Developing link-bait: an example

One of the hardest things to do in SEO these days, is getting the links you want, at the price you want: for free. Most of those directory links you can get for free won't help you a lot, since what you want is links from trusted websites, with approximately the same topic as your website. Directories tend to be neither.

So you have to get links from your fellows, and as you know, it's usually easier to impress outsiders than your peers. I'll use a site i own as an example. This site has CSS3 as it's topic. The pages it started out from where once right here on my own site, but at some point in time, 90% of my visitors came for those pages about CSS3, and all my other content was hardly looked at, so i decided to give these pages their own domain.

I created a new layout, put those pages in there, and then i did something i had never done before: i dugg my own site. Some friends i was talking to on IRC and IM also dugg it, and before i knew it, within 48 hours of first launch of the site, it was on the frontpage of digg and on del.icio.us popular, and i got 80.000 pageviews in 24 hours.

Now getting on the Digg frontpage is nice because of the traffic, but it has a nice side effect too: people will blog about your site, and you'll get loads of links. The CSS3 previews i have on that page each have their own page, and people had their own favourites. What happened is that people started linking to the frontpage, and in their text they linked to their favourite preview pages, so i got loads of nice deeplinks, together with frontpage links.

Lessons learned so far:

• If you have unique content that could convert into a site of it's own, do it!
• Digging your own site and getting some friends to help you start the digg is a smart move.
• If you have enough link-worthy content, make sure to spread it over multiple pages, so people will deeplink in to your site.

I'll tell more about how i made the site even more succesfull in a next post.
[tags]SEO, link-bait, linkbait, link building, css3[/tags]