• Define your audience. Be able to answer the questions “who will spread this?” and “why will they spread it?”

• Know your linkbait portals. A post that would do well in Digg might bomb with Slashdot. Likewise, a list that gets a lot of Reddit love could be dead on arrival with Lifehacker. Each portal has its own audience. Figure out who hangs out where, and submit accordingly.

• Write a great title. You want to make sure that the title grabs their attention and demands their interest. This may actually be more important than the actual content of your bait.

• Make your bait beautiful. Spend some time on a unique design. Make sure your content is easy to read and informative. Have few, if any, ads.

• Create a place for discussion. You want people to discuss your idea, and what better place to start that than on your linkbait page? Plus, if you get a particularly good discussion going, you’ll get people linking strictly because of the ongoing dialog.

• Authority is important. Cite research and link out to reputable sources. It makes what you’re saying real, and people will feel good about referring people to it.

• Pick on people. If you can say something sufficiently funny, mean, or insightful about a popular internet personality, maybe you’ll get someone like Rand Fishkin, Greg Boser, Todd Malicote, Jim Boykin, Danny Sullivan, or Shoemoney to link to you. At very least, maybe they’ll check their trackbacks, like what you wrote, and link to it. A little validation goes a long ways.

• Ask for feedback. Ask popular bloggers, popular industry figures, and people who manage media sources to look at your bait and give feedback. If they like it, they may feature you, or at least send another authoritative link your way.

• Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Make sure your servers can handle the traffic that will come if/when your content goes viral. Also, don’t get banned from your linkbait portal by practices that might go against your portal’s terms of service. This might include getting all your coworkers to Digg your post, or Digging all of your own posts in quick succession. As a side note, you ARE allowed to submit your own stuff to Digg, which allows you to control the headline and description. That’s important.

• Retain the traffic. Follow up any good piece of linkbait with other quality content to reel in the visitors that come to your site. You don’t want your site to be a one-hit wonder.

This is my final post about PubCon (a week after it’s over, I know, I know).

This forum was one of my highlights for the conference. Not only were two of my favorite bloggers (Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org and Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com) on the panel, the topic was one that I’ve been hearing more and more about. I was definitely interested in what they had to say. And in honor of the forum, I’m going to post what I learned in list format in a post entitled “Ten Tips For Killer Linkbait.” Enjoy.

Guy Kawasaki

Today kicked off with a keynote by startup guru Guy Kawasaki. In his presentation, entitled “The Art of Innovation,” he talked about the necessary elements of successful innovation. I particularly liked what he had to say about defining yourself with a mantra, a two to three word phrase that encapsulates your purpose and reaon for being. I’m a firm believer that you have to know where you’re going if you ever want to get there, and so mch the better if you can actually remember that purpose. Guy spent some quality time making fun of mission statements, and the MBAs who create them, which reenforced his ideas about having a mantra. From a product development standpoint, he really emphasized that the best products are created by people who are trying to create something that they would want to use themselves. Overall, highly entertaining and inspiring.

PPC Ad and Landing Page Optimization

Christine Churchill - PPC Ad Copy

Here’s a breakdown of relevant points

1. Make your ads stand out by providing differentiating information - price, guarantees, service, etc.
2. Provide incentive to click - compelling headlines, etc.
3. Add a sense of urgency - “limited time”
4. Use the keyword in your title - It will be bolded in Google. This is the single biggest factor in CTR.
5. Talk about the benefits to the customer
6. Add a call to action. What do you want them to do?
7. Use brands when possible
8. Avoid self-centered copy
9. Prequalify visitors by providing information to eliminate freebie hunters, etc. Prices, age limits, etc.

Brad Geddes - AdWords Quality Score

I didn’t realize this, but Adwords has different quality scoring guidelines for content and search advertising. Apparently the landing page doesn’t figure in search ranking, only in the minimum bid, whereas with content, there is no minimum bid, but the quality score is important. Also, when inserting dynamic keywords, the quality score is based on the alternative that you provide with the dynamic code.

Tony Wright - PPC Ad Testing

This is an interesting concept I hadn’t really considered before. Tony suggested setting aside a small percentage of your advertising budget strictly for testing, allowing you to test out new areas and strategies with keywords and ads without putting your main budget at risk. One of these days when I work for someone who doesn’t allow AdWords to be self-perpetuating, this will come in handy.

