No Nibbles on Your Website Content? Try Better Link Bait

January 7, 2010 | by Carrie Hane Dennison | Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Content

When I was a young girl, my family spent many weekends at a lake filled with blue gill. We kids loved to go sit on the bridge or dock to fish. But there was no way I was going to touch a worm. So we used little pieces of hot dogs. The fish loved it! No one ever went home without having caught several fish. (We always threw them back.)

Why did the fish get hooked? Because they saw the bait, liked the way it looked, and chomped down. And they kept coming back for more.

How does this relate to the web? Your website content is the bait for getting visitors to come to your site.

Linking is now one of the best methods of increasing your search engine rankings. But you can’t force other people or sites to link to you. You have to have a reason for them to come and get hooked.

The better and more relevant your content is, the more people will want to tell others about it. To tell others, they link from their site or social networking profile to your site. More links to your site means greater search engine relevance and more exposure through the sites which provide the link.

If you want more links to your site, first you must provide the right bait. Content or tools that are timely, relevant, educational, humorous, or otherwise useful will give reason for people to go to your site.

Once you have content you know people want, spread the word. Get yourself out on the web and insert yourself into relevant on-going conversations with a link to your site. Post about your new content at your social networking sites.

Don’t link to your home page, though. Link to the exact page that will help someone with a specific question. Use appropriate keywords to make the link.

There is only so much you can do yourself, so make it easy for your visitors to spread the word. Use ShareThis or AddThis to all pieces of content on your site. This lets visitors click and post to a social media profile, email to friends, and/or bookmark on a social bookmarking site like Delicious or StumbleUpon.

Once you get more links, continue to generate that unique, interesting, useful content to keep your visitors coming back. Because if you don’t, your bait will get stale and the fish will just swim on by.