But what is link bait, what makes it work and why does it fail?

What Is Link Bait?

Link bait is content designed from conception to go viral. The goal is to produce something so awesome your friends will share it with their friends, your friends’ friends will share it with their friends and so on.

In theory, if you to create the perfect viral link bait, people keep sharing and sharing until everyone on the Internet sees your creation.

In the diagram above, you send your link bait to four people. Each of your friends share it with four people. Each of them shares with four more and so on. Four become Sixteen. Sixteen becomes sixty-four. Sixty-four becomes 1,024. In this perfect distribution, 1,108 people will see your content and it keeps growing.

Great link bait earns links. Those links increase domain authority. Higher domain authority generates better search engine rankings. Or at least that’s the SEO theory. But as we are about to discover, one cannot simply decide to publish link bait and have it work.

Just like SEO, making link bait work is difficult. If fact, you’ll quickly realize that link bait means different things to different websites.

Link Bait Strategies

Over the years, link builders have identified a few common link bait strategies. Lists vary, but they generally look like this:

• News Stories
• Debate Articles
• Attack Articles
• Resource Lists, How-to Articles and Infographs
• Humorous Stories
• Incentive Pieces (Contests, Awards)

A good place to learn about each strategy is The Link Baiting Playbook: Hooks Revisited by Todd Malicoat.

Link Bait Is About Links

For SEO purposes, we are interested in sharing. You want people to write about your link bait on their websites, blogs and on their social media accounts. It would be a shame if 10,000 people saw your link bait yet none of them actually linked to it.

While sharing on Twitter and Facebook is a good start, the gold standard is to earn permanent links on websites and blogs. This is why tutorials and infographics are popular. Website owners and editors only link to content that they think their readers will find useful.

Before you spend time and effort on production, identify specific websites that might post and link to your content. The folks at Distilled recommend you get five actual commitments from bloggers before you spend a dime on your link bait. That’s sound advice.

While you want dozens, hundreds or thousands of tweets, shares and links, try thinking like a sniper instead of a B-52 bomber. Every country has snipers. Only a few can drop the bomb.

If Link Bait Is So Terrific, Why Doesn’t Everyone Do It?

The sad truth is even the best link bait flops more often than succeeds. For many, this leads to disillusionment and surrender. To succeed, you must commit to the long-haul up the river into the heart of darkness.

Link bait is like baseball. If a professional ball player gets on base 3 times for every ten at bats, he becomes a star and hall of famer. Today, the on base percentage for the entire Major League is 32%. That means even pro players fail seven out of ten times.

Set reasonable expectations and don’t beat yourself up when you know that you did a good job.

Audience Size & Popularity

If you or I tweeted, Today, do something good for someone you do not know, we might get a handful of retweets. But what if certain other people posted this; what might happen?

• Niche celebrities Guy Kawasaki or Rand Fishkin—25 to 100 retweets
• Cult celebrities Neil Gaiman or Amanda Palmer—100 to 1,000 retweets
• Global celebrities Lady Gaga or  Justin Bieber—1,000 to 100,000 retweets

Popularity matters because it creates leverage. Having more people to message directly increases the opportunity for content to go viral.

Guy Kawasaki and I could create and publish virtually identical inforgraphs, but Kawasaki’s version is far more likely to go viral because he has over 300,000 followers on Twitter, plus one of the most read blogs on the Internet.

If you ever wondered where the value is in making connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other social media sites, here is an important example of ROI potential. Your friends and contacts are your first generation. The more friends and contacts you have, the greater your link bait success rate will be, assuming that you publish quality link bait.

The ROI here is not sales, it’s influence. You are publishing and promoting link bait to get links, not to make customers. Influence leads to links. Links lead to rankings. Rankings lead to lead generation. Lead generation leads to sales. The investment, by the way, is networking and friend making.

You don’t have to be Lady Gaga either. Sure she can launch a thousand ships, but her fans don’t create content. Focus your friend making efforts on Web editors and writers in your business space and you will grow the type of influence your need.

Help your link bait travel. Add embedding code and social media sharing icons. Tell people to pass it along. Make it insanely easy for people share your content and give them specific calls to action to do exactly that. Ask three times. Before your link bait, after and alongside your share buttons and embed code.

