This article will consider five pieces of linkbait and analyze what they have in common in an effort to help you design better linkbait for your own site, and thus help you garner links, traffic and sales.

By Pandia Guest Writer Gabriel Goldenberg, SEO ROI

If you’re a reasonably well-read SEO, you’ll have heard of linkbait.

If you haven’t, linkbait is content (text, audio, video, free software, etc.) that is likely to attract links, and lots of them. In that sense, it can be described as viral.

The five pieces of linkbait that will be considered here are SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 Awards, Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox plugin, Jason Calacanis’ expressions of hatred towards SEOs, Neil Patel’s Beginners’ Guide to Digg and Website Auction Hub’s site appraisal tool suite.

(Disclaimer: I planned/proofread the appraisal tools with George Papp, owner of Website Auction Hub. But I see no reason why only the big boys of search engine optimization should get some free link love.)

Choosing An Audience And Understanding It

Online as offline, you need to communicate with your audience about what interests them. When politicians visit a retirement home, they speak about health care for seniors.

If you’re going to capture the interest of your audience, you should research the topics that resonate with them. Looking at blogsearch, site archives and industry hubs will give you a good idea of what people are talking about and what they like talking about.

This is why SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin emphasizes the need to please the linkerati so much. He sees in them every SEO’s choice audience because they have blogs and they know how to use them!

The Web 2.0 awards aimed for all the techies who love mirror-imaged, round-cornered, aquafied designs and social media. The
Firefox plugin clearly addressed the SEO community’s love of productivity tools. Neil Pattel told Digg about, well, Digg (and maybe told some SEOs and SMOs too).

And if you’ve ever bought or sold a site that was more than just a domain, you know that getting an accurate valuation for it is half the battle. (Convincing potential buyers that your 3-month old funny quotes site is really worth five figures is the other half.)

Talking About Your Target Audience

What goes around comes around. Talking about your target audience (the people you want links from) and linking to its members’ sites is frequently a good way to get that audience to link back to you.

There are two explanations for this. First of all, people are narcissistic - it’s normal human behaviour to love yourself and having others talk about you tends to feed that love.

Obviously, saying good things about others is more likely to get you a link back than if you just say something neutral. (We’ll look at negative comments further in this article.) By linking back to you, people can show how important they are. SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 awards, Calacanis’ virulent outbursts against SEOs and Neil Patel’s Digg guide all have this in common.

In the first case, Rand Fishkin and his Mozarellas talked about the Web 2.0 crowd, or what Rand likes to call the linkerati. Your average 2.0er has his/her own blog and isn’t stingy about links. Better yet, they (lately it’s been feeling more like ‘we’) love to think about how cool their group - comprised of other Web 2.0 folks and themselves - is. That’s a recipe for links.

In the second case, Calacanis dissed a group of people - Search Marketing Experts - who make a livelihood from blogging and trade in links.

Naturally, a certain number of SEOs responded (albeit with much more poise and tact than Jason had) and their responses included links so that readers could understand the context of what they were writing about.

In the third case, Neil Patel wrote a guide that discussed one of the most narcissistic web communities around - Digg.

According to SEO Blackhat, a story about Digg made the Digg front page about 1.5 times a day (554 times in a year). And as most of you reading this know, making Digg’s front page means links from the Digg community (and maybe a few dozen visitors).

(I’ll slip in a fourth mention for this new bit of linkbait I’ve just seen: the SEO Dream Team. Great idea to get links from authoritative SEOs!)

Giving Something Useful Away

All of the sources cited above besides Jason Calacanis’ screeds share this trait.

The Web 2.0 awards give away outside recognition that enhances credibility. Anyone that won an award is guaranteed to mention it on their site because it makes them look good to their readers. The more credible you are, the more you’re perceived as some kind of authority and the more people will want to do business with you.

The SEO for Firefox plugin is a beautiful little gem that helps SEOs quickly assess the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword.

