Hooqy Media Blog

Whenever you are about to do your strategic link bait I would highly recommend for you to place the Digg vote option on your site. You can find the code to add to your site by going here:

http://digg.com/tools/integrate.

When you add it to your site it should look like the above icons. I would recommend putting a “Digg” button at the end of your content so that if the reader finished reading it they can give it a vote if they feel that it deserves it.

I have spilt tested putting the icon at the top of the page and at the bottom and the bottom left hand corner would always result in a higher voting rate. This is known as ‘search engine
optimization 2.0,” or social media optimization.

What getting lots of votes will do? As stated previously, if you receive a lot of votes in a quick
enough manner then you will get on the FrontPage of Digg which will temporally boost your website rankings up in Google because you will be receiving a temporally back link from a site with a pr of 8 which is Digg’s FrontPage.

However, what will happen is after 24 hours your story will go to the second page of Digg which is of a pr of 4, and then to the third page, and it will keep going down through the archives.

The funny thing is that when I offered a FrontPage service in the past my clients would ask me why their website url jump up so quickly in Google and then later fall back down, and I tell them the reason for that is because of the temporary back link that they receive from a social news site with such a high authority and page rank within Google.

However, to try and maintain your position within the search engines here are some other tips that you can check out. I have found this to work nicely with long tail keywords.

Votes:

When you do a search in Google you will see a number result which is an estimation of how many pages are indexed in Google for that keyword as highlighted in the image below.

From my past experience I did some extensive studying in the search engines and if you take that number and multiply it by .0001, then that would equal a good number of votes that your story will need to stay in Google for the long tail keyword that you are targeting.

Comments:

I then take that same number and multiply it by .00002 which will equate to roughly how many comments you will need for your link bait.

Comments are super useful when it comes to strategic link baiting and the more comments you have will usually translate to the more traffic, social proof, and hopefully the higher your
rankings will be as well.

I do find that a lot of comments help and that is why I would highly recommend webmasters to allow for comments to appear automatically once they are releasing their link bait.

This makes it better for the readers because it gives them immediate gratification. Another problem comes in is if a webmaster doesn’t generate enough comments on their blog, but to clear some doubts, if your story gets on the FrontPage and stay on there for some time then you will be getting your fair share of comments.

However, if you still don’t get the number of comments that you desire then you can always purchase them. No, I’m not talking about using a piece of garbage commenting software… I’m talking about actually hiring real people to do it. I would just post a job at a local freelance network such as elance or guru.com and hire a data entry individual that is looking for
more work.

I have them to put a combination of good and bad comments to help encourage readers to input their own thoughts on the comments. I actually thought of this idea because back in the day when I tried to start my own forum I would pay webmasters to add content to the forum by starting forum threads and discussions so that this could help encourage visitors to register and join in on the conversation.

For many webmasters that started a fresh forum this way without having any “internet assets” such as their own list of subscribers, or without starting a strategic alliance with another webmaster and leveraging off of their assets, this is a very difficult way to get a forum started.

However, this is an excellent technique to help jump start any new blog and that is by having common readers that will commonly comment on blogs.

Just take a look at some of the most successful forums on the internet… a lot of them have lots of active users that continuously add content to the forum.

The same principle can be said with some of the most successful blogs out there as well, many of them have a large list of readers that add more content to the original post by commenting on it.

Search engines love extra content so by having a good number of content this could increase your traffic and search engine rankings. Days before my link bait goes live I would send them a pdf attachment of the content and tell them to pretype an X amount of comments and once the link bait goes live I tell them to spread it out over the course of three days but I always tell them to place the most amount of comments on the first day.