Infographics have fast become one of the most popular styles of linkbait. Savvy marketers and bloggers are using infographics to drive traffic and get inbound links.

Here are some of the reasons infographics make excellent linkbait.

• They can be read quickly—The attention span of internet users is getting shorter and shorter by the moment. People have so many different things vying for their attention, so it’s your job to get your message across to them as quickly as possible. Infographics are excellent for this because they trim all the fat. There’s no introduction, no extensive commentary. Just short, easy-to-understand points.
• They appeal to visual learners—The graphical element of infographics allows you to reach an audience that wouldn’t read the information if you typed it up in a blog post or a report. Many people find visuals helpful for learning, so an infographic lets you share your message in a format they can easily understand.
• They’re easy to share—Infographics are made to be shared. There’s a reason you see infographics constantly hitting the front page of sites like Digg and ReddIt. Heck, not an hour goes by that I don’t see a link to an infographic in my Twitter feed.
• They often trigger an emotional response—The best infographics grab you on an emotional level. Maybe, they make you laugh. Or maybe, they share some information that angers you. Or they could just shock you and make you say “Wow! I didn’t know that.”
• They share interesting information—A good infographic offers really interesting, unique information. The statistics and facts are usually surprising to most people, and they put things into an interesting perspective to make the data even more compelling.

Have you ever used an infographic as linkbait? Share your experiences by leaving a comment. 

Over the past 3 or 4 months, I’ve had an aggressive link building campaign going for my website. Link building is always something I’ve worked on when I had the time, but running a one-person show, it was difficult to find that time. Finally, I decided that I had to make the time if I was serious about wanting to grab top search engine rankings.

With the help of my good friend Gerald Weber (the_gman) and a consistent creation of content for guest blogging, article distribution, and press release marketing, I’ve started to see some truly amazing results. I’m in the top 5 for many of the targeted keywords, and I’m close to getting top 10 rankings on some keywords I thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell of ranking this high for.

And while it would be easy to pat myself on the back and take my foot off the gas pedal, the truth is I still have a long way to go. When it comes to link building, the battle is never really over.

Why?

1. You can always climb higher—I don’t know about you, but I’m sure as heck not ranking #1 for every keyword I’m targeting. And I never will be. That’s the point though. There is always room to go up. Sure, the higher you get, the harder that climb will be, but if you don’t keep building links and implementing sound SEO tactics, you’ll get stuck or even start to slide down.
2. There are more keywords to rank for—I’m doing really well with a handful of keywords, but I know there are many other keywords I should be focusing on achieving better rankings for. There are always other keywords to target. Some new keywords may have even popped up since the last time you did your research due to changing industries or new consumer behavior.
3. The people behind you want your spot—The higher you get in the search rankings, the bigger the bull’s-eye on your back becomes. There will always be people behind you who are trying to surpass you in the SERPs. And if you take your foot off the gas, they’re going to get by you eventually.
4. Current links may go away—That link you got from the PR 5 blog yesterday? It could disappear in the future if the blogger decides he’s tired of blogging and wants to shut down his site. Links come and go. That’s why you need to keep getting new, high-quality links on a consistent basis.
5. The search engines love relevance—The goal of the search engine is to provide searchers with the most relevant, up to date results possible. If the search engine sees you haven’t had links coming in in a long time, your website could be viewed as irrelevant or less useful. Continuous link building helps you stay relevant.
6. Algorithm changes could shake up your rankings—Finally, you never know when Google is going to switch up its algorithm. Ranking factors could change, and you could find yourself needing to do more work to climb back to the top.

How do you keep finding new ways to get links?

Linkbaiting is an important part of building a successful blog and a well-ranking website. That’s why we regularly write posts offering you tips for creating linkbait and even template linkbait headlines.

Recently, I came across a really cool tool that’s designed to help all bloggers come up with linkbait ideas for their blog. The tool is called Linkbait Generator.  The way it works is you enter your own subject into the box, and you click “submit” to generate linkbait. Just keep clicking the “generate” button to get more and more headline ideas for your blog.

Here’s an example. I entered the subject “dog training.” Here are some of the linkbait ideas that this tool generated:

• The 7 most controversial videos of all time about dog training
• 10 ways people have gotten rich exploiting dog training
• 5 amazing things you probably didn’t know about dog training
• 6 shockingly evil things about dog training
• 5 insane but true things about dog training

You can go on and on generating ideas, but you get the point. I’ll say that I’m pretty impressed with some of the ideas this tool generates. I could see any of the above topics working as a successful piece of linkbait if written and promoted properly.

