What is The Power of Link Baiting:
Link baiting is the process in which you use a hook or a bait to attract back links. It refers to something unique or important on your site that would want others to link to it. A bait or hook generally refers to link good content written for sites, blog posts or online articles and then submitted on popular websites. It could also refer to widgets tools and other useful online applications. When content is written it is also relevant to ensure that the title also serves as attractive bait or hook to the audience. The bait or the hook could take one of the following forms:
• Resource Hook: These are hooks that generally provide useful resources to the audience. A useful tool such as a stock exchange ticker or a compilation of resources useful to a particular niche or domain is a good example of the same. People are always on the lookout for resources that would be meaningful and useful to them. As such, a resource hook acts as a strong bait to gain incoming links.
Example: Must read search marketing blogs
• News Hook: This hook banks on providing the latest news first. It could also be a compilation of stories following a particular news item. This type of hook works best over a period of time. One needs to regularly post interesting news articles which slowly establish credibility as an expert.
Example: Optimistic about Personalized Search
• Contrary Hook: A contrary hook looks at views contrary to an established or perceived school of thought. It usually takes up a contradictory or controversial view of what someone has said or written.
Example: 10 reasons why SEO is of no use to marketers.
• Attack Hook: This is quite similar to the contrary hook but seeks to be more provocative, direct and upfront in nature. The advantage of an attack hook is that the hook could attract the most number of links if your content is perceived to be credible and authentic.
Example: Aaron Wall gets sued for blogging
For both the contrary hook and the attack hook it is advised to make sure that the facts are properly checked and corroborated before the post/article is published. A seemingly non credible post can get a lot of negative reviews which could affect all future posts as well.
• Humor Hook: This type of hook seeks to bring in some aspect of humor into the daily mundane lives of people. As a hook it can turn out to be very effective as people like to see something bizarre or funny in the midst of their daily routines. The humor hook stands out and is thus able to gain quite a few links.
Example: Top 21 signs you need a break from SEO
About Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
Structuring Your Internal Links
There are two main types of internal linking –
hierarchical and mesh Linking.
Hierarchical linking
Hierarchical linking is where one or more sitepages on your website (such as the main page) are considered more important than other web pages. Important web pages are linked to from all other web pages in the website, but not all web pages cross-links between each other. This concentrate Page Rank (PR) on your most important web pages. Most websites should create a hierarchical linking , whereby the main page and the most relevant service, content pages are linked to more often than other web pages. In this time, you can increases the chance that your most relevant web page is ranked the highest on Google for your most important keyword or keyphrase.
Hierarchical linking – only important webpages get links from every other page.
The home page typically has the highest PR value as this is the webpage most often linked to, both internally and externally. This may not be ideal if your home page is nothing but a contains little content. In this case, you should redesign your home page to include more content and make it more important to Google. If this is not possible, you should relink internally to your most important keyword or keyphrase or relevant content page.
In the figure, the About Us or Home page is only linked to from a one page. This is because the About Us page is not nearly as the other webpages. So why funnel important PR value to it – instead flow PR importants out of the webpage back to the mainpage.
Mesh linking is defined as where all webpages are considered equally relevant (to topic, theme, and keywords). This is the simplest linking method in that each page on the website links to every other webpage on the website. Most websites use the mesh linking by default without thinking about it by virtue of having the same menu navigation bar on each webpage that contains the same links. This evenly distributes PR among all web pages in the website, which is not ideal. The following figure illustrates this concept.
Mesh linking – each webpage links to every other page
For example, note that each webpage links to the important About Us page. So why funnel important PageRank value to it? Use hierarchical linking whenever possible!
Linking Your Pages Together
Before we start, it is time to introduce the concept of PageRank (PR), but is introduced here in order to
understand why it matters how you link webpages on your website together.
PageRank is a numeric value that Google places on how important a page is on the
Web. PageRank is determined by how many incoming links there are that point to a
webpage. Incoming links are links that point to a webpage from another webpage. Such links
may be located on webpages on the same site (internal links) or on pages on
different sites (external links). External links are valued more than internal links.
Google figures that when one webpage links to another webpage, it is in effect “casting a
vote” for the other webpage. The more incoming links there are for a webpage, the
more important the webpage is to Google.
Proper linking between pages of your site, if done right, will help retain the total
PageRank of your website and will also distribute or spread your website’s overall PageRank value to
your most important webpages. Your site’s total “PR” value is simply the sum of the PR
values of all the individual pages f your website. But keep in mind that PR is calculated and
usually referred to on a per-page basis.
Internal links serve to distribute or share PageRank among all webpages of your site.
Links on your website that point to other sites can decrease PR from those pages
that contain outbound links (and hence your site’s total available PR), while links
from other websites can increase your website’s total PageRank.
The more internal links there are between webpages of your site, the more evenly
shared the PageRank becomes in your website. Let’s see why this is important.