Today’s AMA Atlanta Luncheon on SEO featured a panel of experts from Prominent Placement, 22 Squared and Google. Overall a good event but my two favorite takeaways of the day were search tips dealing with link bait and the italian banker.
As one of thevery few viewers of Dirty, Sexy Money, I was familiar with the episode where the stars try to decipher an ‘explicit’ position from a home video asking, “isn’t that the Italian Banker?” The panelist then went on to describe what a fantastic job ABC had done tying their broadcast to their online presence in what has ultimately gotten legs as a YouTube phenom. Basically they’d taken an obscure term that had no other meaning and created lots of demand from the search engines, driving incredible traffic for what was certainly a languishing show.
For those of us who are not in the broadcast arena or cannot afford to promote our products on TV, the tip about link bait was even better.
As a fisherman’s widow, I thought I was familiar with all concepts Field & Stream. Au contraire. My new friend Stacy Williams introduced me to the idea of link bait as a fantastic way to meet one of the top three goals of SEO. Link bait, as she described it, was putting content on your website that other websites would want to link to. Obviously this needs to be relevant data but the key is to make it content which is interesting and highly searched.
The example I shared was a long ago blog post on Wachovia’s referral marketing program. I disagree philisophically with their program but it continues to generate more traffic than any of my other posts simply because of the number of people searching for info on that program. Lesson learned? It’s valuable to provide explanations and commentary on industry events, even when you disagree. This “link bait” doesn’t smell nearly as badly as live bait and really works for catching traffic.