Do you ever wonder what it really takes to get thousands of links to your website with a small investment? Web developers use link building all the time, whether it’s in the form of countless directory submissions or guest posting. But link baiting is so much more powerful, as long as you know how to do it. People tend to associate link baiting with a “viral or fail” attitude — either a single piece of content gets thousands of links or it was a failure. But that’s not really true. Link baiting is doing what Google wants you to do, creating valuable content that people want to link to, even when you don’t ask them to.

But creating link bait is not as easy as filming your cat walking on the top of the couch, or writing yet another Top 10 Nobody Cares list. Fortunately, however, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

What is Link Bait?

Link bait is content, whether it’s an article, video, picture, widget, or infographic, that’s interesting to a large audience. It stands out as being humorous, valuable, or referential to your niche community. It’s also well designed (or sometimes, as you might find, very poorly designed) to attract attention. Best of all, link bait attracts organic links. While the power of link bait can be limited for keyword SEO (as people are not always going to link to you using the anchor text you want), it is the absolute best way to build authority to a “brandable” domain name. Look no further for an example than a site like Mashable.com.

It shouldn’t take long for business owners to realize the potential behind link bait. After all, almost every television commercial is designed to be memorable – whether it’s sleek, funny, controversial, or provides truly valuable information. Why should the concept be any different with online content?

It’s important to remember that almost any topic can become link bait, depending on how you treat the subject matter. For example, an article entitled “wireless providers in my area” is obviously meant to satisfy an SEO keyword need – but it’s not going to get many links on its own. On the other hand, what if you were to create a widget that matches a user with all of the wireless providers in the area based on their price range, location, technical needs, and housing situation? That could very easily become something people would want to share with others in the niche – link bait at its finest.

How to Create Link Bait

Now that you hopefully understand the power behind link bait, and how it can be applied to any business, it’s time to learn how to create it. Depending on your budget and technical/creative prowess, you might be limited at first – but that’s alright. There are plenty of ways to create link bait without needing to be an all-star content writer or a brilliant graphic designer.

Free to Cheap Options

Link Directories – These tend to be overdone, but I’m including them because they’re easy for anyone to create. Simply find a niche, like “hedgehogs as pets,” and compile a list of links to any sites that you feel have solid information on the topic, or a portion of the topic. Not only to people like to bookmark these pages and link to them, but the people you linked to in the directory may notice your “shout-out” and return the favor.

News-Worthy Articles – Follow Google Trends and news websites closely and create content based on that. Don’t just dryly rewrite the news stories – give them an intelligent, or humorous spin. For example, you might create an article called “The Downward Spiral of [Insert Celebrity]” which tells a story, and links to some major news sources for credibility.

Write Something Scary – Fear really does sell. While you won’t be making anything up if you don’t want to land in hot water, you can take a topic and apply a sense of urgency in an article, perhaps even warning consumers of a danger. Consider the topic “dog food.” You can easily get some clicks or links to an article called “10 Poisonous Chemicals Found in Dog Food” – at least more links than “How to Choose Dog Food.” Remember, don’t fabricate anything to get some links. But do look for information that others might avoid.

Getting on the Expensive Side

Create a Widget – Widgets are absolutely fantastic link bait if you know a programmer willing to work on the cheap, or if you have a decent budget. Widgets don’t fall under the typical umbrella of duplicate content like articles do. So, you have to get your widget out there as much as possible for it to become link bait. The idea behind the widget is to create a useful tool, like a calculator, that people will literally imbed on their blogs or websites. This, in turn, gives you countless links back to your own. We don’t need any more mortgage calculators by the way, but we could use a calculator to help determine how our daily meat consumption matches up to lions, tigers, and bears (oh my…).

Create an Infographic – If done well, and it should be, an infographic is also an expensive investment. Don’t use an infographic to add some pictures to your content – that’s a waste of time. Instead, use the graphics to literally become the content. You could create an inforgraphic listing the tallest mountains in the world with some pictures of mountains to the side. Or, you could have the pictures of the mountains be the data, like a graph. The key to making good infographics is to create them so every image belongs in the graphic. But keep the word count as low as possible – people don’t like to read paragraphs in their graphics.

