Building links remains one of the single most important strategies when it comes to SEO. Links provide Google with in-roads to finding your content and they suggest to Google that your content is high quality.
Google looks at links as referrals or as testimonies or votes, and if you have lots of links pointing at your site from high quality blogs, then it will suggest that those blogs thought your content would provide value to their users.
But creating links is not so easy. Google will ban any site owners that are found ‘buying’ links, link swapping no longer works, and Matt Cutts has even warned against over-reliance on guest posting. And anyway, if you’re a small site, then you’re likely to find that a lot of other websites won’t want to link to you anyway!
So how can you go about getting those links?
Simple: you post something on your own website that is so incredible that it moves a huge number of your visitors to share it for you. This is called ‘link bait’ and it is the very best way to build a genuinely organic links profile.
What Makes Great Link Bait?
So how do you create link bait?
The first tip of course, is to make sure that your content is unique, interesting and well-written. Think about the kind of content that you would share. Would you share something that was badly miss-spelled? Or that was only 300 words long?
If you don’t have the necessary writing ability to create top-tier content, then hire someone to do it. And if you’re going to hire someone, pay them enough to ensure it will actually be up to a good standard.
But making great content is not enough. There’s a good chance you have already been filling your site with high quality posts and you still haven’t seen many links appear on forums or other blogs.
So What is the Missing Ingredient?
Again, it comes down to reflecting on what makes you post links or share content. And often, this comes down to communication. Normally, we refer to other links when we’re trying to educate a reader or someone on social media or when we’re trying to back up an argument.
This means that you can benefit from writing content that will serve as a comprehensive guide to a particular topic. If you write a text all about how to raise testosterone and you cover every method and all of the technical language, then future articles might refer to your guide.
Likewise, if you write a post that is controversial and uses studies and logic to refute a popular viewpoint, then your article might be used to back up arguments by those who agree with you.
Sharing as a Form of Self Expression
Finally, acknowledge that a lot of people will share your content actually as a way to express themselves. We are all narcissists and we love using the web to tell our friends and family what we think and who we are. Write blog posts that are aimed at a very specific type of person and you’ll find they want to associate themselves with them! Don’t try and please everyone, or no one will care enough to share!
