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.
5 Responses to “Reasons for Not Being Good Link Bait”
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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