Noise

The social Web is a busy place. Chances are good that you scan through posts and messages, looking for things that grab your eyes. Your time is limited so the more friends you have online the less carefully you scan. Those posts you pass over, I call noise.

Noise can turn this:

Into this:

When it comes to link bait your content must stand out above the noise. There is no average, just outstanding or meh.

Noise increases over time too. When I began promoting events and content on Facebook I was a lone pioneer. Today Facebook feels like a raging river of marketing messages. I can barely keep my head above the torrent. Twitter is the same.

Is your link bait truly delicious? If you cannot be your own harshest critic, then make sure you have blunt, honest advisors to run your ideas and drafts past.

All link bait gets accompanied by messaging. Whether it is on your blog or social media account, make certain you make your accompanying text as enticing as your link bait.

Timing

Be careful if you use social media to promote your link bait. If you are not on Twitter when a friend posts, you may never see it. The half-life of a bitly link is three hours. This is why people carefully select when they post important links.

Some strategies involve tweeting when Twitter is busiest so more people will the posts. Other strategies prefer tweeting during off-peak traffic times or in weekends, with the hope that less people posting will make it easier for a message to get seen.

Pre-write and schedule your posts. I like to tweet important links three times — morning, noon and evening. However, I am not going to tell you that my strategy is the best for you. Every market is different. Watch you social media space, try different strategies and figure out what will work.

There are tools that automatically schedule tweets and other social media post for you, supposedly when they will be seen by the most people. I don’t trust them. Apparently they work for some people, but I think this is because using the tools make them change their behavior and tweet more often.

Hope & Prayer

I see a lot of link bait released into the wild with a hope and a prayer. People who do this know they don’t have a big audience to get the viral snowball rolling. What they are praying for is this:

They want an influencer, someone with a large audience, to see and share their link bait with her audience. Because so much content gets put out on the Web every day, this is a low percentage gamble.

By now, you probably know what I am about to advise. Invest the time to connect with influencers and get to know them well enough to ask if they will share something before you even roll-up your sleeves and work on your link bait.

Who should you connect with? Watch Twitter and see which influencers converse with their friends. Neil Gaiman is a huge influencer, except he has over 1.6 million followers, so it’s going to be rather difficult to enjoy a virtual cup of tea with him. Look for people like Ian Lurie who has eight-thousand followers, engages in conversations and links to cool stuff.

Do Not Campaign

Lots of marketing is done as campaigns. It has a start and an end. Social media is not a campaign. You cannot decide to turn-on social media, drop a dozen link baits, then turn your social media off.

Just like you cannot ignore the friends you go to bars and ball games with, you must keep nurturing your online relationships. This is why I call social media networking friend making.

Know The Value Of A Link

While it is practically impossible to know the actual value of a link, this is important because you’re spending actual money on your link bait.

At some point, the value you receive must exceed your costs. Since link bait is for SEO, links are the best measure of success. Therefore you have to know the value of your links.

There are lots of ways to price links, none of them perfect. But try telling that to the CFO. I suggest estimating how much it would cost to place each link as small banner ad since this is a white hat approximation.

Get an experienced Internet media buyer to do this estimate for you and only count links on actual article pages. Your link will fall off any page that changes over time.

Since link bait is for SEO, treat any sale from a link bait referral like a direct credit. Add the amount of any sales to your earned-links ROI estimate.

Don’t be afraid to make up-front investments, especially when you are starting out. But at some point, though, you need to look at your wins and losses and decide whether or not you are having a winning season.

If you spend $10k and get 1,000 links, that’s $100 per link and a steep price to pay. If you get 30,000 links you spent 34₵ a link, much more palatable. 100,000 links? 10₵ a link.

Last Word

I have one last thought for you. All infographs may be link bait, but not all link bait are infographs. They may be all the rage right now, but infographs are expensive, few designers do them well and there’s a heck of a lot of competition out there.

Why not start with some excellent blog articles with some outstanding images? If you ask ahead of time for some link commitments it will be just as effective and much cheaper. That could save you from burning out before achieving success.

We keep hearing about all the latest and greatest new way to build links, things we “must” do, but we don’t always step back and consider what a natural link profile actually looks like as we try to beat everyone else in the SERPs.