Now, there is something you should know when using the tool. Not all of the headlines it generates will be great. In fact, there are some that just won’t be relevant to what you do at all, but the majority of them are pretty good.

The whole point of this tool is to show you some of the proven styles of linkbait. The truth is there are certain types of headlines and ways to phrase things that gives a blog post a better chance of getting hot. So, even if you don’t end up using any of the ideas this tool generates, I still think it’s good for putting you in the right frame of mind for coming up with successful linkbait.

Give it a try. Check out Linkbait Generator and let us know if it works for you.

It’s hard to find good quality information now a days. And it seems like it’s even harder to find good solid information about SEO. So here’s a SEO Blogs that I think you’ll enjoy reading. It’s a site that I feel does a great job delivering the goods and helping people towards learning more about search engine optimization. I found the site on Sphinn.com, after having a successful front page story submission. And while we’re on the topic of Sphinn, if you haven’t joined the community, I recommend doing so. Once you do, you’ll instantly sync yourself with a lot of experienced people who do nothing but eat, sleep, drink SEO 24/7.

Hobo SEO Company

Hobo SEO is a company based near Glasgow, Scotland. They focus on providing customers with the highest quality SEO services and also help with online branding. They are a content focused SEO company who show their clients firsthand how to do what they even do themselves.

At the time of writing this article, Hobo SEO has over 6700 RSS subscribers, and over 2200 Twitter followers. Those are quite impressive numbers, so they must be doing something right. They claim that their site is viewed by over 50,000 people every month, many of them come direct from Google searching for DIY SEO tips.

Hobo SEO goes the extra mile and even offers people a free SEO eBook titled, “hobo guilde to GOOGLE SEO.” You can get your free copy simply by joining their free newsletter.

Additional freebies include:

1. DIY SEO GUIDE – Where you can get some help understanding why your website is performing poorly in Google.
2. Linkbuilding Guide – They say that the key to high rankings in Google is to have other real websites link to yours. Their linkbuilding course will help you learn more about successful linkbuilding.
3. Beginners Guide to SEO - For beginners, this is an excellent start. Hobo SEO’s Beginners Guide to SEO offers you everything you need to get started with becoming a savvy SEO yourself.
4. SEO Blog – Visit their SEO Blog where tips and ideas about Google and search engine optimization are shared among 50,000 montly visitors.

With all the freebies, the guides, the newsletter, and the blog, Hobo SEO is one of the better SEO blogs I have seen. All in all if you’re looking for high quality SEO information from people who know what they’re talking about, I recommend making HoBo SEO one of your daily reads.

What are some of your favorite SEO sites that you’d like to share with others? Drop a comment and let us know. Also, if you have your own SEO site, you’re welcome to tell everyone about it too.

Increasing PageRank can be a huge challenge and can take a lot of hard work, but what if there was an easier way to increase PageRank quickly?

There is actually! And, it’s a darn good way too. For a long time I have know about this, but couldn’t figure out a good way to do this. I searched for software and never found anything, and the only thing I found that could do this for me was a half functional website.

But, before I get too far ahead here, I need to explain to you how you can increase your PageRank. As you may know, backlinks are needed in order to get more PageRank. More so, backlinks with high PageRank are even more important.

So, who the heck is going to give you free links from pages with high PageRank? Well, the answer is simple… you are! You might not realize this, but many of your own pages within your site have established their own level of PageRank.

I have known this for awhile, but the problem I always had was finding them. Yes, I can manually search for them, but this takes a long time and kind of feels like fishing in a pond with only one fish in it.

If there was software that could scan all my pages automatically and then sort them by highest PageRank first, that would be ideal. I never could find anything that would do something like this until a few weeks ago. Naturally, the software comes in the form of a Firefox Add-on.

The add-on is called, SeoQuake. If you download and install this add-on and search your own site using Yahoo Site Explorer, you can quickly and easily discover and sort all your internal pages by their PageRank level. You can also do this by searching for your site in Google too. Take a look at the screen shot below. It will show you SeoHosting.com’s pages sorted by PageRank:

[click image to view full size]

Doing this then gives you a tally of how many pages you can use within your own site for link building. You can use these pages to help boost your own home page PageRank, or use these pages to help establish and boost the PageRank of newly built sites you have developed.