It provides a large variety of very useful data such as domain age (although this seems to be acting a little wonky lately; I’ve seen a few “2002″ registrations that were quite new), number of incoming links, Wikipedia presence etc.

SEO services are often priced in relation (partly, at least) to the quantity of labour required, and this tool speeds up finding out that information.

Neil Patel’s Beginner’s Guide to Digg explained to newbies what Digg was and, more practically, how its algorithm works. If you know how the algorithm functions, you can rank your submissions accordingly. So beyond just the Digg community that really diggs Digg, this also reached a second audience of internet marketers with well-written, actionable information.

The Website Auction Hub suite of tools help people with appraising web sites. WAH is a niche forum that aggregates site-for-sale listings from around various webmaster forums and other sites. So these tools help the membership get a better hold on the value of what they’re selling/buying.

Initially this was also to be complemented by a Dane Carlson type “My blog is worth $XX,XXX” badge that collated the total value from the five tools, but this wasn’t done for reasons known only to the site owner.

Effort and Depth

With the exception of Calacanis’ linkbait, all the others put considerable effort and time into producing their linkbait piece.

Speaking personally from my experience helping to plan and develop the Website Auction Hub tools, I can tell you that hours and days and weeks went into them from the time I first laid out the idea to George Papp, to my writing of the articles that served as the theoretical basis for each tool.

Between the articles and the emails with George about developing the tools, I easily wrote over 10,000 words.

Consider SEOMoz’s methodology in creating the Web 2.0 awards:

“Our team reviewed hundreds of sites in the Web 2.0 sphere to uncover the best in each of 41 categories. From there, we assembled a team of 25 of the most knowledgeable, well-respected experts in the field to vote on the winners.”

The main page and the What is Web 2.0 page rack up just under 10,000 words alone - beyond which there are interviews and all the background research that was invested in creating the awards.

From having had a conversation with Aaron Wall when the SEO for Firefox plugin was in development, I know that a lot of time and money went into production.

There was the idea, fleshing it out, coding, debugging, display issues, etc. And the truth is that it really displays a wealth of information to satisfy even the biggest research-freak SEO.

While the number of words in a document is not necessarily tied to its quality, there is a general positive correlation between the effort and time invested in its production - things that are tied to its quality - and the number of words it has.

But regardless of word counts, my point here is simply that if you put in the work, your linkbait is much likelier to be successful.

Summary: Give Away Deep, Useful, Targeted Content That Appeals To Your Audience

To conclude, your linkbait should have four fundamental characteristics. Give something away that’s useful. Better yet, make it useful to a targeted audience. Better still, make it useful in a way that interests said audience. And put a little effort into it!

I’d also like to make a comment on Jason Calacanis’ form of linkbait: controversy. He did it by insulting SEOs, did it by offering to hire Digg, Reddit et al’s top users and seems to enjoy the medium. Personally, I count him as part of the background noise as far as that kind of behaviour goes.

And you’ll notice he’s the only one that didn’t get a direct link to his site (it goes to a Google SERP), because even with NoFollow, there’s some benefit to the receiving site in Yahoo and MSN.

Finally, you’ll see that even though I no longer work with WAH and haven’t spoken to George or Dane in a good several months at least, they’re still people I respect and like. So I’m giving them links here for free, as a way of returning some old favours.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but like I told Marketing Sherpa, SEO is about networking. And it’s really important for general link-building. People who know and like you are much likelier to link to you than those that aren’t. (Tying that back in to linkbait, if you take the time to comment and build relationships with some of the bloggers whose sites you’re targeting beforehand, your linkbait is much likelier to succeed.)

About the author

Gabriel Goldenberg founded SEO ROI in May 2006 to offer premium search engine optimization services to mid-size companies. If you do web design, development, programming, affiliate marketing or provide other web-oriented services, he encourages you to contact him about his private-label outsourcing services (he’ll do the SEO, you offer it to clients with a markup).

He has been cited by Marketing Sherpa, published on BrandCurve.com, and offered a job in SEM at Microsoft. He writes on local SEO.