SES:SJ – Link Baiting & Viral Search Success

Linking Track, Wednesday 1:30 – 2:45 PM
Link Baiting & Viral Search Success

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, Search Engine Strategies San Jose
Chris Boggs, Search Strategist, Brulant eMergent Marketing
Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz
Cameron Olthuis, Partner, Advantage Consulting Services

You know it’s going to be a good session when they start off talking about how to become a “Master Baiter”. That’s Rebecca Kelley’s contribution! Before you begin link baiting you need to do your research. Go to the social media sites you might want to target and perform a search for whatever it is you do. This can help see what others have done in your industry and how successful they have been. When you develop your content, use your keywords and be sure to meld in your viral elements with your branding. You can get a lot of mileage by appealing to people’s vanity… especially people more popular than you. (Rebecca, have I told you how cute you are?)

It’s important to manage your launch effectively. You can also use a successful link bait to gain some stickiness by making sure your nest posts is a worthy chaser. Link bait isn’t a success every time, and it’s not likely to hit your target audience. You’re looking for links here, not new business.

According to Cameron Olthuis there are five kinds of link bait: informational, controversial, humor, news, tools. link bait can get you links, improve your link profile, drive traffic, increase branding awareness, get you some social bookmarks and even garner some media publicity. Cameron echoes Rebecca saying that he does research by looking at the popular social media sites for your topic and see what’s going on.

When it comes to promotion to social media sites it helps to have a “power account”. Submit lots of good content that isn’t your own. Be sure to use good titles and descriptions, and not necessarily the same title of the content. Beyond content you can use flash games, viral videos, mashups, images, widgets and tools.

Jennifer Laycock talks more about the viral aspect of link bait. Viral marketing is much more marketing oriented than link bait because viral targets your audience for links rather than just linkers. This builds conversions along with links, not just links. Viral appeals to someone’s passion and creates brand evangelists for your company. Jennifer gave the case study from her The Lactivist blog and her run-in with the national pork board.

We got a rundown of how to look for site’s linking to you from Chris Boggs. Your link baiting helps keep links coming to internal pages, not just the home page. Make sure your links are semantically relevant to your site’s keywords… several degrees of separation is fine and dandy.