Be careful not to build links to quickly, you don’t want to do anything unnatural because Google is kind of smart and may catch on to what you’re doing. The key here is having an available research to use towards proper link building. If you’re too aggressive with our link building campaign, you may even ruin the value of your high quality pages.

What else can you do to help increase PageRank quickly? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

If you are trying to build links that point back to your blog or website one of the most powerful ways you can do that is by offering to write content on other blogs. This is a little different than landing a freelance writing job because your offer is to help bloggers by writing content on their blog for free. While this might not sound like a very good deal for you, it really is. 

Paying for links is risky. Google has a good sniffer for spotting paid or sponsored links. Doing link exchanges, especially blogroll exchanges is proving to not have much value. Ordering sponsored posts is very risky because you then put your site on Google’s radar. So really what option do you have left? 

The answer is in writing guest posts. It is a safe and very natural / organic way to score powerful backlinks to your blog or website. Consider this too. When you publish content on other blogs, you are in complete control of the link building process. You are in complete control of how you want to word your content and shape and mold your links pointing back to your site.  In other words, writing guest posts on other blogs gives you the ability to take a blank piece of digital paper and turn it into anything you want. 

Guest posting on other blogs has other benefits as well. For one, you’ll find that you have an endless supply of blogs where you can publish your content on. Most bloggers struggle for material. Just like a journalist or a columnist, often bloggers struggle from writers block and totally enjoy it when someone offers to provide them with killer content. 

Another benefit is the fact that not only can you build links by writing the content, you can also take advantage of the opportunity and use the post to sell yourself to readers of the blog you are publishing on. This gives you an amazing opportunity to increase the number of regular reader who read your own blog or website. 

The only disadvantage I can think of is the amount of time you need to invest into writing content. One thing about that though is I believe that you always get back when you put in. Meaning, if you invest the time into writing quality content on other blogs, your return will be great as well. 

Contact a few blog authors and you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them will contact you back having a strong interest in having you write a post for them. I know for a fact that when people contact me, I get excited because I know that my nightly post is covered and I can have a little free time to do something else. My advice to you when you do contact bloggers is to present yourself well. Be honest and explain what you want to do and what are you are willing to do for them in exchange. Writing content on other blogs is  mutual exchange. You give the blogger a night off from having to write and they give you a medium to spread the word about your own blog or website. 

This week produced quite a bit of excellent content around link building. In this week edition of SEO Friday, we’ll recap some of these excellent articles and references that were published during this week. As you may know, link building is a very important aspect of improving your visibility in the search engines.

Ann Smarty, author of the successful Search Engine Journal, wrote an article titled, How To Build Links and Awareness by Pitching Bloggers. In this article she addressed that bloggers can be an excellent resource towards building links for the fact that most bloggers are always on the hunt for new material to write about and they are connected with many friends which gives your links the opportunity to go viral. The article was submitted into Sphinn, so be sure to help Ann out by casting your vote.

The author of a blog titled, Link Building Best Practices, wrote a very thoughtful piece that distinguishes the difference between SEOs and Link Builders. It is stated that there is a clear difference between the two skilsets and it is noted that commonly most people are either one or the other but not both. Understanding the difference between the two very well might break the boundary and expand the skilset from both professions. You should take a moment to help out by casting a vote on Sphinn.

SMX in London is at full force this week and one of the more popular topics — you guessed it — link building. Wiep Knol, author of a very informative link building blog, provided some coverage for all the folks who could not attend SMX in London with an article titled, Blog Your Mind Link Building Techniques. Without a doubt, there are some excellent links and references found in this article including a wonderful overview of the line up of professional speakers who gave speeches. As with the other two articles, providing your vote on Sphinn will help out the author.

What an amazing week to learn more about link building. What other articles did you read this week that helped you? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

Make no mistake folks, link building is a very important aspect in getting traffic from Google. Many of you guys and gals read my personal blog and I spend quite a bit of time talking about building micro niche blogs and targeting keywords that don’t require backlinks. While that is true, in a way that also limits you from capitalizing on prime keywords. Ranking for prime keywords are definitely in your reach; however, this can not be archived without launching a well thought out and well researched link building campaign.

