One of my favorite blogs, Wolf-Howl, is written by Michael Gray. Michael is an expert on cutting-edge site promotion strategies, and often posts about Digg and link-bait strategies.

Thanks for talking with me today, Michael. For those readers who don’t know you, could you introduce yourself and tell us about your areas of expertise?

Sure my name is Michael Gray and I’m an all around trouble maker! Seriously though I started on the programming side of web development in 97-98 for a large specialty retailer in the NY area. I was reponsible for building, maintaining and growing the website until 2004 when I left to go out on my own. Sometime around 2001 or so we discovered SEO which really didn’t have a name back then. I read, watched, learned and applied a lot of the things I read on the forums (there were no blogs at the time) and the company realized some huge traffic and financial gains because of it. Eventually I started to wonder why I was working so hard making money for someone else and began working for myself on the side. After moonlighting for 2 years (often on company time) I went out on my own, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Right now I work on a combination of projects, about 60% of my time is spent client work. Some of the projects are traditional SEO, however the majority of the work I do for clients right now is linkbaiting and blog consulting. I also take a few reputation managment jobs every year.

You write a lot about link-baiting, and there is certainly an art to getting it right. What are some the mistakes people make, and what would your advice be to people on how to link-bait to achieve good results?

People in the online world think linkbaiting is some new concept, but it’s been going on in the print and magazine world forever. Visit any bookstore or magazine stand look at some of the covers you’ll see cover stories like this "5 Bedroom Tricks That Will Make Your Sex Life Sizzle", "30 Day Total Body Makeover", or "Tips to Help You Get Organized This Weekend". They are titles designed to catch your eye, connect with you personally, help you solve a problem, and ultimately make you buy the magazine. I like to think of websites, especially blogs as an online magazines. You publish a series of articles every day/week/month and use the linkbait style posts to get links, and more importantly get subscribers (or as Andy Hagan’s calls it defensible traffic).

Linkbait is a proven method and it’s not going away. People have been using "top X" lists ever since Moses came down off the mountain with a top 10 list of "thou shalts". Radio stations play the top 100 songs of summer every year, every December AFI puts out a top 100 list of movies, and how many "bedroom tricks" do you think Cosmopolitan magazine has published since Helen Gurley Brown changed the format in 1970? People need to get over the "bait" hang-up and understand that in a culture where people have an attention deficit, it’s compete or die.

There are certain elements that you’ll find in a lot of linkbait. A snappy eye grabbing headline, is key. For example would you rather read "Removing Spyware will Speed up Your Computer" or "7 Quick Tips to Remove Spyware and Make Your Computer Run 300% Faster". The danger with a headline is you now have to deliver. If you promised me 7 tips I better see seven real tips. I need to see some content not just links to 7 software programs you’re an affiliate for. Think of the headline as a contract between you and the reader, you need to live up to your end of the bargain if you want links and subscribers.

Another thing you need is a scan able style of writing. Lists are very scan able which is one of the reasons they work so well. If you’re post is more narrative in style, short paragraphs with h2 or bold headers for sections, can really go a long way towards making things easier to read. Pictures or videos are also an important aspect. When you read a magazine or newspaper article you’ll notice the "best" picture is above the article or near the top with the text wrapping around it. Keep your mastheads small and thin and use big eye grabbing pictures at the top above the fold on all monitor/screen sizes for maximum effect, nothing stops a StumbleUpon user from hitting the "next" button like a great picture.

Additionally put links in your linkbait. Link to other articles on your site, link to other sites too, don’t be stingy with the links. It OK is you send some traffic away chances are the person on the other end will notice if you send enough traffic their way, and maybe return the favor in the future. The only site you should never link to is Wikipedia, well because I hate the wiki

Lastly linkbait is never ending process, the more you repeat it the more effective it is. I can guarantee you in almost every issue of Cosmopolitan there is a cover story about love/sex/relationships. New people come online everyday and you want to do everything you can to get their attention.

Right. I think that’s a really important point – know your audience. What is your approach concerning Digg, and other social networks? What have your results been like using these networks, in terms of inbound linking and traffic?