When doing a backlink audit, there are a few things that automatically make me ask questions, namely “what happened here?” Since I firmly believe that having a good idea of a link history is critical before moving forward with a campaign, and I am slowly but surely becoming less nonchalant about risk, I thought I’d share these items with you and explain why they concern me.

Now, none of this is intended to say that these occurrences are indicators of Google violations, etc. They’re simply changes that make me take a closer look. The more risk-averse I become, the more I don’t like to find anything that makes me take a closer look, if you get my drift.

Link Spikes

Link spikes are a natural phenomenon in link building, occurring whenever you get an increased number of links in a small period of time. They can also serve as an indicator that something unnatural is happening with your site’s marketing. If I view my site’s link spikes over the past year, they occur whenever I have an article published.

Over the course of time, they appear in a very natural manner, as they happen at certain increments. I’ve examined backlink history graphs that look very nice and have gradual increases each month, then there’s a massive spike that can be traced to a piece of linkbait.

To me, that seems ok as there’s an explanation for it, but I can see that it would seem odd if I had no idea of what caused the spike. While I’m not as worried about the signals that link spikes send as I once was, I do think that they can look very out of place, and that concerns me. However, since I don’t work for Google, I’ll hush about it now.

Changes in Link Types

Remember all the fuss surrounding no-follow ages ago? We were told that it needed to be placed on paid links so we wouldn’t be penalized. People rushed to no-follow their paid links (and probably some that just looked sketchy)…can you imagine how that changed all the data for a site?

One month, you do a report and you have 50 nofollowed links, then the next month, all of a sudden you have 1000. Weirdness. If I had been watching a site for a few months, I would have wondered why the links all changed to nofollow, and of course I’d be thinking that it was because those were all paid.

(While not a change per se, I also find it very strange to come across a page full of links that are no-followed except for one big glaring and most likely paid link.)

Changes In Link Targets

If you have been around for a few years and your backlink profile is 98% homepage links, it would look odd to immediately get 1000 new subpage ones, right? Similarly, if you’re usually getting a sprinkling of links here and there to subpages and suddenly get 500 to one brand new page, it’s going to look unusual.

Of course, there could be a logical explanation but remember that the explanation may not be obvious. Again, as with all of this, changes in link types can happen in a very natural manner, but a significant switch to subpages from the homepage (or vice versa) can definitely look very strange.

Anchor Text Variety

This is one of the ones that concerns me the most as a link builder. We’ve done audits of profiles that have almost no keywordized links. They are 98% brand/site/URL anchors. These people want to build 500 links to a long-tailed phrase such as “magical unicorn wizard hats that glow in the dark.”

Imagine seeing that profile, as you’d immediately cringe, and not just because of the wizard aspect. It just looks like someone decided he wants to rank for that term for his site, and he’s gone out and (probably) bought a bunch of spammy links because let’s face it, no one is going to naturally link to you with that anchor text.

In general, don’t take a kneejerk reaction to link building, especially without considering how you’ve done things in the past. If you decide that you need to build more brand/URL/keyword/nofollow/image/directory links, then do so by all means, but don’t just stop doing what has been working for you. Algorithms change and new things are constantly being touted as the tactic you need, but it’s just not a good idea to keep drastically switching your methods, either.

I have seen no conclusive evidence that either confirms or denies the idea that you should always keep your link building as natural-looking as possible in order to rank well. We can rank sites with paid links for ultra-competitive terms and those rankings stick. We can lose rankings in exactly the same way.

However, that does not at all mean that attempting risky methods is a good idea. What works for one niche or site may not work for yours. What works today may not work next week. This is why, in the end, it’s probably best to do your utmost to keep your links looking as organic as you possibly can, and your link history plays a big role in exactly how you do that.

Yes, I’m cranky but I’m not alone in my grumpiness. I’m also a mess in my likes and dislikes.

I previously wrote a post about differing ideas about what constitutes a quality link. I have very set opinions on some things and don’t give a flip about others, just like anyone else. Therefore, it’s important to realize that, when you’re going after links, you think about your content and your approach with this in mind.

Know your audience but don’t impose limitations  on them

Obviously you know to consider your audience when you’re creating content, but just because your target demographic has strong preferences for one thing does not mean that they do not also have strong preferences for something contradictory. You certainly can’t please everyone, but you can also certainly please more than one main group if you write content well enough.

