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White-Hat SEO + Social Media = Link Bait Magic

This guest post is by Ben Jackson of SEODiscovery.org.

You’re a blogger.

You want traffic.

You know between nothing and a lot about SEO?

Perfect.

Most people are intimidated by SEO and just as many have no clue what it’s all about. This is exactly why corporations waste thousands upon thousands of dollars every year on useless SEO practices that produce lackluster results—they don’t understand what is happening! Well here is my proposition:

Whether you already understand SEO or know nothing about it, I am going to present a strategy to you right now that will have you getting lots of links and traffic to your site, and here’s the kicker…

You won’t even realize you’re building links! You can follow this process, concerning yourself only with creating great content and establishing a great reputation in your niche, and the links and rankings will follow.

Enough talk. Let’s get to it!

One of the only SEO tactics that is actually considered to be white-hat is link bait. Link Bait is a piece of content or feature on a site that is especially appealing and worthy of attention. Visitors like what you’ve shared so much that they link back to you, thus “link bait”. You do the work upfront creating something awesome and then sit back as the links pour in for you. This is also referred to as natural link building and is 100% white-hat.

Step 1. Create your link bait

We are just getting into the entire promotional/SEO campaign we’re going to be developing and this is by far the most important part. You need to have something really great to share and you need to use the magic word—it needs to be FREE (always capitalize FREE). I’m sure we all know already that people love posts with lists: Top 10 Article Directories, Best 5 Tips for Weight Loss, and so on.

You want to create really usable and exciting content for your niche. Compile a few lists together into one comprehensive directory, create a list with an angle that hasn’t been done, share a secret actionable tip you have been waiting to share—something that your viewers will want to come back to and share with others. You can get creative and provide value however you want (I did it with a free software program you can see here: FREE OnlyWire Account Creator).

Bonus tip: If you really want to kick it up a notch, think of something people never give away for free, and give it away for free. Software or an ebook without an opt-in can work well, and you can also put affiliate links and links back to your site in your product.

Step 2. Make sure it’s shareable

The Internet and how we share online has changed a lot over the last few years. We don’t get so many forwarded emails with jokes in them anymore (that is so 90’s). These days, social media has become the analogy for word of mouth on the Web, and we want to let the people talk!

While we are creating “link” bait and we want to get links from webpages, we cannot ignore the fact that most people will opt for a tweet instead. Many people don’t have a real online presence or won’t write a relevant blog post in order to share your link, so they’ll just tweet it or like it on facebook instead.

This is why it’s very important that we place sharing buttons prominently on our page with our link bait and also refer people to them. Every tweet will expose your link bait page to more people who may also retweet or link to your page. Basically, you have an opportunity to greatly expand your popularity and potentially go viral off this process.

SEO reminder: getting a lot of links to this one page on your site will give it a lot more authority and this link juice will spread through your internal links and help other pages on you blog rank higher as well.

Step 3. Create the spark

Part I: Getting ready

At this point you’ve got your awesome link bait setup on your site, catered towards your niche, and ready to explode. The sad truth is that if you build it, they will not come: you still have to promote this page to get the ball rolling. If you have a big Twitter following or an email list, you can contact these people about it to get things started.

A lot of us don’t have those assets built up yet, but thankfully there is a lot you can do to ignite the fire on your link bait. We are going to accomplish three different things all at the same time:

  1. Build dofollow backlinks to your site.
  2. Build links to your link bait.
  3. Establish/build a positive and professional reputation in your niche.

This is all done through blog comments. Here’s how:

  1. Go to www.dropmylink.com.
  2. Enter a very broad keyword for your niche like “seo” or “cars”.
  3. Choose to search for “KeywordLuv” blogs.
  4. Click Search.
Drop my link

Drop my link

This will help you find tons of blogs in your niche that use KeywordLuv on their comments. In case you’re not familiar, KeywordLuv blogs are “dofollow” which means they pass link juice, they allow you to use your keyword to link back to your site, and a lot of the time they link back to your most recent post too. Your goal is to first amass a list of popular KeywordLuv blogs in your niche.

Part II: Here comes the magic

It’s time to reveal how this all comes together now. You’re going to visit each of these blogs one-by-one and leave a comment on their most recent blog post. You want to comment on the most recent blog post because it will have the most activity which means the most potential for people to click through your links and find your link bait.

Also, these pages are linked right off the homepage so they should have some PR (No you can’t see the PR because “Toolbar PR” isn’t updated often, but the page does have PR). When you comment, you can leave a link with anchor text to any page of your site you want to rank. I know you don’t have all page #1 rankings, so choose a keyword you have been working on and leave an anchor text link to the corresponding page (there’s the link building part).

When you leave a comment you will also automatically get a link to your most recent post. The idea is that you make your link bait your most recent post. This way, you get an anchor text link to a page you want to rank and you get a link promoting your link bait. These “most recent post” links stand-out and get clicked on more often as well.

