Getting links from other websites is regarded as a very important part of any SEO strategy.
Because that’s how search engines find your site.
Getting links from other websites in the same niche as your site is thought to be even more important.
Because that’s how search engines figure out whether your site is regarded as being truly relevant to your chosen subject.
Getting links from other websites by asking them nicely is viewed as a necessary chore when trying to build your website’s link profile.
Because it can be a laborious task to locate and research appropriate sites from which to request links. Or, if you’re a spammer, it can be equally laborious to send out those hundreds or even thousands of “Dear Webmaster” emails.
Getting links from other sites by writing a piece of content that they find so compelling that they’ll want to reference it in their own posts and include a link to your site is a great way to develop a natural looking link profile for you website.
Because this type of content will work it’s way around other sites in your niche as more people discover it and link to it from their own sites, spreading like a virus and building more links to your site as time passes. The ultimate goal when creating any piece of linkbait is to have it “go viral” but remember, it’s not just about getting links. It’s also about getting more traffic to your site through those links.
And then it’s about keeping that traffic by coming up with more compelling content so that people will keep coming back to your site (and hopefully keep linking to it).
And that’s the problem I’m having right now.
When I started this site my plan was to spend some time building up the Beginner’s Guide, gradually developing it into a useful resource for people wanting to learn about WordPress and SEO. I’ve had a few ideas for linkbait, but I wasn’t planning to start pushing on that front until after I’d built up a wider range of content for the rest of the site.
And then I wrote a post about why the SEO World is like High School. I just thought it would be a funny little, throw-away post to help fill a gap in my posting schedule while I complete a series of posts for the Beginner’s Guides. I certainly didn’t plan for it to go viral the way it did and it came as a complete surprise to find that I got mentioned in the weekly round-up posts on both the SEOmoz and Bruce Clay blogs.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about all this attention, I’m just surprised to have been noticed for what was just a joke.
Although, in hindsight, I think the fact that it was a joke is the main reason why it was such a successful piece of linkbait.
I guess all the SEOs out there that I listed for the various High School personas got a kick out of seeing themselves described that way and the joke just spread as everyone passed the link around on Twitter, reaching far more people on their lists of followers than I’ve got on mine, extending the reach of the post way beyond anything I would have expected for it.
It may not have been intentional, but I’ve learned a lot from this and given that the whole point of SEOpsCentre is Learning by Doing that seems like a big win to me.
But it does mean that it feels like the pressure is now on to keep coming up with link worthy content so that I can build on this accidental success and not let it go to waste.
Does anyone else out there suffer from this kind of linkbait performance anxiety?