Every social network is a little different and what works well on one may not work well on others. Right now I’ve got a love/hate relationship with Digg, I love the traffic and the links, but as much as I hate to stereotype digg is an ochlocracy run by a bunch of petulant teen apple fanboys who are all about "hatin’ on the man". If you want to succeed on Digg try to find stories that are about a similar subject and use it as a starting point. Also watch the homepage for "non news" stories to get some ideas of what they like/tolerate and go from there.

I love niche sites while they don’t bring anywhere near the traffic of Digg, they can bring you better links and higher quality traffic. For example I had a linkbait article about women in the workplace it did really well on sk-rt.com getting to the homepage. Somebody submitted it to Digg and it floundered with 10-15 votes, because it didn’t match the audience.

Targeting your audience is a really important consideration and I don’t think enough people think about it. General interest pieces are good, but highly focused content that’s matched to a particular audience is better. The worst thing you can do is spend time/money/energy creating the best content for the wrong audience. For example you can have a 5 star chef prepare the most expensive Kobe beef you can buy, but serve it at a PETA rally and it will get an icy reception.

Another big mistake I see a lot of people making is cramming adsense or some other advertising down your throat when you come to their site. Giving people "commercials" when you really want them to link to your content is extremely short sighted IMHO. A lot of people who use social sites have "advertising blindness" and won’t click on your ads. The money that you’ll make from 20,000 diggers will probably not even cover the cost of a happy meal at McDonalds, so you’re better off giving up the $5 today, for the extra links you’ll get in the long run. On a lot of my sites I’ll use programming that "activates" the ads as when posts hit a certain age. It extremely unusual for a linkbait post to be bringing in traffic from social sites after a week, at that point it should only be SE referrals, that’s the time to give them the ads.

In you article “What’s One Digg Worth” you provide an interesting breakdown of the traffic and linking stats associated with a successful Digg. You mention that people also need to take a holistic view when it comes to links, such as “mixing in directory submissions, some traditional link development, content creation, article distribution, and a few other tactics as well”. I’m sure many webmasters find the process daunting – what would be your advice to someone with a new site? What are the essential things you would recommend people do in order to build a successful link acquisition strategy?

If you don’t mind, since it’s been nearly a year since I launched that site I’ll give you an update. Traffic has tapered off dramatically, right now the site gets anywhere from 25-75 visitors a week, all long tail searches most in the 4+ KW range. The good part is it’s completely autogen, I don’t have to touch it. It’s not a highly profitable website, but for zero upkeep that’s ok, and I’ve definitely been able to re-use the programming.

Back to your question, I like to think of link building like a financial portfolio, you want to be as diversified as possible to limit your risk. For example a few years ago it was possible to rank for terms purely on reciprocal links. Time passes, Google updates it’s algo, and recip links get devalued. Then article directories were all the rage, a year or so ago a lot of them lost their value. Directories were a solid bet for a long time, until a few weeks ago when Google took a big swipe out of that market. Right now viral and linkbaiting is all rage, and Google really likes seeing it, but will it eventually get devalued, almost certainly. If you, your company, or your website depend exclusively on one tactic, you put yourself at risk to algorithm fluctuations. However if your linking portfolio is diversified your much less likely to suffer those dramatic heart palpitating ranking drops.

It is a lot of work to try and keep up with and manage, but IMHO it’s definitely worth the time. I know a lot of people are probably like me they’d like to pay some writers for some articles this week, and drop them all out next week, and cross it of their "to do" list. However if you spent any time analyzing the Google patent application of 2005 you’ll realize time/age probably play a role. Getting 500 links tomorrow is not as "good" or "natural looking" as getting 500 links over the next 6 months. So if you want to pay for the content for the articles to syndicate and get them all delivered next week, that’s fine, just trickle them out slowly over the next 6 months. I find it’s pretty helpful to come up with rough game plan or timeline so I don’t forget things, again it is more work, but definitely worth the effort.

The time/age issue is something Ralph touched on, too. You’ve been pretty vocal on what you see as Google’s hypocrisy on paid links. Is this a war you see Google winning?

Ahh the paid links debate, it’s a pretty contentious subject at the moment, but sure lets dive in. I think it might be a bit helpful to use an analogy to help people understand it in real life terms. Let’s say you own a house and to make the math easy we’ll say it’s worth $100,000. A developer comes along and offers you $150,000 on the spot to buy it from. You think wow that’s $50,000 for doing nothing but being in the right place at the right time. You decide to sell, make a nice profit and are pretty happy with yourself. Of course you might feel a little bit different if you discovered your old house is smack dab in the area that Disney World is going to build a new theme park, and you could have gotten $500,000 for it. If only you had known all the facts and the true value of the real estate, you might not have been so happy with the peanuts the developer was willing to give you.