As you can see, it’s not really all that difficult to create link bait. While you might distribute the content to some friends, the idea is that the majority of people will come to you – not the other way around. Make sure people know your content exists, but don’t force it. You’ll want to have some accurate data to see which efforts work and which don’t anyway. And remember, one solid piece of link bait is worth 100 forced links, every time.

It almost seems like there are as many SEO firms as there are small businesses on the Internet. They all tend to promise the same thing – number one rankings for your keywords in just a few short weeks. And some of these SEO firms actually deliver on this promise. Most, however, do not. If you do see your rankings shoot up for a few weeks, it’s best to be a bit suspicious unless there’s a clear explanation like your site structure was off, or the firm was able to get a search engine suspension or ban lifted.

SEO can be very complicated, and it can be fairly easy. Most SEO revolves around creating high quality content, and generating links to your site using intelligent anchor text. For example, you notice that the term CLEAR 4G is getting a significant amount of searches in Google, and you’d like to have your own wireless Internet site get a taste of some of that traffic. In it’s simplest form, SEO would involve obtaining some links back to your site with the anchor text CLEAR 4G. Obviously, SEO can and usually does get a bit more complicated, creating the need for SEO firms.

But the truth is that not every small business needs to hire an SEO firm. And, if you do choose to hire one, you have to be very careful that you don’t get ripped off. With all of the potential dangers that come from SEO, and the mystery surrounding many of the practice’s concepts, it’s quite easy for an SEO firm to destroy your online business. When you invest in an SEO firm, it’s important to understand the dangers, educate yourself on the process, and identify specific goals.

The Dangers of SEO Firms

Of course, the primary danger of hiring an SEO firm is that they may not be able to deliver the results you need to stay competitive. Worse yet, their efforts could end up getting you no results at all. As you likely invested a great deal of money in the services, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. But just how detrimental can they be? Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz.com published a post in 2007 outlining his take on the general range of SEO service prices, and came up with the following for mid-range SEO services:

• Consultation/Review of Site: $2,500
• Link Building: $5,000
• Keyword Research: $500
• Viral Content Creation/Marketing: $7,500
• Monthly SEO Services: $7,500

If you’re shelling out almost $8,000 a month for SEO services that are not effective in giving you a decent ROI, you might as well be flushing money down the toilet.

Of course, there’s another danger of hiring an SEO firm, and one which can be significantly more costly. In early 2011, the New York Times published a revealing report on the fashion giant JC Penney, following allegations that the company had illegitimately gained backlinks when they began ranking highly in SERPs for terms that had many confused, like “bedding” or “area rugs.” As it turns out, an SEO firm that JC Penney hired simply farmed out links from unrelated sites, some of which included topics like casinos and property rentals. Needless to say, a lot of money had to be thrown at the problem, not to mention the amount of money JC Penney was likely paying the SEO firm for such “incredible” results.

And the problems caused by poor SEO can follow your site for what seems like an eternity, with bad neighborhood links festering in your backlink profile like scarlet letters. Ignoring the initial cost of the service itself, how much time and money will you spend undoing the potential harm to your website. It’s likely to be far more than the SEO firm could have hoped to make off you. Fortunately, however, there are some things you can do to protect yourself from such dangers.

Learn a Little SEO

It’s not all that complicated to learn the basics of SEO, and we’re not talking about becoming a guru. The more you know about SEO, however, the better service you can hope to get from an SEO firm. If SEO is done right, it’s not a matter of the tactics being some big mystery. Instead, any meaningful SEO task takes a great deal of time – time you should be spending on other aspects of your business. Link building is an especially arduous task that is best outsourced to an SEO firm.

Learn how anchor text, content, backlinks, and basic site code all factor into your overall site. If you understand how keywords work, you might not even need to hire an SEO firm to perform a keyword report for your site – you’ll already have an idea of what you’d like to target. Better still, you’ll know if the SEO firm you hire is completely missing the mark when they deliver their first reports.

