Reasons for Not Being Good Link Bait
At some point during your goal of marketing your website you are going to want to build up some links pointing to your website. Some can be forced like press releases and article writing and others have to happen naturally. The ones that happen naturally are usually very powerful but they do require your website to be at a certain standard.
If you are wondering why your website has no natural one way links pointing to it lets go over some reasons on why Jennifer Iderstyne, a writer for Search Engine Watch thinks why other websites are not linking to your website:
“No Great Content”
This is both the most obvious and the most likely reason a site is finding links hard to come by. It’s great to have the classics; a company history, product pages, and promotional copy. But that’s not really content, at least not content as it relates to link building.”
Often times if your content is only mediocre than nobody is going to want to link to it. Other websites and blogs usually link to other websites when the content is compelling and worth linking to. Is your content worth linking to?
“No One Knows You Exist”
If you got through “No Great Content” thinking “That doesn’t apply to me, I love what I do and I’ve created some great stuff,” then consider this: does anyone know who you are? That’s the biggest problem sites that have great content run into.
Sure, it is a vicious cycle to have to create links in order to rank and in turn having others find you and possibly link back to you but there are ways to get in front of your audience without achieving great rankings first. Try using social media to at least have your audience find you first. If you are in a competitive space and you are waiting for your organic search rankings to have others find your website you might be waiting for a while. Create some new pathways now to get visible. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket when marketing your website because you could find yourself waiting for some time.
15 Responses to “Reasons for Not Being Good Link Bait”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Great tips Nick. Content is King still rides high in the web world, which I’m very glad about. We are a web design company in the UK and try daily to write & record helpful posts for other designers and tips for company’s how to improve their online campaigns. Of course we are a commercial web design company, who’s main revenue is from other companies paying us to do this. But we feel making a strong name for ourselves online is more important and want to be know as a company who people can trust.
Hi Rory,
Thanks for reading and your comment!
At the end of the day, link building and producing good link bait is about building your online brand and reputation (and getting great quality links in the process!).
Thanks again & Take care!
Nick
Link building is essential if you want to rank high in Google, as those on the first page get approximately 42% of the clicks, which is a high percentage, it doesn’t leave much traffic for everyone else. However, like you said, you can’t receive the right reaction without good content, people may look at your website first but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are definitely going to buy from you. Your content it most important where that’s concerned.
Great post Nick, thanks for sharing.
You hit the nail on the head here, it’s very important to remember that content is king.
Hi SEO Essex,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Good post Nick, and I completely agree that having lots of quality backlinks to your website is key to ranking high in search results.
There are two ways to build backlinks:
1. Actively
2. Passively
The first part of your post focuses on how to passively get backlinks to your website (i.e., good content), which is a key to any link-building strategy. However, like you mentioned in your post, most websites will fail if they sit back and wait for people to link to them for the reason you mentioned above (i.e., nobody knows you exist).
As a result, you need to always be actively building backlinks. You mentioned using social media, article marketing and press releases as methods of building backlinks to your site. These are all excellent strategies! So is commenting on blogs (like this) and forums, but be sure to actually take the time to add something of value to the conversation and never post comment spam. It’s not just a waste of time, it’s also rude to the blog’s owner and readers.
Anyway, keep the posts coming. They provide very useful nuggets of information that website owners can benefit from.
Have a great day!
Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks so much for reading and sharing the additional recommendations!
This is all very true and I am glad you find my nuggets of SEO info useful
Take Care!
Nick
Social media is a great way to get the word out there and to put your site on your audience’s radar. We launched our website 6 weeks ago and we’ve been mostly using Twitter to promote. It allowed us to directly connect with our target audience (wildlife lovers) and start a dialogue.
Thanks for your post!
This is just a casual speculation rather than an assertion, but I do wonder whether the people who advocate creating content that people really want to receive, are mostly people like you.
The world is currently full of people searching for answers the the questions you are currently focussed on. Isn’t it therefore a self fulfilling prophesy that you will get a lot of natural interest. Can the same really be true of every website dealing in every type of product or service?
Thanks for your ideas Nick. Personally I find it a constant struggle (in a one-man operation) to find the time to develop my website, add valuable content, manually get backlinks, and all while attending to my current clients. And in an increasingly competitive environment too. Ah well, we all face such challenges I guess.
It may seem a vicious circle to need links to get great rankings. But getting noticed by Google and the other SE’s is not rocket science.
Unfortunately many web designers have no idea how to optimize sites for SE’s so their clients remain virtually unknown. Properly optimizing content and meta tags for keywords (if only on the home page) will eventually get you noticed by the SE’s. It may take some work to stay there but not getting noticed is unexcusable!
Hi Mike,
You nailed it on the head! Much of content creation (to create link bait) is indeed common sense in many cases…
Hi Denzil,
I have been there (as a one man show) before and it is very tough to understand the balance as to how to create good content, build relevant links, brand, trust, etc. Especially in our industry that is extremely competitive (more competitive than most industries I have seen and/or worked in).
Anyway, thanks for reading and best of luck with your business and SEO efforts!
Take Care,
Nick
Hi David,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts! This is so very true! From my experience some of the best web designers are NOT good and real SEO people. I wish they just all stopped offering SEO! For instance, my company Brick Marketing does not offer web design at all since we are a full service SEO and SEM firm…that is what we concentrate on!
Thanks again & take care,
Nick
Another good post Nick. Short but sweet.
I am not successful yet but in the 4 or so months I have had my website I found out early on that I’d have to create content. I just put something on my blog then distribute it to the article directories. I have trouble getting known and you are right about social media. However I haven’t really worked it out yet but I guess once I do I will be able to utilise it for my site.
David of Atlanta gave a good reminder about getting noticed by the search engines. I find it is ok for my index page but google is not recognising the inner pages even though I am developing backlinks.’
I also wanted to know what you think of SocialAdr as a bookmarking backlink tool?
I got sick of waiting to grow my brand and decided to use Twitter to start . Getting your brand out there is key .Soon i will be offering a 5pk. software tools just to join my site and to gain exposure for my brand name.
Great content makes for links back from other similar sites easier to get however to me great content means something new everyday and that can be a little daunting. I try to keep changing and evolving but when your still learning codes and how to use them it makes it a lot harder.
Twitter is excellent for advertising blogs/items for sale and updates to your site and its pages but is it really good for creating back links. Google Webmaster Tools shows me no links back directly from Twitter and the same goes for Yahoo Tools .
The only real links i can see from this source would be from people linking to your site after you put a link out there.
This link is valuable but it seems to me those are the only links Google finds .
Am i wrong , I don`t know for sure. Does anybody? Let me know what you think Nick.
Great post by the way , it should get a lot of comments.
Have a Great Day!
Hi Mark,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Twitter is a good place to start to build your brand and it does lead to indirect links as you promote your offers, news, etc to your audience on Twitter.
Thanks again for reading & take care,
Nick
Great article.
One of our websites is of a high standard for content. It gives a lot of helpful information and code useful to website designers. This particular website gets lots of links without us even trying.
Other websites we have with basic content do not get linked to even when we push them.
So great content plus helpful information seems to work well.