Websites are no different, most people don’t know the true value of the websites they own, run and develop. Many people build them as a hobby and when something like adsense comes along and gives them the ability to go from costing them time and money, to making $200-$300 a month profit, just like the guy selling his house before, they are happy. Of course they are also ignorant to it’s true value. What if the guy running the hobby website finally figures out it’s true value, and instead of taking the adsense chump change, he starts selling text link advertisements and brings in $2,000 to $3,000 a month? That extra money would probably really make a difference in his life, and by the way those numbers are real for more than one website I manage. It’s in Google’s best interests to keep you in the dark as to the real value your website has, as long as they can keep charging the advertisers top dollar, they will sacrifice a few nickels and dimes to you via adsense.

Can Google win the war, I certainly hope not. Google has a big advantage they are smart, organized and well funded. They also cultivate the corporate image of lava lamps, bean bag chairs, and garage startup guys making the world a better place. In reality they are just as cold, calculating, and manipulative as Microsoft, ‘We aren’t competing with Microsoft Office really, that beta presentation software coming out Friday that looks and acts just like power point isn’t a competitor to power point, here have some more free Gmail space to be quiet". Google is also really good at convincing you they aren’t a business competitor. However if you want to sell text advertising in Google’s eyes you are a direct competitor. In fact you are such a competitor they put out terms or service agreements to try and control how you implement it, making your offering that much less attractive. What’s amazing is people blindly follow these statements, like a mob of mind controlled zombies. Can you imagine McDonalds coming out with a terms of service document telling other restaurants they way they were allowed to use pickles and ketchup, would anybody listen to them, why is Google any different?

I’m glad to see conferences are giving equal time on the paid links debate. In the past it was only search engine representatives, who had the stage, fear mongering the audience with their one sided propaganda. The more educated people become the better. People need to ask themselves are they ok following Google’s rules and content getting table scraps in the form of adsense checks every month, while Google makes 13 Billion in profits each quarter?

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to "know a guy" to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any "gaming theory" to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

Agreed. Thanks for the interview, Michael!

Looking for a spam-free directory listing? Be sure to check out our directory, Rubberstamped.org. Our aim is to build a quality DMOZ-style directory, without the wait.

Previous link building interviews:

Aaron Wall

Ralph Tegtmeier

An advanced link building discussion with Ralph Tegtmeier. Ralph is a highly regarded SEO, and runs Fantomaster.com

Thanks for talking with us, Ralph. For those readers who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself, and tell us about your background?

I was born of German parents in Egypt, my father being in the Diplomatic Service, and spent the better part of my childhood years in Africa an Asia - a multilingual environment that certainly proved a great help when I forayed into that globalized environment we term the Internet many, many years later.

My academic background is in Comparative Literature, English Literature and Portuguese Philology, in which I graduated as a Master of Arts with a thesis on "Occultism and eroticism in fin de siécle literature" at Bonn University in Germany.

Later, I worked as a bookseller, a seminar trainer, a freelance writer, a translator and a publisher. I became interested in the Internet in 1994 and soon discovered its marketing potential. So I have been an online entrepreneur in various fields since Fall of ‘94. It must have been around 1996 or so that I purchased a "top secret" report on optimizing web sites for search engines and tried out the techniques and strategies it expounded - with spectacular success. Of course, in those days it was all mainly about duplicate titles, keyword stuffing your meta tags, invisible text, etc. As Baudelaire was wont to say: "Ah, qu’as tu fait avec ta jeunesse!" (laughs)

Anyway, in 1999 I teamed up with an old school buddy, Dirk Brockhausen, who happens to hold a doctorate in physics and worked as a certified SAP Consultant in both Germany and Switzerland. And so, fantomaster.com GmbH was born. Technically, we’re German expats domiciled in the German speaking (eastern) part of Belgium, just a few meters from the German border.

While we also developed a few nifty tools entirely unrelated to search, we did focus on IP delivery (aka cloaking) applications right away as it was perfectly clear from the start that this was the most powerful optimization technology extant.

