Link Bait and Life 2.0
Being an internet marketer and social media guy (I know it’s become such a buzzword) lends itself to parody quite often. I came across this satirical spoof on YouTube poking fun at the development of Web 2.0, and had to pass it along to anyone who could use a good laugh.
I love the line: “We are at the forefront of capitalizing on a social network that is even larger than MySpace. We are about to tap into real life.”
Besides the hyperbolic effect and comedic relief, I believe there is certainly some link bait quality to it too. For anyone new to the term, link baiting is when you strategize your SEO and search engine marketing plan by creating easy and effective opportunities for acquiring backlinks to your site. Zeke Shore, who wrote, directed, and produced Life 2.0 got his link bait right here in my blog.
Generating backlinks on top-level pages, like an index/home page, should be a primary focus for search engine marketers, but not their only cause of action. Google has always been eager to see both quality and quantity of backlinking, but other search engines like Yahoo! and Bing do not weigh backlinks quite as heavily. With the growth of social media there is a plethora of ways to get the link to your homepage out to highly ranked pages.
Here are some basic link bait strategies:
1. Create a WordPress, Firefox, or Chrome plugin/extension and distribute it free of charge. When the plugin is activated a backlink will be automatically created on the user’s homepage.
2. A viral video teaser like Life 2.0 that prominently displays your site’s url at the beginning and end. If the clip has mass appeal and can drive traffic to your site, provide users with exclusive access to the full video as long as they place a backlink or send the video to ten friends.
3. Set up a link exchange on your site. I am an advocate of what Matt Cutts at Google calls page sculpting, only accepting links from a homepage with a page rank above a certain level. All other links would receive the rel=no follow attribute otherwise. If you use WordPress check out WordPress Link Directory by Sean Bluestone.
Believe me, there are far more creative ways of getting backlinks to your site, one of which is building your brand on the web in a variety of places all funneling back to your homepage. If that was not enough for you here are 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity, but remember to always follow the golden rules.
Ahh, you can never take life too seriously.
Have some SEO success stories you would like to share? By all means comment away!
Feel good.
By Dustin at
In SEO, Social Media, Web 2.0, View Comments