Most recent post

Most recent post

When blog commenting, take the time to read the post (you might learn something from it) or at least skim it so you can leave a comment that adds value to the page. If you leave stupid comments like, “Wow, great share thanks!!” you will fail in two ways:

  1. Your comment won’t get approved.
  2. You won’t look authoritative and won’t build a solid reputation in your niche.

Make a meaningful comment because this will cause discussion around your comment and it will make people want to click through your link. To recap, you will visit a popular blog in your niche with KeywordLuv enabled and leave a comment on their most recent blog post. You are not spamming, you are adding value to their page and sharing your links.

This way, you can establish yourself as an authority in you niche, build “dofollow” anchor text links to your website, and promote your link bait so that it catches on and gets links to your website on autopilot.

Bonus tip: When someone in your niche comments on your site, follow their link back to their site and comment on it too and even tweet a post of theirs. This goes a long way for building strong relationships and networking with relevant web masters.

SEO is becoming less and less about traditional link building, and spamming becomes a dumber idea every day. If you focus on sharing quality content, creating a great user experience, and integrating social media, you are bound to grow your traffic and increase your rankings. You can repeat the above strategy over and over again for repeat results. Instead of worrying about the newest link building schemes or paying for an expensive new SEO program, you can focus entirely on creating great content and building your reputation—every blogger’s dream.

Master the SEO basics for FREE with Ben Jackson’s SEO Course (No opt-in) and be sure to follow Ben on Twitter and “like” the FB page too!

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Now, this post was interesting, at least put an interesting spin. I guess I’ll have to write my almost one-year-old statistics about commenting vs guest posting (commenting got me around 4500 visits in a month, guest posting has never gone that far even if I had one quite viral post once), ironically, as a guest post here.

    Ruben

    • Hey Ruben,

      I’m a big fan of both commenting and guest posting (obviously :P), but that’s interesting that you found commenting to be stronger than guest posts for traffic purposes as well. Was this indirectly through increased rankings or simply direct traffic? Bring on the post lol, would love to see your stats and methodology.

      • Hey Ben,

        What do you think of article marketing?

        Regards,
        Ron.

        • I think that it’s still a plausible means of promotion. Article directory marketing is dead, but article marketing for syndication still works. I use all of my best writing for my own site and guest blogging, but if I finish up an article that just isn’t quite good enough (old news, not a popular topic etc.) then I’ll submit it to the top directories.

          Basically I won’t really bother doing article marketing until I run out of other blogs in my niche to write for. When I do pursue article marketing, I write with the intention of it being published beyond the directories.

    • Interesting for sure!

      I wonder how numbers affected when you guest post and follow up by engaging ever commenter though — any ideas?

  2. this tool is just awesome. I can easily find the blogs with keywordLuv. thanks

    • No problem, it’s a favorite of mine. Also, for anyone using it on a strictly SEO oriented campaign, here’s a quick tip for finding the high PR pages fast:

      1. Go to your Google search settings and enable 100 pages to display per page
      2. Use SEO Quake to organize all 100 in order of PR

      You’ll end up commenting on a lot of older posts so it’s not a great strategy for direct traffic, but it will help you find the “link juice” quicker.

  3. Love it. Great info, especially with the Drop My Link tool. I think finding the dofollow’s that aren’t PR pitfalls is half the battle. And I totally agree on the relationships opinion. Part of link building is also relationship building, whether you intend it or not. If you ask me, I’d say building the relationship is just as important as getting that link juice. You just never know what doors might be opened. . .

  4. I had no idea that anything like that even existed. This is truly some great info… The kind I like to see here on ProBlogger.

    Cheers!

  5. Well, I feel this tool seems to impress me! I’ll give it a try! However, I would like to bring to your notice that your links are not properly tagged (FREE OnlyWire Account Creator) in this article. It leads to page not found. So, please make the respective changes.

  6. This is a very novel approach to getting backlinks! I’ll give it a shot! Link Bait aside, though, just using the Drop My Link search opens a wealth of link possibilities! Thanks for the tips!

  7. Thanks for interesting info

  8. Awesome post. i learned something now.
    :)

  9. Hey Ben, really a KICKER! I really like the information you shared. It enhanced my knowledge even more. There is one problem first two links are not working 1. your website link 2. only wire link both giving 404 error.

    Wali

  10. Hey, just check all of the links on the posts. Mostly are not working or redirecting properly this usually happens when we copy paste the links from MS Word to WordPress. Thanks

  11. Thanks for this interesting article. Especially the “drop my link” tool is very cool. I’m gonna try your approach today!

  12. Ben. Very Nice tool towards keyword. Cool. Thanks for sharing the info.

  13. Thanks for turning us onto Drop My Link, it’ll definitely come in useful for my commenting & link baiting strategy.

  14. I think I’m stupid. I have used CommentLuv and I’ve seen the similar feature that allows you to pick an article to highlight.

    However, KeywordLuv is not working the same way.

    I might just be really too tired to be testing it, but how are you supposed to activate it?