There are countless good articles on basic SEO, and a lot of very poor articles. Business Insider has a list of the 10 Basic SEO Tips to Get You Started that is a quick primer into the rudimentary aspects of SEO. Any articles on sites like SEOBook.com are also excellent resources written by one of the industry’s leading experts.

Outline Some Basic SEO Goals

Before you approach an SEO firm, make sure you outline some basic goals (another area where some small knowledge of SEO can help). They should be as tangible as possible. For example, don’t approach an SEO firm saying “I’d like to get more traffic to my site.” Instead, say “I’d like to appear on page one of Google’s search results for the phrase rubber ducks.” If you’re interested in building links, come up with a general idea of your budget, and what you expect to receive. Some SEO firms will charge per link, while others will charge a contract fee, sometimes splitting it into chunks.

If possible, outline what’s acceptable and what’s not. If you can, try to reserve the right to reject any links that you do not feel are legitimate.

As long as you have some basic knowledge of SEO, set some reasonable and tangible goals, and monitor the project closely, there’s no reason to fear SEO firms. But be aware of the dangers and be prepared to make changes if things aren’t going as planned. Your SEO firm should provide regular updates on their progress, as well as clear accounting for any bills they send. Keep your expectations reasonable, but don’t let an SEO firm gouge you for unnecessary services.

Webmasters often forget just how important structure is in a website. And it can be an easy mistake to make. You likely add hundreds of pages of content after a site’s initial launch, based on new keyword data or to just get some fresh content up for SEO purposes. But you can easily betray your original site plan, and make your site difficult to navigate. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the human visitors are the only ones that will have difficulty navigating your site. If your URL structure is off, or you have pages that are more than a few clicks from the homepage, Google may take notice as well — which will likely translate into lost rankings.

Why Website Structure Matters

One question that new web developers always seem to get wrong is “what do searchers usually click on first in search results?” The tendency is to repeat the mantra of “the first result.” But this is actually seldom true. Humans aren’t algorithmic robots. If the second result appears more relevant than the first, searchers will almost always click on it before blindly visiting the first result. In a perfect world, the first website on a SERP will be the most relevant page to a search query. This doesn’t always happen, however.

The same concept translates to your website. Every single portion of your site navigation needs to point visitors in the right direction, from the URL structure on down to your individual pages of content. If a site or page appears to lack relevancy in its structure, your bounce rate will soar. If you have a large site, think about how much content you could add before needing to change the navigation – 20%, 25%, 30%? A good rule to follow is that your site navigation is well implemented when you can add 30% more content without a navigation update.

Structuring Your URLs

Navigation is fairly simple to understand if you think about URL structure. Let’s say you have a wireless Internet service lead generation website, mywirelesssite.com, and a piece of content titled Compare T-Mobile 4G internet and CLEAR. As you can see from the page linked to that title, the URL structure is not what you might normally expect, or http://www.mywirelesssite.com/compare-T-Mobile-4G-Internet-and-CLEAR.html. Instead, the web developer shortens the URL to simply include /tmobile-vs-clear. This will ultimately allow for further subpages without the URL getting out of control. For example, the web developer might eventually want to add pages for each state – /tmobile-vs-clear/alaska or even city with /tmobile-vs-clear/alaska/anchorage.

With the original URL structure, the URL for the page could quickly get out of control. Use your URLs to quickly structure your website, not fit keywords into the address — this does nothing but overcomplicate things. With long URLS and poor site structure, your site will be difficult to index, and deep pages may likely not see a SERP for months.

To properly structure your URLs, create a simple spreadsheet that begins with your homepage in column A, mysite.com, for example. Next, think of all the primary navigation pages that you might have. On a business site, these might include services, locations, about us, contact us, and testimonials. These become your first extended URLs as:

• http://mysite.com/services
• http://mysite.com/locations
• http://mysite.com/about-us
• http://mysite.com/contact-us
• http://mysite.com/testimonials

If you were to flesh out one of those sections (we’ll use services as an example), your URL structure might begin to look something like:

• http://mysite.com/services/roofing
• http://mysite.com/services/painting
• http://mysite.com/services/scaffolding
• http://mysite.com/services/paving
• http://mysite.com/services/refinishing

Everything looks clean and simple, and it’s clear what each page’s relevance to your overall site is simply by looking at the URL. You could have done it the hard way with something like http://mysite.com.com/roofing-services. But, to a search engine, this looks like a whole new category in itself, and can get messy when it’s time to update content, update your navigation, or even switch up your design/coding.