So how do you launch an effective link building campaign? Well, really for many of you reading this, the problem is finding sites that will willingly add your link to their pages. But if you think about this for a second, you very well may already have a huge source of sites to use at your disposal. How many web sites or blogs do you have? Is there any reason why you’re not using your own web sites or blogs to help build backlinks to another blog or web site of yours?

I do this all the time! Granted, I have friends who’ll add my link to certain blogs posts upon request, but a large percentage of my link building comes from my own internal fleet of blogs. There is nothing wrong with using your existing blogs or web sites to help build up the number of backlinks to another blog or web site that you own.

What about doing this on sites that all share the same IP address? Well, that’s a good question… I am glad I asked myself that. Here are my thoughts about that. If you are in the business of building sites with the aim of trying to get them to rank high in the SERPs then you really need to do things right and be organized with how you distribute your sites among different servers. Granted, I think a lot of the myth about having multiple sites on the same IP might be slightly over-rated.

But guess what? I can’t prove that! I don’t work at Google. I don’t have their magical formula. There is one thing that I do know, and that is the cost of web hosting. When I started building web sites, hosting was expensive! Today, you can order web hosting for as little as $4.95 / month! So, to answer your question about having multiple sites on the same IP address, I’ll say this. I can’t prove that this is good or bad, but seeing how cheap web hosting is today, why risk it? Be organized, and distribute your sites among different servers.

Having that said, let’s talk about how to build backlinks to your web sites and blogs by using your own sites. When you determine which keywords that you want to start using to plug links to a certain site or blog of yours, simply do a Google search for that keyword on your site to see how many instances are there.

Example: site:yourname.com “keyword phrase”

When you do that, Google will return a list of web pages or blog posts on your site or blog that where that keyword is used. If the page or post is older, you can almost guarantee that there will be a little bit of PageRank on that page as well. Go back and edit this page or post and plug your link to point to the blog or site that you are trying to build links to.

If you are like me and use WordPress blogs and want to do this automatically, then there is a very handy plugin that will soon become your best friend. The plugin is called aLinks and unfortunately the web site has been down for several months. The only place I have found where you can download this plugin is HERE. aLinks is a plugin that allows you to automatically link keywords on your blog and point them to any destination that you want. It’s one of my personal favorites.

Anyway, I hope that you found this article to be helpful. What are some other creative ways to build backlinks to your site? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts!

Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

There has been a great deal written about link building strategies. It may be difficult to sift through what works and doesn’t work. Whether you have years of experience in SEO link building or are new at link building, you should always think independently when formulating how you will link build.

Link Building Takes Time
There is no two ways about it: link building is time consuming and a great deal of work. Get that squared away before going forward with your link building plans. There are no easy quick answers when it comes to building links. Even paid links you have quickly purchased must be indexed by the search engine spiders in order to count and we all know it takes time for links to take effect. If you provide link building services you must set the correct expectations of link results for your clients.

Social Media’s New Link Territory
In the beginning much of link building had been relegated to submitting to directories, reciprocal links and paid links. This concept has changed in the past few years. With the growth of personalized search and social media link building has become super charged. Before you totally jump on the social media bandwagon take a look at what your client’s website actually needs to produce a solid link building strategy outcome.

Think Through Your Link Strategy
Newer link building methods such as social media websites may be popular now but using old linking techniques and new linking techniques together can work very well for your link building strategy. Eventually all new techniques become old techniques making way for yet more new techniques. We know some human edited directory links still provide good results. Reciprocal links can be dicey compared to one-way links. One-way links on topic still work well.

Articles and press releases work if carefully orchestrated to the right websites. Think quality not quantity links. Paid links can be problematic with Google so use them carefully. Think through your daily types of link building (blogging, digging, stumbling), your well known techniques (directories, articles, press releases) to your long range ideas (product reviews on blogs, creating new blog sites, business profiles, paid links) and on and on. Take a look at the whole picture: short term, long term, in the future…where do you want to be online?

Independent Thought For Link Builders
Quality links is still the name of the game when it comes to long term link building success. Yes there are probably quicker ways to get results and it may at times be worth this type of strategy. Think through what you find effective to build links. Not every technique works in every situation for every client. Instead of going with the popular choices come up with your own independent link plans then see what happens.

Individualized Link Strategies Work
Creating specific, individualized link building programs for each client will give you more ways to provide successful link building results. Combining traditional marketing, social media marketing and traditional link building can be a winning combination in your quest for good links.