    Would I put:
    Heather@(mykeyword)
    Heather@YourKeyword
    YourName@YourKeyword

    When I tried me@mykeyword, it used my keyword as the anchor text for the standard website link (which looked really dumb). When I tried “YourName@YourKeyword” it showed the person commenting was “YourName@YourKeyword”. Nothing brought up the recent posts list.

    What am I doing wrong?

    • Hey Heather,

      You just have to fill in the name part like Heather@your keyword. You want to put a space between the words in your keyword, but no where else. I accidentally made a comment in this format above (darn auto form filling :P).

  15. Thanks for this article. I had never even considered using KeywordLuv as a way to get backlinks. I didn’t even finish reading before I had posted comments on several blogs related to my site. This is a great tip!

  16. I comment a ton, but I didn’t know about the Drop My Link website, so I’ll definitely try it out, thanks for sharing.

  17. I like the idea of “white hat SEO” but I have to say, it’s hard to be competitive when you’re a small blog and you have larger fish stealing your article ideas and using them to their advantage.

    It’s like you might get a good idea, publish it, then watch a monster-traffic site take your premise and run with it, stealing your traffic. That’s NOT white hat. But that’s what happens out here. And no, website owners don’t take responsibility for their staff’s action all the time. They have blinders on and say it’s your problem, not theirs.

    So be ready for that one newbies. It will happen.

    The bottom line is if you’re innovative and have your innovations and ideas “borrowed”, you just have to keep innovating. If you have that quality in you, then you’re golden!

    Sorry about that tangent,

    I LOVE the recommendation for commentors to read the post before commenting. Too many leave generic comments. My, I’m too principal bound, and delete those. I want conversation for my bits and pieces of info I scribble about.

    But that’s me. I’m weird that way.

    KeyWordLuv didn’t seem to give me quality returns… but I’m not done tooling around with it.

    Later gang!!!

    -Bruce Simmons

  18. Ditto, I was also not aware of the Drop My Link website – thanks. This article sums it up quite well.

  19. nice post. Thanks for the sharing :)

  20. The creator of the KeywordLuv plugin doesn’t use it anymore, and he has disabled his dofollow plugin too due to a high volume of spam comments. Ironically, he created a ‘comments’ page just for the plugin page, that is it’s in exclusive use on the plugin’s specially created plugin page and nowhere else on his site…

    I really like the idea of your post, Ben, but when you recommend something that even the creator of doesn’t use, I’m not gonna either.

    • Hey Catherine,

      That is ironic he has stopped using his own plugin, spam comments can be cut down immensely with simple plugins like G.A.S.P. even if you are using keywordluv. However, I’m not recommending that we install it on our sites. Rather, I’m advising to find other sites using it and comment on them. Our comments won’t be marked as spam because we actually read the post and add value to the page with our comments.

      • I do agree with your proposals, and I even use GASP on my blog, though I’m a little concerned and confused about dofollow. I lost page rank recently, from 4 to 2, can’t tell you how much that hurt. Despite doing SEO since I began my blog in 2009, it sent me on an SEO crusade and one of the things I was reading just yesterday was that Google recommend the nofollow and may well mark you down for having dofollow. What’s a girl to do? Sigh..

  21. Thanks mat for this wonderful information about Link Bait Magic.

    Thanks.

  22. Firstly thanks for the great post and the awesome tool to find the do follow blog posts, one thing that I do find interesting looking at all of the comments posted above, is that very few have taken advantage of the anchor text as explained in this article.

    It is a great traffic strategy, and works well on some of my established sites.

    Thanks again

    Steve.

  23. when you’re writing the title tag for your web page, make sure that it contains your targeted keywords along with your city and your state. This will tell the search engines exactly where to rank you.

  24. I enjoyed this more the second time I read it. I’m such a n00b at SEO and blogging that I didn’t understand at first.
    I believe I get the tactic; basically create the link bait content, then use “drop my link” to find the blogs that use dofollow and give good comments not spamming garbage on those blogs; This in turn will build link backs to your site giving u more traffic and hopefully more followers, possibly customers and so on… =D

  25. I’m not entirely convinced that these types of links will go towards any sort of ranking – especially with the recent Google Panda update (I’ve yet to see any evidence on this within Webmaster Tools). Also, for the amount of manual work involved it might not really make that much difference. For instance you could spend an hour a day doing this type of link building, perhaps just to get maybe 20-30 links (some of which may not get published after moderation). Whereas if you spent an hour a day creating quality content, then you could easily attract better quality links (actual promotions of your site, not to mention visitors, along with the link juice itself).

    So, i’m swaying towards this being a lazy mans way of SEO.

  26. Hello everyone. I am new to this and I am thankful that this article shares all there is to know clearly and easy to understand. I would like to try this strategies so I can make backlinks more faster and easily.Thanks again for the author of this site.

  27. Now, I’ll give more time in using dropmylink. Kudos to the creator, Mister Fong :-)

  28. fiza tariq says: 09/12/2017 at 3:02 am

    i like your work dear

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