Google has made the getting of links pointed to your website essential for ranking in their search engine, because of this it is essential to acquire quality links and the more the better. Some websites buy links from other websites, but Google have said they will take action against manipulation of the search ranking through the purchase of links, although things get a little fuzzy though when you start defining what it is to actually “buy a link”. Buying links of course does have it’s own problems, which can be discussed at another time.

Which is why linkbait can give you an edge in your online marketing strategy. If you are looking to reduce your monthly PPC spend and boost your organic listings then linkbait is absolutely something you should consider.

This all sounds great, but before you put your linkbaiting skills to work, there are some issues which should be covered.

What is linkbait really about?

It’s simple really, linkbaiting is all about getting other people to carry out a job, it’s as simple as just persuading them to link to the web content that you want to direct them to.

It’s less to do with programming and search engine optimisation and more to do with publishing. It’s a particular kind of publishing that works with tabloid newspapers, billboard adverting, the front covers of current magazines and if you are old enough to remember the fantastic album covers of vinyl records. I can hear young 20 something’s a bit confused and thinking, “but I thought all music came out of an iPhone”.

Attention

It’s all about how much attention you can get and so many users of the World Wide Web are now able to surf at the speed of thought enabling them to travel to anywhere on the web in a few short clicks. You need to get them to pay attention, stop them in their tracks and consume what you have to offer. Naturally if you have a great headline this could do it, but niche relativity and of course domain context are highly important.

You really need to engage a company who are passionate about their web design and SEO. Get this right and you are on your way to running a successful website.

I thought it would be a great idea to do a spot of shopping from the comfort of my own home.

She has already compiled a little list of gifts she would like. In theory this should have made my job a lot easier.

Some of the clothes whe wants are from a website that is new to me.

In all honesty a lot of websites still concern me, especially if they don’t have a contact telephone number on show.

Nevertheless I decided to plough ahead and put in an order for the 2 items she wanted. I opened an online account, placed my items into the basket and then proceeded to the checkout.

This is where alarm bells started ringing as the security padlock at the bottom of the right hand corner of the page showed that my credit card details would not have been secure if I had submitted them.

I sent the company an email asking for their telephone number so I could place my order over the phone. That was 2 days ago and i still haven’t had a reply to my email.

Unfortunately for my daughter this all means that unless I find the time to visit the store, she won’t be getting her presents as I am not prepared to put my credit card details onto a non secure website.

I would expect if you are paying for a website to be built you would ensure all aspects of web design are covered. This isn’t just about getting a few items on a website. You have to ensure people can find your website amongst all the millions of websites out there. This will involve engaging a company who are brilliant at Search Engine Optimisation. However this would be a waste of time of you don’t ensure your website security is correct.

All potential customers will need to ensure that your website is secure and unless you can guarantee this, you will be loosing sales. Make sure the company you choose for your website design want your business to succeed just as much as you and get it right from the outset.

The gaming world is probably the most competitive niche in SEO – esp poker and casinos.

There is no secret sauce as there used to be e.g. with old link networks beingburned. Rob shows a graph of search volume and est clickthrough

888 vs William Hill – #1 and #4 respectively. Both are similar in terms of optimisation, but it is their backlinks that separates them. Rob uses a similar way as David Naylor to rank links according to their anchor text, class C IPs and other metrics such as PR.

Once you have dominated your particular market, as an example casino in the UK, why not think about branching out into other countries, for example France. Use backlink comparison to look at a few top ranked sites in France. Main conclusion is use a subfolder NOT a subdomain – with a subdomain your authority is starting from scratch. With Google Webmaster Tools you are allowed to register a subfolder to a different country. Rob expanded on this more in the Q&A – it is much easier, quicker and cheaper to use a subfolder on a generic TLD to rank for really competitive keyphrases in different countries, compared with building up authority from scratch on different (sub)domains.

My summary:

This was an excellent session as expected with such top class speakers, all so experienced that if you let them talk for any amount of time there’s going to be valuable stuff for anybody who is into Search Engine Optimisation to soak up. The major problem is that with the timescale the speakers are receiving, they have to cram a shedload of great ideas into a few bullet points. It’s easy for it to go over your head and I’m knackered trying to get it all down! Needless to say I’ll be checking out the slides when they’re released and chatting to the speakers in the pub if possible!

I’m not sure what the next big conference will be about, hopefully they will have one dedicated solely to Web Design in the not too distant future.

Besides software, there are two other ways on how to build a simple website. The first is coding html by hand and the second and easiest way is to register a .tel domain. I’ll explain both and let you decide which one to proceed with.

The first solution – HTML

If you’re writing the coding yourself, you’ll have to first purchase a domain name and find a good web hosting service. After you’re done with that, edit the nameservers at the registrar and replace them with your own nameservers. Then, you use an FTP software to upload your website to the host.

