Content is your most important asset in link building. Leveraging
your content—together with your users and online networks—can lead to
scalable link acquisition and some exciting results.1. A Closer Look at Content Syndication
The concept in content syndication is to develop content with the
intent of publishing it on someone else’s site. In return for providing
the content, the author gets a link back to her site. This is a
legitimate strategy in the eyes of the search engines because the site
is endorsing the content by accepting it, and the return links are an
acknowledgment of that endorsement.
It is also often possible to get targeted anchor text in this
scenario. Be careful, however, because if the anchor text is unrelated
to the article itself, it will not comply with what the search engines
want publishers to do for link-building techniques.
There are a couple of important points to watch for when
syndicating content:
The publisher should strive not to distribute articles that
are published in the same form on the publisher’s own site. Search
engines will see this as duplicate content. Although the search
engine’s goal is to recognize the original author of a piece of
content, it is a difficult job to do perfectly, and it does happen
that the search engines make mistakes.
When looking to distribute content published on a site, the
best practice is to rewrite the article, add some things to make it
a bit different in structure and in its material points, and
syndicate that version of the article. One way to do this is to take
a different angle on the discussion within the content. Therefore,
if the site publishing the syndicated article ranks high for key
search terms, it is not a problem for the author’s site.
If you must syndicate the exact article you have on your site,
have the article link back to the original source article, not just
your site’s home page. That will serve as a signal to help the
search engines identify which version is the original.
When considering the syndication of content, it makes sense to
study the site’s content needs and then custom-tailor the content to
those needs. This practice maximizes the chances of the target site
accepting the article.
One variant of content syndication is to generate articles and
then submit them to article directories. Many of
these types of sites exist, and many of them are, frankly, pretty
trashy. But there are good ones as well. The distinction between the
trashy and good ones is relatively easy to recognize, based on the
quality of the articles they have published. Many of these article
directories allow publishers to include links, and these links are
followed. Table 1 lists
some that are worth considering
Note that even if these do appear to pass link juice, some of them
may be disabled on the back end by Google, but there is no way to tell
which ones. For that reason, it is best to focus on whether the article
directories themselves appear to be of value. This maximizes the chances
that the search engines will value them as well.
In general, though, search engines are not going to punish a
publisher for putting an article in these directories, and many of them
may provide somewhat helpful links. However, this is not a high-value
activity, so although you can pursue it, you should probably not make it
the focus of your link-building efforts.
2. Leveraging User-Generated Content
Providing users with ways to contribute content directly to your
site can be an effective tactic. There are many ways to do
this:
Open up a forum on your site
One of the biggest challenges with this strategy is
achieving critical mass so that active discussions are taking
place on the site. This typically requires a substantial amount of
traffic to accomplish, but in the right situations it can become
an activity for developing interesting content with little
effort.
Launching a blog and inviting third-party contributors
One of the best ways to do this is to contact respected
members of your market space and see whether they would be willing
to make written contributions to your blog. They may do this
simply because they would like the exposure, or you can pay them
for doing it.
More selectively inviting third-party contributions
A blog platform may be more than you want to do, but you can
still ask respected members of your community to consider
contributing articles to your site.
Of course, the contributed content does not need to be an article
or a post. You can seek out photos, videos, cool new tools—anything that
may be of interest to users.
With each of these strategies, one of the big questions is whether
the method for contributing content is open, strictly controlled, or
somewhere in between. In other words, can any user come along and post a
comment in your forum? Or do all users have to have an editorial review
first? Editorial reviews may significantly reduce spam attacks, but they
are a barrier to the development of active discussions.
In the case of forums, engaging discussions can attract links. For
an example from the world of SEO, Search Engine Roundtable is a
frequent linker to discussions in the WebmasterWorld Forums. The
key to this is the critical mass of discussions that take place on these
forums.
The reason the tactics involving third-party authorship can result
in links is that most people have pride in what they have created and
want to show it off. As a result, they will have a tendency to link to
their content from other sites where they contribute, or their own
website.
It is a good idea to make this easy for them. Provide sample HTML
that they can use, or badges that confer the value of recognition—for
example, a badge that says something like “Valued Yourdomain.com
Contributor,” or “Contributing Offer.” Only people who are authorized
contributors are allowed to post such a badge, so it becomes an honor to
be able to do so.
3. Creating Link Bait/Viral Content
Link bait is the term that some use to refer
to the notion of creating content for the specific purpose of acquiring
links. The content is published on your own site or perhaps on another
website, and it is compelling enough that lots of people link to it.