Contrary to what many people would like to make you believe, it’s still exceedingly effective, though of course, as in every field of SEO/SEM, you’ve got to adapt to the ever shifting ground that is search technology. For example, nowadays link building has mutated to an all-important component of any serious search marketing campaign with the obvious exception of PPC.

In the past, the focus tended to centre around page content - build “quality” content, and they will come. Would you say that linking factors are the most important aspect of ranking? Has SEO become all about links?

Search ranking technology being an exceedingly complex set of different data retrieval and processing algorithms, with network stability, hardware performance and scalability issues governing a lot of what’s going on, it would be pathologically simplistic to reduce it to any one, single be all and end all factor.

Of course it’s being done all the time. That’s because people will always look for simple solutions to complex problems, it seems to be hardwired into our brains. But of course that doesn’t make such simplifications either true or effective, no matter what any which "guru" may proclaim to be the latest fad of the day.

I’ve never subscribed to the "Content Is King" paradigm as an exclusive, predominant causal factor of search engine rankings. By the same token, I won’t endorse the current craze of reducing all and any SEO to "merely links, naught else".

So I said it’s an all-important component of SEO, and that’s what I stand by. A component being defined as one part of an entire set. But claiming that links are everything would be a gross exaggeration.

Because it’s simply not borne out by real world results. This is not saying that you can’t at all do well with links alone in search under a given set of very special circumstances. For example, many black hat SEOs will auto generate web sites by the ton, and rather than optimizing the content in any particularly sophisticated way, they’ll simply throw a slew of fairly powerful links at them. The result being that very many of these sites will actually perform quite nicely in the SERPs - with a half life, however, that’s generally measured in days, occasionally in weeks, almost never in months.

Is this a feasible business model? As Earl Grey (aka Mick) outlined in the interview Rand Fishkin did with him a while back, it actually can be - provided it meets your personal philosophy and lifestyle. "Interview with a Black Hat Seo" However, I don’t think I’m overstating things if I say that it’s certainly nothing your average Web entrepreneur is likely to embrace.

The really interesting question this brings up, actually, is how we want to define "SEO" these days? For most members of the hard core black hat community it’s a "churn and burn" approach, i.e. an exceedingly short term thing - and in case someone’s wondering, yes, these days they’re quite proud to call themselves "search engine spammers", no holds barred. Not too surprising, when you think about it - after all, the term "punk" used to be exclusively pejorative too until Punk Rock hijacked it.

For a more mainstream, long term approach, links are definitely of eminent importance, too - but there’s a whole lot of other factors to take into consideration as well. So will your SEO efforts work out without building decent incoming links? Certainly not. Will they work out if all you care about are links? No, they won’t - at least not if you’re interested in a modicum of relative stability, taking a long term approach, however shaky your rankings may finally prove to be in actual practice nevertheless.

In your linking workshop, you advocate webmasters build links at a consistent speed, rather than building too many links, too fast. What is the reason for this?

It’s not really about "how many" - the keyline is consistency. The main reason being that you want it to appear as "organic" as you can.

If you can build a thousand good incoming links a day and you can actually keep up that rate for six months or more, fine: go ahead and do it. After all, many news items will generate similar spikes of interest - and that’s what links are supposed to convey: Not a "vote" on how good or bad any given page is, as popular misconception will have it, but, rather, a vote on how interesting (which may well include "controversial") in whichever context people deem it to be.

Thus, there would probably be nothing "non-organic" about such a spike in incoming links if it’s some fairly popular topic. Which, of course, can easily create a headache for you in its own right: What’s a "fairly popular topic" anyway? I mean, if you’re selling teak wood knitting needles, sure, by some lucky fluke they just *might* happen to become the latest craze, with slews of links suddenly pointing to your mega hip knitting needle pages from all over the Net. But then again: How likely is that, really? Nothing you would probably want to bet the farm on, I would think.

Plus, if anything of the kind should actually happen, the search engines are pretty sure to be the first to know about it. After all, they own the entire set of search queries. So to make it actually plausible, you’d probably have to launch a huge network of zombie bots, daisywheeling across a myriad of proxies (fat chance - after all, they’d have to be properly geo targeted as well…) to generate such search queries artificially.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that for most if not all non-black hat webmasters this is an entirely academic scenario.