Google offers some additional tips on URL structure, including warning site owners to not create URLs that are long ID numbers rather than easy to read words.

Addressing Physical Site Navigation

Take a look at the irs.gov site map. You’ll notice some fairly broad categories like “Individuals,” “Businesses,” and “Retirement Plans Community.” Not only are these clear in the site map, but you can locate each category in the top navigation of the site. While the site could still use some work on structure, and the site map is a bit out of date, you can see the main idea – just about every page on the site is two or three clicks from the homepage, even though the site is quite large.

With the Panda update, Google has placed emphasis on two major things – high quality content and intelligent site structure. The main reason why many theorists believe content mills are tanking in the SERPs is because they can’t possibly organize millions of pages to be only a few clicks from the home page because they were never really meant to be organized that way.

Structuring Content

The majority of Internet readers tend to scan content, not read it in its entirety. A study as early as October 1997 found that 16% of web readers read content word-by-word. Do you really think that’s changed in a social media era dominated by the likes of “teaspoon content” sites like Twitter and Facebook? This scanning makes it necessary to properly structure content to get the most important ideas to your readers as quickly as possible. Beyond using bulleted lists, lower word counts, specific (not clever) subheads, and highlighted keywords, you have to pay close attention to your page’s HTML structure.

It should go without saying that you should have an “H1″ or title tag for every page – this is important for structure and SEO. But you should also include 2-3 H2 subheads, and even an H3 for a sub-subhead. Just like the larger text helps break up content for readers, the subhead tags help search engines scan your pages faster, and determine relevancy more accurately.

Site structure really comes from careful planning, intelligent design, and a commitment to providing high quality, relevant content. Beyond some of the more technical aspects like using proper code and paying attention to URL structure, most aspects of a site’s structure should fall into place naturally. Remember that organization is paramount, and your site should be fine.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have to stop what I am doing to answer the phone while some stupid SEO tries to sell me his services. And too make it worst there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least two spam emails from some SEO company trying to sell me their services.

Since these guys have decided to drive me crazy I figured I might as well put their information to good use.

So here’s the thing, I am taking my SEO Watch Dog website and I will start doing website reviews for companies that either call or spam me.

If your website isn’t set up correctly then I would think twice before spamming me and since the statics for online SEO vs. Offline marketing look something like this.

1.  80% of consumers research online before buying offline?

2.   70% of people searching Google never click past the first 3 links?

3.   60% of all traffic on the internet is now video?

4.   YouTube is the #1 search engine?

Since you are calling me and sending me spam email instead of using the search engines to drive traffic to your business I can only guess that the reason for this is that you yourself don’t know how to market your own business online.

So you have resorted to offline marketing to sell and online service that you cannot even do.

When we surf the internet we see every website as its own little island, however as search engine optimizers we have to be able to see how websites connect with each other. When taking on a new client the first thing I want to do is understand how their website fits into the grand scheme of the Internet world.

In the real world we all live in different neighborhoods, well the Internet works the same way. The first step is identifying which neighborhood our client lives in. I can do this by getting a list of their most competitive keywords and doing a search for those keywords.

This will identify both the tall buildings and the landscape. We first look for the tall buildings, you know the sites that keep showing up over and over in the top ten when searching for a competitive keyword.

Are there any spam sites in the top 10?

How old are the sites in the top ten?

How much advertising is going on?

Oh and when you are searching for these keywords you need to de-personalize your browser. Copy and paste this URL in your browser http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s&pws=0 and do your searches from there. Search for the most competitive keyword the site could rank for. We need to make a list of which sites keep showing up time after time. We also need to know the age of the sites that show up in the top ten.