The Death of Link Building
The accepted tactics for developing a web presence is always evolving. Building links has always been an accepted form of search ranking development, with a few stipulations here and there. As of late, it seems that Google wants to do away with link building altogether, and wants to promote onsite optimization more than anything. Google, it would seem, is trying to encourage us to earn links rather than building them. Link baiting is nothing new to the SEO world. It has been a tactic for almost as long as link building, but now it seems to be the only SEO method that Google wants give credit for. Rather than ranking websites based on how many links they’ve built, Google is now ranking websites more heavily on their onsite factors, and links earned rather than built. SEOMOZ’s Whiteboard Friday gave a detailed analysis of Google’s new ranking factors, and announced that link building as we know it is dead. Google and other search engines want to award link juice for earning links more naturally. Google’s algorithm has changed in such a way that they now want to accredit almost no link juice for links built, and would prefer that all of your links are earned rather than built. Find out how to start earning links and prevent building links that could potentially be harmful to your site’s rankings.
Infographics
Regardless of which industry you’re writing about, a well-done infographic is always going to be one of the best forms of link-bait. People are attracted to visual explanations because it catches and keeps their attention, and explains things in a way that they can understand, and infographics can provide this kind of visual stimulation that they are looking for. This is why a good infographic can easily go viral, which can cause your web rankings to explode.
Keep in mind that infographics can easily be taken as a photo and uploaded to other sites, so it might be wise to brand your infographics in order to integrate the website or company that you are representing into the graphic. This way you can at least increase brand awareness if your graphic is taken as a photo.
Articles
Industry-relevant informative articles have always been the traditional way to earn links, and they are still a very effective link-bait tactic. Not only do they improve the quality of your website by adding content and keywords, but it serves as a great way to acquire interest and earn natural links. Beware of spinning articles that you find on other websites! After Google’s Panda update, spinning articles is almost obsolete, and you would be better off writing fresh and original content of your own. It always helps to have a resource page or section to contain links to your research and other resources that could be relevant to your industry. This could also serve as link-bait, and legitimizes your article.