Link Development and Optimization

Rae Hoffman - Managing Your Linkbuilding Team

This was an awesome presentation. She went pretty quick, but there was a ton of good information. She talked a lot about how to outsource your linkbuilding, but along the way, she dropped some important ideas about the things you should look for in links, even if you’re doing it yourself.

1. List the type of links you want to obtain
2. Track competitor backlinks to see where YOU should be linking
3. Decide what you’re looking for in reciprocal partners
4. Be goal-oriented as far as requests and actual links are concerned

Joel Lesser - Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking has kind of become the red-headed stepchild of SEO. It used to work well, but in recent years, its reputation has become tarnished as a completely useless way of building search engine rankings. Joes contends that relevant reciprocal linking is still helpful in search, and he also feels that it’s a good source of traffic as well. I tend to agree that having reciprocal links with related sites probably isn’t going to hurt you in the SERPs, but as to whether its going to help you very much, I’m a little skeptical. I’m going to have to test this myself.

Roger Montti, “Martinibuster” - Alternative Linkbuilding Strategies

Here’s the list:

1. Advertising or Linkbuys - He thinks that CPM is still a valuable hat tip in G, whether it’s an image or text, particularly if the ads are running on relevant sites. He also was very much against PageRank-based inquiries and advertising.
2. Buying websites outside your network. Look for inactive or underperforming sites.
3. Enter your sites into site of the month/day/week directories.
4. Get included in online-archived newsletters. It’s worth the small price.
5. Sponsorships - and if you sponsor a college event, you might even pick up some .edu links.
6. Proxy sites are good. Try leaving insightful comments on blogs, use trackbacks, blogrolls, and DMOZ listings.
7. YouTube and Google Video. Apparently, if you put your URL in the body of the description, YouTube and Google Video will turn it into a real, indexable link.

Copywriting

Ted Ulle - Managing Copywriting Teams

This presentation is obviously geared toward how to manage a whole team of copywriters, but the ideas about process are applicable to one-person operations as well as copywriting teams.

1. Have clarity of purpose. This is your guiding light.
2. Build a pile of content using forums keyword neighborhoods and emails to get a feel for the community.
3. Decide on metrics and goals at the beginning.
4. Build a solid information architecture. if you don’t know about how to do this, you should learn.
5. Build solid menus for your content.
6. Do graphic design last.
7. Now do the final HTML web edit to pull it all together.

Jennifer Slegg - Unique Content

There’s really only one thing to say about this: write unique content. That’s it.

Byron White - 30 Tips For Web Writing

Byron talked a lot about building community. A couple of points I liked:

1. The necessity of a good story. If you have a great story, you have a much easier time getting other people (your readers, most importantly) to believe in your message. There’s something about a great story that grabs people.
2. Related to the last point, part of finding a great story is taking a list of all the things that you’re not but you would like to be, plugging it into the following sentence: “We are not _____,” cross out the negatives, and tell the story of why the new sentence is true.
3. Try to get to your audience.
4. Respect intelligence.
5. Mine data anywhere you can get it. Search boxes, FAQ emails, site question submission forms, etc. are all good sources of data about what your readers are looking for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach SEO mentally, and thus far, I’m pretty much equating it with my experience with keyword-based cpc advertising.

When I’m working in AdWords doing SEM, the mantra I’ve come to revere has been “think like the customer.” If you can learn how to put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for your product/service/information, selecting the proper keywords to bid on and writing the proper ad copy comes a lot more naturally, and the ads generally perform much better.

Thinking like the customer takes a little work, however. You need to identify the demographics of the individuals that are interested in your product/service/information (PSI from now on, for your sake and mine). Are you trying to sell to teens? The elderly? Men? Women? The type of person you’re advertising to matters, particularly when it comes to the type of copy you’re going to write.

Once you have a basic understanding of who your customer is, you can then think about the potential search terms your customers are going to use to find your PSI (stuff, from now on. PSI is a little lame). If your product has fairly good brand recognition, then name-type terms are going to be very valuable. On the other hand, if your product is new, or you are trying to create a niche, you’ll do a lot better selecting descriptive keywords that detail problems that your stuff solves or things that your stuff improves. For example, if you created a tool that makes your internet faster (pretending that no such tool exists) then you would bid on terms like “speed internet up” or “faster internet.”