The accidental brilliance of unintentionally viral content

Let’s take the amazing viral video for Christian the Lion for an example. I cannot think of a group of people that this video would not impress, even though the music could take the hair off a sweater. The image of a wild animal recognizing his former owners and bounding up to them is absolutely one of the most lovely things that I have ever seen. This video was not created for linkbait purposes, of course, nor was it filmed for branding or marketing purposes. It is simply beautiful. I need to go cry now.

Hypocrisy is a given

Hypocrisy isn’t exactly the perfect word but it’s as close as I can get right now. I’ve never known anyone (at least not with any sense) who had consistent views, consistently. To give you an industry-related example, I look back at many of the first posts that I wrote and I disagree with about half of what I said. I’d say that I’m 95% leftwing but that 5% is a nagging little reminder of why I tend to dislike the liberal agenda many times. I’m sure that you have some beliefs that conflict with others, too.

So with this in mind, how can you tailor your approach in order to make the most of it? Some of it will of course depend upon your tactics, but much of it will simply depend upon whether or not you can apply the same methods of creating for the masses with approaching the masses.

3 Ways to get the word out

If you’re lucky enough to have a popular site with content that gets picked up very, very quickly, well…I envy you. For the rest of us, it’s necessary to promote content through various channels.

1) Social media is good for alerting people to your new content, but I see it done so obnoxiously many times. There are some people who get on Twitter and do nothing but tweet links to their own content (new and old!) This tactic isn’t just limited to social media newbies, either. If you want to tweet links to your content, do it but take the time to respond to at least some of the replies that you receive. As with anything else in social media, it’s important to be engaged here. You can’t expect to tweet links to your followers if your followers don’t care. If you were to examine your list of followers on Twitter, for example, would you be able to easily categorize them in terms of industry/subject followers, friends, people who follow anyone and everyone? Try to build up followers that cover many bases. My favorite SEOs to follow tend to talk about a lot more than just SEO.

2) Emailing webmasters to ask them to link to your content is also a viable method for building good links if you do it properly. I have never liked the one-size-fits-all approach for this, however, as it simply does not work and tends to seriously annoy webmasters. If you’re going to email and ask for a link, take the time to get familiar with the webmaster’s site and see if it’s truly a good fit. If it’s not, don’t waste anyone’s time. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can use one email to approach several people in a certain niche, either. Read the site and get a feel for the tone used, and that should help you tailor your words.

3) Making use of customer email lists can be a fantastic way to promote content, but it can also be done very poorly. I routinely get about 5 emails a day from a company that I once ordered something from, years ago, and it’s highly irritating. (I know I should unsubscribe but there’s a part of me that kind of likes being irritated, and it’s a current client!) While sending out current sales to your existing customer base may not build a tremendous amount of links, it’s definitely going to drive traffic and conversions. I don’t expect a company to tailor an email promotion to each individual of course, but if it’s well-written and the promotion itself is a good one, it’s going to work. However, here’s where I’d also use social media such as Facebook and Twitter in order to do a more individual approach, as simply emailing existing customers isn’t going to necessarily get the word out to new blood.

Overall, don’t be afraid of contradictions and concepts that seem opposite in nature. Humans aren’t one-dimensional, and should not be treated as robots. Think of all of your own ideas, likes, and dislikes, and contemplate how they change. With this in mind, you’ll hopefully be able to cast a wider net.

We didn’t have video clips on YouTube, DVD players, pause and rewind in the privacy of our living rooms. A movie also gave off numerous visual clues that could be obtained through passive viewing, requiring very little effort on the part of the viewer in order to understand what was being presented.In contrast to this, comics required more active participation as a reader would be forced to glean little bits of background information from the drawings, the words of the characters, and subtext.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this. Links are built through various methods, all of which are affected by very different aspects of their medium. In order to win at each one, it’s critical to see how understanding the active/passive components and using different techniques that are appropriate for your method can help you build better quality (and more) links.

Content writing

First of all, there’s the good old-fashioned content method. You write a piece that naturally attracts inbound links. This is a passive method for the writer, but an active method for the reader, which means that it must be engaging and easy to follow. No one wants to read the same paragraph twice to figure out what you’re trying to say, whether it’s online or in print. In fact, with the average attention span of a web user being somewhat low (to put it nicely) creating quality content that attracts links means getting to the point but doing so in a unique way.

Aim for the reader to be able to passively absorb your content. Who wants to waste time reading something that’s been read numerous times before? To help make sure that your content is easily readable and absorbable (and linkable) it’s always good to write a quick outline of your piece, whether beforehand or after you write it. If you can’t easily generate an outline of your ideas, you might want to rethink your approach.

Asking, begging, and possibly pleading

Secondly, there’s the proactive pursuit of inbound links. You ask, you beg, you might whine or offer a form of compensation. This is a very active method. In order to succeed here, you not only need to have something worth linking to of course, but you also have to choose and use, proven methods for approaching webmasters and alerting them to your content. If you don’t keep up with the latest in the industry, this is going to be much harder.

Also, from my experience using emailed link requests, even though you have your method (email) you still have numerous factors to consider, as each niche has its own unique aspects. Using an email to ask for a link to your site that sells educational products for young children is going to be very different from using an email to get a gambling link. Your language is going to be different, as your targets are very different, and what you have to offer (good content and useful products in this case) may easily be enough to get you that link.

In certain competitive niches, asking alone may not work. Some webmasters would prefer to discuss a link on the phone, and some will want to IM you. There has been a lot published recently about how well a simple phone call works in establishing enough trust to generate a quality inbound link. Even though we now have new methods of reaching out, the old ones do still work.

Linkbait

Thirdly, there is linkbait. Linkbait is particularly interesting here because of the manner in which it can be best presented. Is it video? Is it a content piece? Is it something else? Using all of this as a guideline, you can easily see that a video that you shoot, one that is designed to garner inbound links, might be a better medium than a piece of content depending upon the topic. If it’s something very physical and funny, for example, a video might work better. Let’s say that you have a very irreverent sense of humor that doesn’t always come across in writing. If your viewers are able to read your expression and those of others in the video, your humor might come across more easily. Maybe I should start producing all of my blog posts in video format…

Linkbaiting is both passive and active. In producing linkbait in your desired form, you could just let it sit there and wait for the links to roll in, which is passive, but in order to really succeed, you have to take an active approach and do the asking/begging/pleading bits. This is where social media is very useful. Social media is also both passive and active. Some people are content to observe but if you really want people to pay attention, you have to be an active participant. Speaking personally, I’m sometimes overwhelmed with information on Twitter for example, and if I have ten minutes to spare, those ten minutes will be spent clicking on links from users that I trust and interact with, not users who just throw out links nonstop without ever taking part in a conversation with me (or anyone else.)

To conclude, I’d like to say that while this probably does sound fairly obvious to many of you, it certainly isn’t to everyone out there. (I know, because I get loads of crappy emailed link requests myself.) Link building can definitely be done without much thought, but it will be done very, very poorly if you choose to ignore the basics and then the results, if you see any, won’t last.

It’s kind of like yoga, if I may liken link building to one more thing. You do the poses and that’s great, but without thinking about your breathing and your movements, you won’t get the full benefits.

When most marketing and advertising teams look at a contest they are looking for mass exposure, so they choose a prize that is going to have wide appeal, like an an iPod or iPhone. However as an SEO you need to look at this as an opportunity to build the anchor text you want, especially the really hard to get commercial anchor text. Want to rank for “Las Vegas Hotels?” Tun a contest giving away a Las Vegas hotel room. Want to rank for “coach handbags?” Then give away a Coach handbag.

When going for links like this, the prize may actually cost more than a low level prize the marketing/advertising department had budgeted for. If that’s the case, it’s your job as an SEO to show how important and valuable getting those anchor text rich inbound links are worth. Unless you’re giving away an exotic sports car, the links you generate are almost always worth more than the prize due to the rankings they can produce and the significant amounts of traffic they generate.

The next step is to think about your landing page. I’m not talking about the design/layout of the page—I’m talking about the URL. Try to choose a URL that has the keyword in it and that you can use after the contest. For example this URL:

http://example.com/las-vegas-hotels/

has much more staying power than either of these:

http://example.com/las-vegas-hotel-contest/


http://example.com/contest/las-vegas-hotel/

Another mistake a lot of people make is that after the contest ends they leave the page up with a notice the contest is over, or 301 the content to another page. A better solution is to leave the existing URL in place and just improve the page with different content. If you are concerned about usability, you can relocate the contest information to a new URL with a link at the bottom or even display a message based on incoming referral URL’s or referral keywords. If you’ve already got a commercial page about the particular item, this doesn’t present a problem. I bet you’d really like to have a second indented listing for your keywords, so leave the original page up—just make sure the two pages really are different.

Don’t miss the opportunity to generate views for any videos you may have. Including informational videos on contest pages is an easy way to increase the views on those videos, especially if they are short, to the point and helpful. The number of times a video has been viewed plays a role in YouTube popularity rankings and in getting videos to show up in Google universal search results.

A caveat: Contests, sweepstakes, incentives and giveaways, legally speaking, are much more complicated than—in my opinion—they need to be. Laws vary considerably from state to state, so before starting down the contest path make sure you do your due diligence and consult with an attorney and make sure you aren’t creating a legal headache for yourself.

Here is my expanded version of Roger’s tips on how to extract which .EDU sites link to a competitor of yours (or to an important company in your space). These commands work on either Yahoo or Microsoft Live Search, but not Google at this point:

• linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “resource”

• linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “directory”
• linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
• linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “links”
• linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “favorite”

Using this technique you can find a ton of link targets to pursue, all from known linkers. You can expand upon this as you see fit, too. For example, you can add the industry category name for products or services like yours to the list. You can also try this on .ORG sites. Once your brain gets going you can just keep going and going.

Once you have assembled this list of sites, the next step is to figure out which ones are the most important. Take the list of pages linking to your target from step one above, and run a tool on it to establish the PR of each of the target domains, and the linking pages as well.

Next, sort the list based on the PR of the domains. Take any item where the domain is a PR7 or better, and put them on your “high value targets” list.

Take the remaining sites, and sort them on the PR of the linking page. Take any item where the linking page has a PR5 or higher, and put them on your high value link targets list as well.

You are going to have to spend some time on the high value targets list. Of course, you can do this in priority order as well. You are going to want to hand craft your campaigns to these sites.

Do the research to find the email addresses you want to contact by hand, and make sure the person doing it really, really understands what you want to accomplish. Finding the best person to contact is critical here. Make sure you are NOT paying this person by the number of email addresses found, as this incentivizes them to be lazy about it and send you the first one they find.

Also, make sure that person identifies critical aspects about the linking page. What is the name of the person who is responsible for the page? What department are they in? Since these are high value links they are worth a lot of effort.

Hand craft your communications to these high value targets. You can use a template email as a starting place, but plan on customizing it based on the interesting data you have found out about the linking page. Be patient; these links can provide extremely high value to your site. Getting just a few can have a big impact.

Take the pages that were not on the high value targets list, and repeat the process above. However, since they are lower value links, you can have this be a bit more of a cookie cutter-type process, and you can use a lower cost person to do the research.

As with the high value targets, you will want to send an email to these lower value targets. You should also customize these because letters that do not have customization in them come across as SPAM. You have done the research, and you should make sure it shows. However, you can perform less customization than you do on the high value targets.

Make sure that all communications you send out come from a real person, with an email address from your real domain. Include real contact information for the person to respond to, provide a simple unsubscribe method, honor all unsubscription requests, and comply with any and all parts of the CAN SPAM Act. You do not want the trouble that can result from failing to follow those guidelines.

Crafting the email

As a final note, let’s talk about crafting the email itself. First and foremost, you must remember that your email is an intrusion upon the recipient. The first thing you need to have in mind is a simple respect for their time. The bottom line of this point is to be very concise in your communication. Make your pitch in 4 paragraphs (16 sentences) or less.

While you want it to show that you have been to their site and that your email is thoughtful, stay away from the obvious BS (such as pandering to their ego). Just get to the point: “I saw your site at www.theirdomain.com, and saw that you link to sites similar to ours (such as www.dangerous-competitor.com) and thought you might be interested in offering our site as a resource to your visitors.”

If you can cite some quality references to your site, such as a major media site that wrote about it, or a major university that links to it, do so. Building credibility in this way helps the reader understand if they can trust you, so help them out with this.

Provide them with the location on your site which is the most relevant page for them to link to. Yes, you can suggest some anchor text by providing a link. It can help them if you do this.

That’s about it. One big, big don’t: Don’t include anything along the lines of “This is not SPAM …” Even if you are complying with all requirements of the CAN SPAM Act, putting this statement in there is simply offensive. Just make sure you comply with the guidelines and don’t waste any of the recipient’s time with meaningless statements.

In addition, don’t let a team of people in India do the emailing work for you. While there are many exceptional resources available in India, they don’t know what you are really trying to do, or about your business, or the subtleties of a successful pitch strategy. It’s not that they are not smart – they simply don’t live in our culture.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide.

Matt says, “if a site says that they completely made up a story to get links, Google doesn’t have to trust the links to that site as much.” But is that about intent of the author? Does the intent have to be about influencing your search results for Google to trust you less or is it something larger?

I think Matt’s post explains that it isn’t Google’s job to police the internet. But at the same time Matt does offer generic advice. He said, “don’t burn your credibility by using fake stories. It’s a short-term tactic and makes people trust you less in the future.”

I am struggling trying to write the next few sentences. On one hand, fake stories have their place, when disclosed properly. There are many humor sites out there that obtain great traffic and rankings in Google. But to create fake stories to influence your Google rankings and not disclose that those stories are fake, can be an issue in terms of a site’s credibility.

We all know that Google has various metrics to determine a site or page’s credibility or quality. Part of that has to do with links, on page content, user actions on the page and more. Should truth be one of those factors? I am not sure. If users trust a site less and less over time, users may link to that site less and less over time.

Does Google need to downgrade the value of a site’s links based on it posting fake stories without disclosure? That is the question that is being debated in the industry. Some believe Google has the right to do so, when it is done to influence the Google search results – while some feel otherwise.

Aaron Wall’s Google to Police ‘The Truth’ talks about the topic as well.

The story was named 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers, but it wasn’t true. Nevertheless, several news agencies picked up the story, plus it made it to the front page of Digg and many other social media sites and garnered over 1,500 inbound links in under a week.

Nick Wilsdon highlights how Matt stepped into the discussion, with his comment over at our Sphinn forums:

My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: “Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”

There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.

As you can imagine, that sparked a pretty heated debate in the comments area of the Sphinn post.

Should Google take action against sites that post false stories? What about April Fools jokes that are not labeled properly? What about stories that are not accurate due to poor reporting? Should Google really dip their fingers in this space?

On the other hand, sites that continuously go this route in order to build links – is that something Google should address? Is that a form of linkspam? I think we all would agree that building out great content, tool, etc as linkbait is acceptable. Should Google go after those that build out fake content for links?

Disclosure is a key point made by Matt. Now, if the article says the sources are not validated or the article is speculation – would that be sufficient? Would Google soon require us to slap on a nosource (aka nofollow) tag in the META tags so a GoogleBot can decipher the article’s validity?

Like all these discussions, there are gray areas. It will be interesting to see which avenue Google goes.

The title of this article doesn’t mean I’m changing my position on social media as link driver. Yes, it’s possible, but for the overwhelming majority of web sites, a widespread and costly social linking strategy is a waste of time and money. Go ahead, call me a heretic, but inside you know I’m right.

If the site is this one for adult diapers then really, what’s the social media end game? Sure, you could write a blog post or article like “Ten Uses For Adult Diapers you Never Thought Of” or “Five Sexiest Senior Citizens Naked,” and sure, it might just make it to the Digg homepage, where not a single clicker/reader will be a person in need of that specific product. In fact, for the diaper site, the social media strategy should probably be bare bones simple, such as providing for passive sociality by giving users the ability to share or bookmark the content. If you are determined to go more aggressively social with it, at least focus your efforts here and here rather than at all these here.

I read blogs from a bunch of Social Media experts, which I am not–yet, and the experts say the power of Digg isn’t always in making it to the home page, where you get thousands of mostly useless clicks. The power is in the “second wave” links that a Digg mention can cause. In simpler terms, of the thousands of people who see the post on the Digg homepage, a few might actually have their own blogs that are related to what they spotted at Digg, and when they see it at Digg, they might very well link to it themselves on their own blog or site. Well, duh. Isn’t that what we’ve all been doing since the Titanic sank, linking to stuff we find useful or interesting? Do we really need a central place to find the good stuff? Sometimes yes; mostly, so far, no.

Think of it as social fertilizer. If you spread enough of it, by gosh, someone somewhere will surely be interested, right? Wasn’t that the logic that turned my email inbox into a cesspool? At least with social media nobody gets hurt, since the nature of most social media sites is to shove the good upwards and the bad downwards. A couple years ago I compared SM spam to cigarette butts and the Village Wine parable.

For what it’s worth, I do engage in social media marketing and link building for many clients, but not for all of them. It’s about discretion. Adult diapers? No. Indiana Jones IV, absolutely, all day long. Oddly, there’s a potential tie-in between those two, since Harrison Ford is getting old enough to fit the adult diaper demographic, but that’s a topic for another day. Discretion. That’s what should be at the core of the social media plans we create and execute for clients. Discretion with what should be socialized, discretion with how you go about it, and discretion with what you do with the traffic and links you end up getting as a result. I agree with the fertilizer concept of link building, and I do use it today, just like we used it back in the day for pure traffic plays from venues like Yahoo Picks (gone now, but New and Notable Sites remains), or USA Today Hot Sites. The value of those was–like Digg today–in the amazing traffic spike they caused, with the trickle down secondary link increase being a natural, welcome, residual effect. Sort of like social media fertilizer, eh?

Let’s all of us remember what fertilizer is often made from.

Lastly, sticking with my example diaper site from the beginning of this column, rather than burning hours and client dollars on a social media strategy that is likely pointless, why not instead identify and seek links from the best venues you see here, where nearly every link your adult diaper site is able to earn will not only help your reputation and trust, but perhaps also your search rank.

You might even get a little interested traffic.

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994, providing services ranking from linking strategy and private customized link building training. The Link Week column appears on Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Traffic. Is your goal to get more traffic? Are you looking for more brand recognition? Do you have CPM based advertising on your website? Measuring traffic generated by a viral campaign is one of the simplest benchmarks. Simply measure the traffic generated to the specific URL through your web analytics package. Check out Tamar’s great breakdown of 6 Free (or nearly free) analytics packages here.

Links. Are you looking to naturally build links to help with your search engine optimization efforts? Linkbaiting can be extremely effective for this, but you should track where the links are coming from and whether or not they are helping you. I recommend checking links at the 1 and 7 day marks using either Technorati or Google Blog Search, then at the 30 day mark using Yahoo! Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools (use this FireFox plugin from Joost de Valk for extra info). Simply put the full URL (yourdomain.com/viral-piece.htm for example) into any of those engines and see who is linking back to you.

Buzz. Are people talking about you or your company due to the social media work you are doing? You need to know who’s saying what, and most normal search engines won’t track this. You can use free services such as Serph to help track what’s being said in places like forums and social networks. You can use Serph to search for things like your company name, the title of your linkbait piece or tool, etc.

Bookmarks. Bookmarks will tell you how many people felt your content was important enough to want to revisit at a later time or share with their own network. There are tons of online bookmarking sites out there, but I like to use del.icio.us to gauge the overall interest level. Simply go to the del.icio.us URL page and input your full URL (as explained above) – it will then tell you how many people have bookmarked your site and the different tags they used (which is important to see if people are tagging it with what you had intended).

Conversions. At the end of the day everything should come down to this. Many people want to discount direct sales via social media marketing, but that should never be the case. I firmly believe that you should craft your viral pieces in a way that will help to generate conversions and track them closely for such. Sometimes this might have to come after you have launched and have promoted your piece via the major social networks, but other times it might be the whole goal. Define what conversions you want to have happen and then track each. Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Subscribe to your RSS feed? BUY YOUR PRODUCTS? You can do this simply and for free using Google Analytics.

With these different metrics, its important to put a realistic expectation for each in place before you launch your campaign. Think about what you want to accomplish and define your goals as specifically as you can get. Tracking your results and measuring them against your goals is the most effective way to tell if your efforts were successful and had a positive return on your investment (whether that investment be through time or money).

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.