Such content can take a couple of forms. For example, it can be content
that is designed to provide enough additional value that people will
want to reference it.
Other popular methods are doing something controversial, something
funny, or something that simply draws a strong emotional reaction. Each
market space has some hot buttons, and these buttons can be pushed with
an opinionated article.
3.1. Coming up with link bait ideas
It is easy to come up with content that people will want to link
to, but it does take some effort to come up with the right kinds of
ideas. Here is a four-step process for coming up with and picking
ideas:
Write down everything.
Just collect any and all ideas that come to mind. Do not
censor or edit yourself during this phase; take down every idea no
matter how bizarre, idiotic, or farfetched it may sound.
Break down your ideas.
Once you’ve squeezed every last drop of creative juice from
your head, it is time to filter everything out. It is a good idea
to break down each idea (no censoring or editing yet) into its
Concept and Content components. That is, what is the format
(Concept) for the suggested link bait (tool, widget, top 10 list,
how-to guide, blog post, etc.) versus what is the subject
(Content) of the suggested link bait (Wii, iPod, PPC ads, pigs,
celebrity weddings, etc.)? Separate these into two lists.
Evaluate the content.
Ignoring your Concept list, critically evaluate your Content
list. Are some ideas time-sensitive? Can some wait for a relevant
piece of news to complement them? Are there ideas you’d really
like to write about? Are there ideas that can go into storage for
a dry spell?
Mix and match.
Once you’ve prioritized the content, you can mix and match
it with your Concept list. No story/content is beholden to the
original format in which you brainstormed it. Is your story
something that might make Digg? Then consider the concepts that do
well there: top 10, how-to, and so on. Can it be interactive?
Perhaps a tool or poll concept would be effective. By marrying
your priority content to the most appropriate concept, you can
optimize the effectiveness, reach, and novelty to your intended
audience.
If you use this process or something similar, you’ll probably
notice that you quickly generate a handy repertoire of concepts. Once
you have these down, you can turn virtually any random idea that pops
into your head into link bait.
3.2. How far should you go with link bait?
Most folks in the corporate communications, PR, and legal
departments shy away from anything potentially controversial, and for
good reason, right? But then, why would a company selling life
insurance online dare to venture into the taboo topic of weird and
disturbing death trivia? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
But that’s exactly what Lifeinsure.com did with its link
bait article, “The 19 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Death”
(http://www.lifeinsure.com/information/19-things-about-death.asp).
With such goodies as “After being decapitated, the average person
remains conscious for an additional 15–20 seconds,” you can imagine
how much of a hit the article was with the irreverent alpha geeks that
make up the Digg community. The article made it to the Digg front
page, which in turn got it in front of countless bloggers and social
bookmarkers.
Surely the success of this article in attracting links has
contributed to Lifeinsure.com’s impressive Page 1 ranking for
life insurance that it maintained for many
months. Not surprisingly, though, this contentious article is nowhere
to be found in Lifeinsure.com’s navigation hierarchy, so customers and
prospects are unlikely to ever stumble across it.
Potential linkers also love a good corporate citizen, so be one.
Consider such activities not as an expense, but as an investment that
will generate a return in the form of links. With Second Chance Trees,
social media marketing agency Converseon created a charitable
initiative using internal resources and expertise that could have
otherwise been utilized for billable work.
The idea was to create an island in Second Life where players
could purchase a virtual tree with Linden dollars and plant it. This
would then trigger the planting of a real tree of the same species in
an ecologically sensitive region, such as a Central or South American
rain forest. For a charitable endeavor, the payoff was huge.
High-value links came from news outlets, the blogosphere,
organizations, and elsewhere.
Do not be afraid to be bold or off the wall. You do not always
have to toe the corporate line. If you’re thinking that this will
garner links that aren’t very relevant to your business and industry,
you’re probably right. But remember that one component of PageRank is
topic independence. Tests we performed show that high-PageRank-endowed
yet topically irrelevant links still help, and they can help a lot.
Definitely still work to acquire topically relevant links as well, but
do not neglect the off-topic ones too.
3.3. Encourage link bait to spread virally
You can extend the notion of link bait distribution by creating
something you can pass around. For example, a hilarious video clip
might be passed around via email. Provided you make it easy for people
to determine the video creator (presumably your company) and to visit
your site, this type of campaign can garner a lot of links. Be aware,
though, that if you host the video on a video-sharing site such as
YouTube, most people will link to YouTube and not to your
site.