The most basic code consists of an html tag, a head tag, then a body tag. Inside the body tag, you input your content and place any images or links using the img tag for images and anchor tag for links. After you are pleased with your web page, the body, head, and html tags need to be closed. It may be somewhat difficult to grasp at first, but you’ll get the hang of it in time.

Creating a simple website can be easy if you are somewhat knowledgeable, but it can get a little confusing if you are learning from the ground up. Another solution is to get a .tel domain. This is without a doubt the easiest solution available.

The second solution – .TEL

With a .tel domain name, you don’t have to worry about web design or hosting. All you need to do is register your domain name like yourname.tel and log into the telhosting control panel. From there, you use the forms to type in your the information that you would like to show up on your simple website. There’s already a template for your domain and all of your information is hosted on a DNS server without additional cost instead of a traditional web hosting server.

While building a simple website with HTML is not complicated, it could take time to learn. If you’re not too worried about your site looking fancy and just want a way for your customers or friends to reach you online, I suggest going the .tel route. You’ll save money by not having to pay for webhosting and save time by not having to work with HTML. In fact, your .tel site should be up and running in minutes. This is definitely easy web design taken to another level.

It’s also about identifying those who link, what kind of content do they link to. It’s the current market that goes to define the content. You may think you have the idea, but the truth is that your readers will decide what you will publish and your idea will come from researching the space. If you haven’t taken the time to research your market, then the liklihood is you will fail miserably.

Distribution

You then need to ensure that the content is shown to as many potential linkers as is possible, and the nature of social media marketing can assist you with this but a powerful online network is of paramount importance. This is a brick wall to those who have no access. This can be resolved by taking the time to build up a network, or buy the very people who have built that particular network.
It’s important that when planning your linkbaiting strategy, you realise that there are specific skills involved when creating something worthwhile. It would seem that for successful linkbait to work, there is always an element of simplicity that makes the whole creation look simple. In reality when you are trying to create something that looks to be so simple, it can actually be quite a complicated series of actions.

To create linkbait, this three step process should be followed

1. Find who links
2. Discover what they link to
3. Show the linkers the content

Successful linkbait must contain the following elements:

1. Attention grabbing
2. Entice the reader to consume the content
3. Instil a reason for the reader to share content

Linkbait is not a sales message whose intention is to get you to buy a particular product. The purpose of linkbait is to simply get you to link by using a range of emotional triggers. It’s a well known fact that we are not known for our rational buying, rather that we buy emotionally. Linking is no different, it must reach the linker and trigger the correct emotional triggers.

If you have discovered that your online marketing has way too few links, then linkbait as an element of your whole plan could well be the answer to your problems. It has to mesh with your other online marketing elements such as PPC, Search Engine Optimisation, link buying, blogging, article writing, social media, etc. Of course having a brilliant website in the first place will help and if you get your web design just right, it’s a good beginning.

It is vital that it should in no way be detrimental to your branding plan of action. Naturally the whole tone of your linkbait should never be detrimental in any way to how your brand is perceived. So if you are a bank and you want to create a piece like, “Great Gadgets Bankers Buy with their Bonus”. In the current climate it doesn’t sound like a good plan at the moment. Although I am sure it will get the banks links, linkbait should not be about links at any cost.

Where there maybe blank pages showing up, it would be great to create a script to find these and straight away send off an alert email to the team asking them to create content for this blank page. I like this idea.
Use JS/CSS # solution for paginated pages – all pages are loaded as one page, avoids duplicate content cannibalisation for page 2,3,4 etc.

Use microformats on vacancy pages – make your listings stand out – the one specific to recruitment is called H-Resume microformat (in beta at the moment).

David Fairhurst from Intelligent Retail – Retail SEO

David begins his pitch by explaining how important it is for your visitors when planning your ecommerce navigational structure as most of the time users don’t want to be routed around the website, but get straight to the product they are looking at.The more usual model of a complex tree structure with upto 4-5 branches/categories before you actually find the products are really not the best way forward. To SEO this kind of structure you need to spend a lot of time injecting unique content onto each of these pages – a big time drain. This also creates a “content vacuum” where you have pages that just have links to other pages.These are low value pages to the search engines, especially because Google will only track individual bounce rates. These funnelling pages also don’t allow much cross-selling – high dropout rate, even up to 90%, and in the worst cases people start using internal Search instead – one step away from going elsewhere.

Instead – give visitors immediate access to exactly where they want to go – e.g. mega menus with loads of categories in the dropdown – sites like diy.com (B&Q) have switched to this. This gives you content heavy categories as standard and better opportunities for cross selling, but still options for refinements.The bottom line therefore equates to less clicks = less abandoment.

