Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

There’s a great case study on link bait at SEOmoz. The thing that really separates this is that he gives data on his results. Too often it’s general actions rather than specific ones. Still missing are the specific keywords he was targeting, but that doesn’t really change how you can take this case study and apply the specifics to your situation.

One great thing was that the topic of the linkbait: “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers”. You can completely see how this would garner attention. The page was buried on an inside page on a car dealership website. It was posted on Reddit and Digg and within five days, the site received almost 234,000 unique visitors.

“We knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless… The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in,”

Look at the links the site received…
Before the Digg: 207 backlinks
3 days after Digg: 1,270 backlinks
5 days after Digg: 2,642 backlinks
7 days after Digg: 3,545 backlinks

“We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust…

Google’s latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.”

That really does validate all the talk SEO heavyweights give to linkbait. I need to get cracking…

Job-Hunt.org: An Old-Fashioned Success Story is a great case study of sorts about how to use PR, networking and quality content to build your site and your brand.

Tropical SEO » Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing talks about linkbaiting. First he stresses the importance of the title with this jewel:

Want an example? Let’s run through the cheat sheet Andy Hagans style:

• Who Else Wants Build Links and Rank High in Google?
• The Secret of Link Baiting (It’s all in the title!)
• Here is a Method That is Helping Webmasters to Link Bait Better
• Little Known Ways to Link Bait Like an SEO Pro
• Get Rid of Your Backlink Problem Once and For All
• Here’s a Quick Way to Rank Highly in Google by Link Baiting
• Now You Can Have that #1 Rank in Google
• Learn to Link Bait like Andy Hagans
• Build a Backlink Structure You Can Be Proud Of
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Baiting

He then give great tips about content, including making it scannable, losing the ads and getting friendly bumbs from friends.

How to AMAZE Your Clients With a KILLER Viral Campaign by SEO Bomb Blog
is a great study in how to get fast results for an SEO client. Though partnering with SEO blackhat, they use totally legit methods to create buzz and improve all aspects of the business and their web presence. Wow. Check out the results (I pasted more than I meant to becasue the results didn’t make sense sans context):

Now, as QuadZilla pointed out, my plan had several good points in it, but what was lacking was the one thing that would make this exceptionally remarkable.

The one thing that would make every single designer and Mac fan-boy go Ga-Ga:

Enter The Prizes
Week 1: iPod nano 2GB & iPod 30GB
Week 2: MacBook
Week 3: MacBook Pro
Week 4: Mac Pro with DUAL 30″ Cinema HD LCDs
See where we’re going at? Good.

But there’s one more thing missing: The seeders - and boy did we get seeders.

In addition to the link from Apple.com and the judges from About.com, 456Bereastreet, Mac Addict Magazine and 9Rules.com, you can view the full list of judges right here.

That, dear readers, is some serious link juice.

Crestock.com got 200,000 unique users from the contest, went on Digg, doubled their average daily traffic after the contest, got over 5000 new customers and increased their organic search engine traffic by 1258% - in one month!

SEOmoz Blog | Google News – for traffic, links, and rankings

How to get your site in Google News. The link to submit is http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001866.shtml

A brand can still push their main brand name (say Paypal, for example) while promoting their name as being Paypal Payment Solutions. Place more emphasis on your core brand name, but also make relevant keywords look like they are part of the legitimate official name to get a bit more friendly anchor text.

I used this in the Chml Srucnoc competition with my Chml Srucnoc in 2008 slogan and push. This should be considered and adopted anytime you’re doing a link building campaign. The only reason not to do this, is if it would make your brand or site sound awkward to the human readers.

Directory submission has long been a part of SEO and web promotion.  It’s really no longer useful for driving traffic directly.  Search engines do at times take the recommendations of directory’s, particularly human edited one, quite seriously.  Other directorys can put you in the dreaded Google Sandbox.  So should you submit to them?  Which ones?  The link below hopes to help guide you.  A good rule of thumb is is to use your head.  Click on some of the links.  If they’re junk, stay away.  If it is good content, and related to your site or topic, submit. I’d be slow to pay for a link though.  There are better, more effective ways[1][2] to spend your money.

http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/