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There are many effective techniques through which you can drive massive traffic to a website and Link bait is one of them. It’s a technical buzz phrases which can help you to get tons of immediate traffic. In simple words, link bait is any piece of content that other people want to link to. It’s not just something they find personally useful or entertaining; it has to go beyond that to something that makes people feel a need to share it.

The first task in preparing content that fits the description is to know your target audience. Social bookmarking sites are a great place to generate an initial buzz for your work, so it’s a good idea to join up at Digg, RaidX, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx, and the other high traffic link-sharing websites. Now, don’t go overboard linking and sharing every web page you’ve ever written! Too much self-promotion right off the bat can get your account – or worse, your entire domain – blacklisted or at least psychologically associated with something people don’t want to see.

Instead, find people and popular stories that are in subjects related to the topics you’re trying to promote. If you can’t find the subject you’re interested in among the already popular stories, there’s a good chance that this won’t be the right bookmarking community for your project. For example, internet marketing is almost certain to get down voted at Reddit – but Mixx has many groups and mini-communities that would be interested. Sphinn is a site dedicated just to SEO and marketing issues, so if you’re having a hard time getting any traction for your links you may be talking to the wrong community.

When you know your communities from one another, you’ll have a bit of an insight into what makes the front page and generates link bait. Digg and Reddit are great places to promote: Science, technology, humor, and politics.

Controversy sells and people want “news.” What might have been top-rate link-bait yesterday is probably considered “old news” today.  Timing is essential so if you’re just piggy-backing your post on a story that’s already broke and circulated the net, there’s not a very good chance that your version will make any progress unless there’s something genuinely unique that you can add to the discussion.

While controversy and shock value is great – don’t take it too far.  Avoid insults and condescension, surprise people but try not to disgust them.  Remember, the key to link-bait is mass appeal.  Ideally, you want your link to end up on peoples’ email lists and homepages, so keep it friendly for work and families.

So what happens when you pull this off? Tons and tons of immediate traffic.  In fact, the traffic itself can be a problem if your hosting servers aren’t ready for a huge flood of hits.

While bookmarking traffic rarely converts, the benefits extend long after that initial rush of traffic fades.  Remember, we’re talking about link-bait here so if everything worked right you will get a highly weighted backlink from the bookmarking domain and you’ll also pick up various backlinks from the websites owned and operated by the people who visit these websites.

For examples, I’ve seen deep URLs on my political website shoot up to PR4 and PR5 when the homepage of that domain wasn’t even that high.  Practically overnight, these URLs can rank for extremely competitive keyword phrases because they pick up truly editorial links in a rapid fashion.

Really, I’m just saying that you have to write quality content and promote this content to the correct target audience.  This isn’t fundamentally different than any media that has ever existed!   The big change is the technology that promotes the content, and the way that online social communities can leverage your reach without the typical barriers to entry that exist in print and broadcast media.

So, next time use link bait technique if your online marketers and social media experts put forward an idea. Know that the use of this buzzword/phrase isn’t a genius idea in its own right.  The real talent is coming up with the actual articles, pictures, or video that makes something worthy of being linked to – and putting it where the right eyes can see it.

Posted under SEO Tips

Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:

Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because, every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the Title Tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:

Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:

Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj”.

Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title

Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

These things are the pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your web site’s success path.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization