Well now that people on the social media sites are starting to catch on / have caught on to link baiting, I’ve noticed it’s much harder to make the likes of the digg or reddit front pages. One to two months ago this was a much easier task. I’m not exactly sure if there has been one incident or algorithm change that caused the increased difficulty of making digg’s front page, but I do know that the window on link baiting is quickly closing.

I think part of the reason of the increased link bait promotion difficulty is people have caught on to the sensational titles that were the critical component of a successful link bait. Its becoming more and more rare to see an “ultimate guide”, or “12 tips you never knew”, on the much sought after front pages of the big time social sites. I think as a general rule these are great copy writing techniques that really spark the readers’ interest, but with the communities link bait radars now on high alert these are now a sure-fire way to get your story buried.

The next logical question becomes “So how do I make my story stand out without a sensational title?” Quite honestly, I’m not exactly sure. I think comes down to several things:

• High quality domain name. People are now giving an extra look at the domain the story appears on. If you happen to own freedebtconsolidation.info I think you maybe in real trouble.
• High quality site design. Kill anything that can be construed as ’spammy’: ads or misaligned text and images, or just a crappy all around design.
• High quality content. Its more important now than ever to create actual valuable content. Take your time, and make your writing as perfect as possible.

The long and short of it is: make a quality website … I know, I know, we all hate doing it. I have always defined link bait as creating quality content that adds value and then promoting that content. With the promotion vehicles wising up, the quality content part becomes all the more important, or, maybe you just have to just get used to a lower successful link bait average. If that ends up being the case, I wouldn’t worry, some other link building method will come along shortly.

One of the things I like about usability is that it touches upon literally every aspect of a web business–it’s as much a
school of thought as it is a discipline. There are many little offshoots of that fact–tiny parts of your business which are partly
governed by usability (which you may often not even realize right away). And before your eyes glaze over, let me remind you that
usability always affects profits.

For instance–is your domain name usable? Things that could make a domain name unusable include:

• Having a domain which is not easy to spell. If your site should ever get featured on radio or TV, you want viewers to be able to easily type it into a browser after hearing it. Otherwise you’re going to lose a percentage of them.
• Having a non-dotcom domain. People have a tough time remembering non-dotcom TLD extensions, period. Again, you’re going to lose a percentage of potential visitors by having a
  non-dotcom.

Remember, these visitors you’re losing aren’t just visitors, they’re potential linkerati.
Anyway I just thought this was important to bring up since so many SEOs and marketers seem to be getting into domaining. Don’t forget about usability!

Making multi-part posts or articles is a fancy little trick for linkbaiting I bet you’ve never tried. By dividing your posts into three parts you can:

1. Triple your exposure
2. Triple your views
3. Triple your new subscribers
4. And possibly triple your incoming links

Let me give you a case-in-point with a two part link bait. Building a Niche Minisite Part 1 got 1221 diggs as of writing this. Building a Niche Minisite Part 2 got 651 diggs. I didn’t check Digg the day part one hit the homepage, but part two happened to catch my eye the next day. Matt Coddington got 2 days worth of exposure for the price of one. If it were a one-parter I may have missed it altogether, instead he got 2 sweet authority links out of it :).

He also made sure he released the second part on the next day after the first one was released. I don’t think this technique would work if you spaced out the parts by more than one day.

Now, I’m not one for trying to rehash and rekindle old arguments. Matt Cutts has already stated that currently valid code isn’t taken into consideration for rankings. He also made mention that 40% of sites have code errors, so it would be hard to simply discount that content from the rankings.

I will argue, however, that having Valid XHTML / CSS or close to it should be and in the future may be an indicator of trust to the search engines. I’m not saying valid code will ever be a huge indicator of trust, but maybe just a smaller piece of the trust puzzle, like having a privacy policy.

In the not-too-distant future, close to valid code will be a mark of trustworthiness, mainly because its an indicator of quality. If a webmaster takes the time to make sure his code validates, generally that webmaster takes an interest in producing quality content as well. As far as search engines are concerned, good quality sites should be trustworthy sites, if only for the reason that most spammers and arbitragers probably aren’t going to take the time to fix any validation issues. The name of the game with spam and arbi is to get many sites up at once with “auto content generation” (to put it politely) which is less likely to be clean code . This being said I don’t think any small validation errors should take away from your trust (people do make coding mistakes), but the WYSISWYG code generation or just plain sloppy coding is a far cry from the quality of code that I’m talking about.

My main interest in valid XHTML and valid CSS is accessibility, but hey, if I take the time to make my site accessible by search engines and humans, shouldn’t I be rewarded for that somehow? So how about it Google, can I get some more trust over here?

I can build traffic to a site much quicker with several thousand PPC keywords than by trying to get content ranked organically. In setting up some of these few thousand word PPC campaigns, I stumbled across a great stratagem for organic keyword targeting for both e-comm and affiliate sites. Rather than relying on a questionable keyword tool to find keywords that I actually want to organically rank for, I can merely look at my highest converting Adwords keywords through my analytics package.

By using keyword tools you may be able to hash out some great keywords that you build some content around… only to find out that that traffic isn’t converting. On the other hand, by actually testing out the keywords first in PPC you’ll get a good idea of not only what kind of traffic that term brings, but also how well it converts.

Like I said, you may already have thousands of PPC keywords for your site. Words that you never thought of trying to get ranked organically, but kick butt on PPC. You may want to take those words and make some content around them (assuming you have some ranking power in the major search engines) to capture that FREE traffic.

1. You shall… Never, ever “out”, “call out”, “rat”, or “snitch” on what another SEM is doing.
2. You shall… Never be stingy with links.
3. You shalll… Never use a condom, they just don’t feel right. The only exception is to prevent comment spam.
4. You shall… Attend conferences… make allies… buy allies a beer… if they happen to tell you what they are making a goldmine on refer back to #1.
5. You shall… Never stop learning. You should be reading for a couple of hours a day at least, because you’re not as smart as you think you are.
6. You shall… Work in your bathrobe at least 2 days / week.
7. You shall… Work 7 days / week. The Internet never sleeps.
8. You shall… Obsessively check email, Digg, SEPRS, commissions, leads and sales. When you’re not at home you shall use your “crackberry”
9. You shall… Constantly complain about GOOG and how it sucks for screwing you.
10. You shall… Find a new service or site and immediately figure out a way to game it.

I just wanted everyone to know where I stand on certain subjects that affect our community, no big whoop. I feel like I need to “blog tag” somebody with this… but I’ll refrain since nobody knows who I am yet