Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

Paid links have and will continue to be a major issue within the search engine optimization community. However, although Google continues to condemn any paid link that doesn’t have the NoFollow attribute attached to it, are members of the search engine optimization community currently ratting each other out?

Although it’s obviously not completely conclusive, Patrick Altoft from BlogStorm recently ran a poll asking visitors to his blog whether or not they report paid links that they find.

So, what conclusion did Patrick’s poll give about the search engine optimization community’s stance on reporting paid links? The results are below, and I am happy to see that the majority of the community does not feel the need to rat each other out:

* No - 72%
* Yes - 17%
* Not yet but I probably will - 11%

As you are already well aware of, the issue of NoFollow has received a significant amount of attention over the past year. From Wikipedia adopting NoFollow for all of their outgoing links to Google giving their ultimatum that the NoFollow attribute should be applied to any paid link, everyone within the internet marketing community has their own opinion about the issue of NoFollow.

The latest step in the NoFollow saga was the adoption of the NoFollow attribute by TechCrunch to any links within posts to their sponsors.

As noted by Andy Beard, it’s quite interesting that TechCrunch decided to adopt this policy.

As noted by Andy Beard, it is interesting that TechCrunch decided to adopt this NoFollow policy. Just over a month ago, TechCrunch wrote a post defending their position of not using the NoFollow attribute on their sponnsored links after Ted Murphy wrote a post criticizing them.

Although its not clear whether TechCrunch made this decision on their own or were directly suggested by Google to do so, it is definitely an interesting development in the ongoing story of Google and the NoFollow attribute.

Although link exchanges are not the greatest type of link that you can obtain for your site, they can still be valuable in moderation. However, the process of exchanging links can be time consuming. Fortunately, if you have a WordPress blog, you can automate the process by using the WP-Backlinks plug-in.

Once the plug-in is installed, it adds a widget to your sidebar which contains a form that your visitors can use to submit a link. When a link is submitted, the plug-in will spider the other site for a reciprocal link. As long as it finds one, you will have automatically made a successful link exchange.

Many of you have probably used SXC in the past. In case you haven’t ever visited the site, it is a huge royalty free stock image web site.

In addition to getting free images from the site, you can also easily get free links.

To do so, visit the site and pick a picture to incorporate into your web site. Once you’ve added the picture to your web site, simply visit the page you downloaded it from and leave a comment with a link to the page you used it on. Not only will you get a link from SXC, but in many cases, when the author sees their picture in use, they will also link to your web site from their blog or web site.

1) Your title is everything!

One of the major goals of link baiting is to get picked up by popular web sites in your niche. No matter how great your content is, if you don’t have a good title, your odds for being successful are extremely small.

When you’re trying to come up with a title, take some time to come up with something that will GRAB any reader’s attention.

Examples (all of these articles made it to the front page of Digg):
-The Most Hated Comment on Digg
-$35 For a $0.29 Overdraft? Why I Hate Banks!
-Grandpa dies 31 times in one day and lives to tell about it.

2) People love lists and step-by-step guides

Web 2.0 is all about social networking and processing information as fast as possible. Gone are the days of people reading long, drawn out articles online.

Top ten lists and how to guides are extremely popular because they pack a lot of information into a quick read.

Examples:
-10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page
-The Key To Being Anti-Social - How To Deal With Diggs, Slashdot, Delicious, etc.
-The majority of the posts on Lifehacker

3) Write about a buzz topic

The internet is a fickle place. What’s hot today will be old news in three days. Use tools like Technorati to find a hot topic that fits the subject of your blog or web site.

Examples (at the time of writing):
-Harry Potter
-Ron Paul
-iPhone

4) Don’t be afraid to push the envelope

Controversy can be a great tool for link baiting. I don’t recommend launching a personal attack against anyone, but if you can write about something that is going to stir up lots of debate, then go for it!

Examples:
-Accusations of Google Funding Terrorism
-Trump the Chump
-Your Chances of Getting Laid Through Craigslist

5) Be yourself

When you’re writing, don’t try to imitate the style of others. The people who are most successful with link baiting are those that let their real personality shine through. You want to write like you’re having an individual conversation with every person that reads your content.

Before you can start this process, you need to follow the step-by-step process for finding web sites related to your own.

Step One: Visit the first web site on the list that you created above and find a page that would be useful to your visitors.

Step Two: Once you have identified the page, find the page that is most relevant to it on your web site and add a link.

Step Three: After you have added the link, find the page on your web site that you would like the other web site to link to.

Step Four: Now, figure out which page on their web site is most relevant to the page you selected in step four.

Step Five: Once you have picked out the last two pages, it’s time to send the web master an email. Here’s a sample of what a quality link request looks like:

Subject: Great Article About (Insert the Subject of the Article You Linked To)

Message: I found the article you wrote at (insert URL you linked to) and liked it so much that I linked to it from my site at (insert URL where you put the link). I was also reading (insert URL you want them to link from) and thought your visitors might want to read more about that topic at (insert URL you want them to link to).

Step Six: In general, I wait approximately two months for a response. After that, I check the web site once, and if my link was never added, I remove the link that I added for them.

Step Seven: Although this is a quick process, it can help your search engine rankings immensely. If you can take five minutes each day to send out one email, chances are you will be pleasantly surprised at how many new links you have after just a month.

Although reciprocal links do not necessarily carry the power that they used to, they can still be used as a part of a well-rounded link building campaign.

The main problem with most people’s reciprocal link building efforts is that they don’t focus on quality. Instead of carefully evaluating and selecting websites that will benefit them the most, they simply post a message in a forum and trade links with everyone that responds. When you are working on obtaining reciprocal links, here are three things to keep in mind:

Quality over Quantity: Reciprocal links from three quality websites will help you much more than reciprocal links from ten low-quality websites. You should always carefully evaluate a website before asking them to trade links with you. If you need a free, easy to use tool to help you do this, I highly recommend the Website Analysis Tool. Simply type the URL of the site you are evaluating into this tool, and you will be able to see detailed information about the site, including PageRank, the number of inbound links according to the three major search engines, Alexa rank and much more. This is tool will allow you to separate potential link partners from the low quality sites you want to avoid.

Make Sure the Site is Relevant: When it comes to reciprocal links, the more relevant the site is to yours, the better! The reason for this is that through the search engines eyes, it is much more natural for two related websites to link to each other than two websites in completely different industries to link to each other.

Avoid Trading Sitewide Links: Nothing screams reciprocal linking to the search engines than sitewide links. Additionally, link pages are just as useless. Instead of these outdated techniques, you and your partner should link to each other from within the content of your websites. Once again, since the goal is to appear as natural as possible, this will ensure that you receive the maximum benefits from your reciprocal linking.

Even though one-way links are still the most effective way to improve your search engine rankings, reciprocal links can still be valuable when selected properly.