Of course if you choose the right company for your web design, they will always advise you on the best methods for your particular website

Just because you have a website up and running, it doesn’t mean people will automatically know where to find you. And yet, surprisingly, many first-time web entrepreneurs drop the ball at this point in the game. They assume customers will find them amongst all the other sites floating around in cyberspace, as if through some kind of psychic connection. But if you think about it, this type of thinking is very misguided.

It is the same with any business: customers won’t start flocking to your store unless you invest some time and money into advertising. Depending on your budget, you can either blast the trumpet really loud or toot the horn a little bit at a time. But in the end, you have to make some kind of noise in order to be heard.

But how do you achieve this in the vacuum of cyberspace? Or perhaps more fittingly, how do you make yourself heard amidst a crowd of other aspiring musicians all trumpeting their own cause? Obviously, online marketing is different from marketing a bricks-and-mortar business, so it’s important to know exactly where to begin. If you take the proper steps you will be attracting interested customers in no time.

The first step is to know your customer, inside and out. This is key if you want to be successful in your marketing strategy because you can’t market to potential customers if you don’t know who they are. For someone selling baked goods, targeting the “Carb-Haters of America” might not result in the profits you are anticipating.

Next, determine where you want to market your product. The Internet allows every new or expanding business the opportunity to reach a global market, but not every business is aiming for that goal. If your website is set up as one arm of your existing offline business, you might wish to target potential customers in your local area who also want the option of online shopping. In this case, integrate your website into promotional materials for your store so people will learn about the new branch of your business. Essentially, the efforts you make to promote your business outside of the Internet can be used to get your web address out there as well.

Internet Marketing

But of course, most people who begin an online venture are looking to broaden their customer base and attract a global clientele. There are several ways to start advertising online. Just remember: online marketing is always changing, and nothing works perfectly for every business. You might have to tailor a marketing plan to suit your company’s specific goals, or if Internet marketing makes your head spin, you also have the option of hiring a company to do the marketing for you.

Step one: register with search engines. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee hits to your site, and the promises many search engines make are usually more pie-in-the-sky than realistic, but it is still a necessary evil. If you have to choose, register with Yahoo! and Google, as the highest percentage of web traffic originates from these two giants. In the past, achieving top search results could be done for free; now you have to shell out some cash if you want to get top placement and advertising space. Yahoo! Express and Google’s Adwords program are two examples of this type of paid search engine placement.

Another way to get noticed is to participate in a link exchange. Simply put, this involves seeking out other websites that are related to your company or product in some way and asking the owner if he/she will post your link on the site. If the owner agrees, you offer to post their link on your site, hence the term “link exchange.” This is a good way to start advertising your site because it involves targeting the right kind of people (someone visiting a site already related to your business) and forming solid bonds with other websites. And the more links other sites have to your site, the more popular you become with the search engines, without having to pay for top placement.

Finally, don’t sit back and wait for customers to come to you. Be proactive and go directly to your clientele. Of course, this means you must know where to find them, but this sounds harder than it actually is.

For instance, many new businesses actually use eBay to source potential customers. It depends on what you’re selling, but if you know a lot of people looking for your product spend a good amount of time making eBay purchases, that might be a good place to begin and get your name out in public. Use eBay as a marketing tool – sell a few items for very low prices, get people on your email list and invite them to consider future purchases from your website. EBay is more than a place to sell goods; it can be used as a highly effective marketing tool.

Or, as mentioned above, make business connections with people in a related business. Pay to have banner ads displayed on other websites to help spread the word about your business. This will bring you closer to the people who make up your target market.

This is just the beginning when it comes to online marketing, but if you start off on the right foot and persevere, you will succeed.

Tip #1 Goal

First you need a goal when you are developing a website for your audience. If you do not know what you are looking to achieve then it will be very difficult to be successful. Also, it takes a goal to drive your website where it needs to be. A goal is what allows you to develop an initial plan for your website and helps guide you in developing your website as well.

Tip #2 Audience

Your audience is very important and should be considered in conjunction with your goal when developing a website. Basically, you are developing your website for a certain audience and these are the people that will help meet your goal so this is very important to consider. Just make sure you determine who your audience is before you begin developing your website.

Tip #3 Content for Audience

Once you have determined your goal and your audience it is time to determine the content that will be used for your audience. You might not realize it, but the type of audience you are focusing on will really affect the content you use on your website. So, make sure you have your audience targeted so you know what content will work best for these individuals.

Tip #4 Update

Another important tip for developing a website for your audience is to plan when you will provide updates. This might seem like something you could consider down the road when your site needs updating, but is really not the case. You need to know when your audience will most likely be viewing your site and when they won’t so you know when to provide updates. A little bit of planning will go a long way.

Tip #5 Format

The format of your website is also a very important aspect and one that will really affect whether or not you reach your audience. Once you know who your audience is you will have no problem developing a format that will reach them. Also, your format improves your site’s message, so it is beneficial in a variety of ways.