Generally, the most valuable terms will have the most competition, which means higher bids. Thus, tools like the Overture Bid Tool are invaluable, because they let you see the top bids for the keyword you select. This high-bid, high-value rule isn’t always true, however, so I’ve learned not to be shy about putting keywords up that have no bidding whatsoever. You never know if there is virgin keyword territory that is yet untapped.

Now on to my point. It seems that SEO is much the same way. You figure out who your page is meant for. You figure out what keywords are going to draw those people in. Is your service revolutionary, and therefore niche-creating? Or is it about something more established, like insurance? Using these keywords, you then create content geared towards your target demographic (your site should look very different depending on whether it’s meant for senior citizen shuffleboard players or teenagers looking for snowboard tricks).

You should also prioritize which keywords are the most relevant to your site, and because those are the keywords that are most likely to have a lot of competition, you will have to work harder on link building using those keywords. Consider your time linkbuilding to be like money in keyword bidding. Generally, the better keywords cost more. Hey, time is money, right?

I’m still getting the details sorted out, but this is the best way I can make sense of things using my previous experience. Any other ideas that I might be missing?

Ok, so JazzcatSEO was actually indexed by Yahoo! and MSN a few days ago, but today is the first time I’ve seen this site show up in a Google search, and in the end, isn’t that the most important thing?

In other news, I was listening to SEO Rockstars on WebmasterRadio.fm, and Greg Boser mentioned how he has some domains that are just parked and not currently under development. He made an offhand comment about having content and links on those pages so that they could start to develop some link age and trust, despite their stagnant status. His idea was to use an API to put comment on the page, but I figure an ambitious webmaster could take a minute and throw up some unique content, add a couple of links to web properties that need some extra link-lovin’, get some Adsense up, and let it sit until they have time to work on it. At least this way, you get indexed, you start to develop some trust, and if things go really well, you might even make a few bucks off of Adsense on the parked domain.

I took this to heart, and after throwing up some Wordpress and Joomla installs on a bunch of new sites that I’m not currently working on, I did some limited interlinking between all the new sites, so if all goes as planned, by the time I’m ready to start development on these sites, they’ll already have some good links and a decent Pagerank. Now I just need to put up som content, rank it, and monetize the traffic. Easy business, right?

There’s a thread currently on the Digital Point forum talking about picking up SEO experience by doing pro bono work for charities and other nonprofits. This seems like a really great idea for several reasons.

The first reason is that you get to deal with people who are most likely just thankful for the help. While this isn’t necessarily universal, odds are that the nonprofit will be somewhat less demanding therefore less stressful to cut your teeth with.

Working with nonprofits, you’ll most likely be working in slightly less competetive spaces (unless you want to start spammin’ and jammin’ on PPC from the get-go). This gives you the chance to sharpen your skills before you start playing with the big boys.

You can write off your time on your taxes as a charitable donation!

Also, as Ammon Johns pointed out, this is a great networking opportunity. You’ll have the chance to meet and work with people of a caliber that you otherwise would never have been able to meet. You’ll get your name out, and you may even pick up some other jobs as a result!

Charities can be a great reference, or at very least, they can throw you a good link (thanks, mcanerin).

Finally, you get the satisfaction of helping someone out that really needed you. And that’s something that money can’t buy.

Coming Soon: Ideas for Approaching Nonprofits

My original post on Squidoo can be found here. After less than a week, the first results from Squidoo are in. If you had done a search for “Nate Kartchner” a week ago, the 4th entry from the top would have been the #1 result for my name (it should be the post where I got moded for being wrong about the crane kick in “The Karate Kid”). However, the #1 and #2 results are both from Squidoo now. Granted, these aren’t actual lenses I’ve created, so I’m still awaiting final judgment, however, this is a good sign that the domain is picking up some trust from Google, which bodes well for my lenses. And I can’t believe how many quality lens names are still available. I’m picking them up as quickly as I can think of them, but there are still plenty, if you’re still interested in getting while the getting’s good.

Check it out: Squidoo.com