No Follow links are irrelevant. Inbound links are important where SERPs are concerned but ones with the No Follow attribute are worthless.

-    Linking to sites that are not in your niche

Aside from Page Rank and link authority, niche relevance is also one thing you should consider. Backlinks are relevant if they talk about the same topics as your site does and are something that your visitors will deem relevant. Search engines are rather meticulous about this so it is very important for your link building endeavor.

-    Spam links

Commenting on various websites is one way of getting quality links. More often that not however, experienced webmasters delete comments they deem as superfluous; they know search engines sometimes consider unnecessary comments as spam.

Though it is unlikely that spam links will affect your overall page rankings, it is relatively ineffective and a waste of time.

-    Not getting your keywords as anchor text

Anchor text plays a critical component in the whole SEO process. You should always try to insert your keywords into the anchor text of each link that points back to your site. When negotiating with other webmasters, indicate what anchor text you want to have in the backlinks. Choose the best keywords.

Any serious webmaster need to pay serious attention to the link building process if they are to achieve success in the SEO sphere. The whole thing requires diligence, patience, and wit in order to strategically place your site and increase its chances at ranking high in SERPs. Like any businesses, success in the SEO field will depend on how much time and effort you are willing to invest in this important aspect of the game.