10e20 Blog

I have a confession to make. I am a celebrity gossip addict. I love to look at pics and see what people are wearing. While browsing one of my favorite sites yesterday I came across what looked to me like pay dirt for some great link bait.

Target famous celebrities and bloggers that millions of people read and consume, get exposure for your brand, and LINKS. Looking at it a bit closer, I see some missed opportunity that could have been capitalized on and began to realize that this probably wasn’t intentional link bait (in our world-the Internet world) at all. More “attention-bait”.

Magazines, newspapers, colleges, government, have been employing “attention-bait” since the beginning of media.

First, the story itself is not featured on the site, which forces a link to the homepage. Perez Hilton (one of the most popular blogs on the interwebs) actually wound up linking out to a newspaper article about the article to give his readers a sense of what it was about.

If you’re in an area that finds it hard to build natural links what do you do? You create bait and attract or catch the links whether this is done on purpose or as a happy accident. The best way to do this is with content that is directed at a specific audience and has appeal.

Images and visual aids add to this appeal or can be the whole lure altogether. Eye tracking visualization software studies have shown that viewers move across the content on a screen very very fast. What is to keep them there? Unless the content is of interest to them they will move on to the next page and continue the search.

Lets face it, people view and read on the screen much different than the printed page. If you have appealing or ‘juicy‘ images for the eyes to feast on then that just may be the difference for a viewer to stay and read further.

John Scott from V7N has a great post up about intelligent link buying in a Google FUD world. As he correctly states:

Links remain the most important part of any search engine marketing campaign. Links are SEO. The difference between link building in 2002 and link building in 2007 is that the search engines are better equipped to evaluate those links, and this forces website owners to up their game. Keep building links, just be smart about it.

Here are 10 good tips for intelligent link buying:

1. Buy links from websites which exercise editorial integrity.

2. Vary Your Anchor Text

3. Buy Non-Keyword Links

4. Avoid Site-wide Links

5. PageRank Zero Can Pass Link Weight

6. Avoid Automated Link Spamming

7. Image Links And ALT Text

8. A Link On A Page Is Not The Same As A Link On A Page

Video has become a bigger part of Netscape’s site as they continue to find their way. Video has its own Netscape Channel and was really made popular when the Michael Richards’ racist rant video was put up. Up until this past weekend the “Kramer video” was the most popular clip on the site (it was subsequently replaced by the Saddam Hussein cellphone camera execution) with over 72,000 views to date.

With each uploaded video Netscape gives you the option to share it by grabbing some simple JavaScript code and then placing it on your site or blog:

Much like this brand new website The Stoners Bar did:

On the actual Netscape page containing the video (right underneath the video), there is a small section called Top Syndicators of this Video. In this box there are up to ten links (all without a nofollow on them). If we look at this specific example – we’ll see a nice text link back to stonersbar.com: