Search Marketing Sage

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This SMX Advanced session promises to go beyond the usual tips for creating link bait.  We’ll hear stories about how some valuable and hard-to-get links have been won.  Our panelists this afternoon are:

• Chris Bennett- 97th Floor
• Arnie Kuenn- Vertical Measures
• Debra Mastaler- Alliance-Link
• Roger Montti- martinibuster.com
• Gill Reich- Answers.com

Roger Montti began the session by discussing some of his link building tactics for B2B sites.  Roger uses different search engine syntax operators to qualify the results he gets, and he uses those results as potential resources for link building.  For example, to find other sites with similar content to your own, conduct a search in Google for allintitle: “keyword” (where [keyword] is whatever phrase you’re interested in).  The resulting listings will show you other sites that you can either approach for links wherever appropriate or examine backlinks for even more link sources.

This woman standing by the side of the road in the middle of Death Valley, is a frequent irritation to some of the largest companies in the world.  Her name is Brenda Priddy, and her job is “Spy Photographer“.  She’s the worlds foremost automotive spy photographer and she specializes in getting shots of new vehicles before anyone else has ever seen them.

Car companies hate having these spy photos taken for a lot of reasons – most of them competitive.  But a problem most auto executives probably aren’t aware of is the SEO impact these spy photos can have on model year specific vehicle name keywords.  Once these photos go out to Automotive enthusiast websites like Jalopnik and Left Lane News they spread fast and virally onto blogs, forums and tweets.

We read a lot of search engine marketing blogs here at Search Mojo. We absolutely realize as blog writers that having a good title can be the difference between you post being read and just taking up space in the archive folder.

ProBlogger Darren Rowse has produced the best post I’ve seen about “How to Craft Blog Post Titles“. Sticking to these rules will definitely work at attracting readers to your story.

The problem I have really just might be my own personal perspective, but I’ve really grown tired of super provocative blog post titles that have little or nothing to do with the actual blog post or that have content that just doesn’t live up to the great title.

I’m just as guilty as anyone as using these tactics, but I’ve honestly stopped reading a few bloggers because I feel like I’ve been burned too many times by the title.

In an ideal world you can combine a great title with a great post and keep the blog reader returning because they either subscribed or you built some trust by delivering what they wanted. If you do this you can maybe have a more “vanilla” post title every now and then.

We are all about conversion metrics here at Search Mojo for both PPC and SEO, and I kind of look at blogging in the same way. There is shopper, browser and flyby traffic. We obviously prefer the shopper segment of blog traffic. Not that a browser or flyby reader might not eventually become a regular reader, but it’s really just a quality versus quantity argument.

Bloggers really need to know where the line is to tease just enough and keep people coming back for more.

Some great provocative titles that I’ve recently seen in SEM blogs include:

What if Google Killed Puppies?

Why I’ve Never Been More Embarrassed for Yahoo

Are Social Media Links on Death Row?

SEO is the Worst Thing Ever Invented

Guy Kawasaki on Making $5M/yr in Your Underwear

and my own personal creation How Google Convinced Me To Stop Paying For Sex

These “Link Bait” titles are attention grabbers, most of them live up the titles – you can figure which ones for yourself. If your content doesn’t live up to the caliber of your headline it’s almost the equivalent of all the “male enhancement” and Viagra spam littering my inbox right now. They all have provocative subject lines but I’m not going to even dare open one of them.