11_09_2008

WordPress, Link Baiting & Trackbacks: Improve Your Business’ Search Engine Rankings

Scrawled by Ian | WordPress Tips

Link baiting is a great way to improve your search engine rankings.

That’s because two of the most important factors that Google uses when creating it’s Search Engine Results Pages are the number of and quality of inbound links to a site.

What Is Link Baiting?

In short, link baiting is actively encouraging people to link to your site.

You do this by writing content for your Web site that produces some kind of reaction in your readers, that hopefully makes them link back to your site.

As the name link baiting suggests, fishing is a pretty good analogy. You throw your content out into the great lake that is the Internet and hope that some users will bite. Or as the Search Engine Journal puts it:

“The article is the bait, and the link is the catch.”

Slightly less like fishing, successful link baits often spreads virally. Starting with just one reader linking to your site on their blog, their readers then follow the link and link to you as well. Before you know it you’re inundated with links - at least that’s the theory.

In reality the number of links you get depends partly on the quality of the article that you write and partly on the popularity of people who pick up on your article. If you write something that’s informative and interesting and gets picked up by a blogger with lots of readers, then you’re onto a winner.

What Types of Link Baiting Are There?

There’s some debate about how best to classify - mostly by continuing the fishing analogy by breaking link baiting techniques down into a series of “hooks”.

But, at a higher level, there are two forms of link baiting - negative link baiting and positive link baiting. With the “negative” and “positive” parts of the link bait done by you when your write your Web content.

If you want to write a negative link baiting piece write something that’s controversial, critical or just down-right provocative content. Content that annoys people but still gets you a link back to your site.

And if you want to write a positive link baiting piece write somethign that shares information, breaks some interesting news or entertains. Content that people like enough to link to.

What’s Best For My Business?

If you do decide to try out a bit of link baiting on your business’ Web site, it’s generally best to stick to positive link baiting.

It’s important to remember that your Web site is a part of your marketing strategy and the impression people have about it’s content helps to form the impression they have about you and your business.

Typically people’s responses to link baiting exactly match the type of link bait. If you write a negative link bait, people respond to it with negativity. If you write a positive link bait, people respond to it with positivity.

WordPress and Link Baiting

Stretching the link baiting/fishing analogy to breaking point, WordPress makes a great “rod” for link baiting.

Other than it being really simple for you to publish your content (dangling your “bait” on your “hook”), WordPress has another built in feature that makes it a great Web publishing tool for link baiters - the trackback.

The trackback is like a fishing “float” dancing on the surface of the water attracting potential catches.

Or more accurately, it’s a calling card letting you know who is linking to your articles and similarly let’s the authors of Web page you link to know you’re linking to them.

So 2 good steps to help get your link bait content noticed is t:

  • Link to someone else’s blog (preferably someone in your niche) in your content.
  • Turn on trackbacks on you blog.

By default WordPress is configured to “Allow link notifications from other blogs”, that is WordPress allows links from other blogs to show up on your WordPress site.

But WordPress isn’t automatically configured for outbound trackbacks - your fishing floats.

To switch on outbound trackbacks:

  1. Log in to your WordPress Admin panel.
  2. Click the Settings link.
  3. Click the Discussions link.
  4. Click the Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.) check box.
  5. Click the Save Changes button.

With this configured, whenever you link to another blog your article’s link with show up (assuming they allow incoming trackbacks on their site).

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Number of Comments: One Comment so far.

  1. PPC Bully Review wrote on the 02_01_2008

    Thanks so much for this post. I never really understood the whole “trackback” thing before but this makes perfect sense. I’ve been providing links to other blogs on my posts for some time but never realized that I could (at least potentially) have them display my blog’s link. Thanks for the tip.

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