So in a real world environment, avoid linking spikes. I’m stressing this because many people find link building a dire chore. It’s arguably the most unloved and thankless SEO task of all these days. It’s extremely time consuming, pretty costly even if outsourced, and very often it can be a decidedly humiliating experience (as in begging for links in unsympathetic quarters). Personally, I don’t know of a single SEO who actually enjoys doing it.

So humans simply being what they are, we’re all too prone to opt for the easy way out: Throw a ton of links at your new sites, be done with it as fast as possible, and move on to more interesting tasks. Which, of course, tends to create linking patterns blatantly shouting "artificial" - and which, in turn,goes against the whole rationale of informed, smart link building.

Can you offer our readers some tips in regard to their link building strategies?

Ok, let’s start off with two very generic recommendations.

One - don’t overestimate link building!

Two - don’t underestimate link building!

Now let me explain this a bit. For the past two or three years, very many webmasters, amateurs and pros alike, have become obsessed about link building. And so have most if not all SEOs.

However, most people being lazy and given to oversimplified i.e. skewed and fundamentally faulty strategies, a link building craze has ensued based on the rationale that link building is the philosopher’s stone of search engine optimization. And it gets worse - oversimplifying even further, people took to letting themselves be hypnotized by some neat free gimmicks such as the Google toolbar and the PageRank (PR) values it displays when you switch it to spyware, pardon me: to "Advanced Features" mode, as our friends in Mountainview, California prefer to dub it. This holds true even for those who should really know better because it’s their daily bread and butter, namely SEOs. But I guess PR as a purported or real ranking factor would merit a hardnosed sober assessment in its own right.. Everything on the commercialized Web being about traffic and conversions, link building should focus on this first: Are the incoming links you are getting worth the effort or the costs, provided you have put any serious effort or money into having them set up? And if they do happen to generate traffic to your site - will it convert sufficiently? If it doesn’t, there’s basically two possible reasons for this you’ll want to investigate: Either your site sucks or your traffic source. (It’s a very rare case when both do, but don’t rule out that remote possibility entirely either until you know exactly what you’re dealing with!)

If your on page factors aren’t up to par, be it in terms of content copy, of usability, of navigation - not to forget the products and services you’re actually offering -, even top quality targeted traffic won’t do you much good.

By the same token, even if your page is the world’s finest in its industry, getting untargeted, non- or low converting traffic won’t help you very much either.

So if you’re really subscribing to the simplistic view that all you’ll have to do by way of Web marketing is throwing a ton of links at anywhich crappy web site, think again. You may be wasting the better part of your efforts and possibly losing lots of money in the process.

In terms of actual link building this implies that you shouldn’t just look for your incoming links’ search engine ranking power - because links simply aren’t everything if you want to achieve rankings let alone traffic and conversions. Sure, they can qualify for a lot of clout if established well, but again: THEY ARE NOT EVERYTHING!

Equally, there’s all the webmasters, and even a few SEOs, who will dismiss links entirely. Not too many of them around anymore, true. And even those who are won’t typically trash links in as many words - actually, hardly anyone in his right mind will pretend that they can totally do without links at all.

Hmm, no - maybe I actually missed a fairly substantial group of webmasters and SEOs when I said that: Because obviously the entire PPC crowd can do very well without links, thank you very much. Well, not quite - they actually go for a hell of a lot of links, come to think of it. Only their links are called ads. Banner ads, text ads, contextual ads, AdWords, YPN (what used to be Overture what used to be GoTo), AdCentral ads - links, the lot of them. And paid links, at that. Only they’re the kind the search engines love. At least those they’ve sold to them in the first place.

So why should these people worry about link building, seeing that they are doing it all the time with a checkbook or an online advertiser account anyway? As long as you’re funded, there seems to be no point in musing over " organic" links, or is there?

The reason I’m mentioning PPC links (ok: ads) at all is that links are all about, well, you guessed it: traffic. Restricting yourself to PPC, while an entirely valid way of marketing, especially when rolling out a campaign, is very much like putting all your eggs in one basket to the point of utter dependence on the PPC networks. You may be losing money that way as well for two reasons: For one, paid click bids have historically appreciated dramatically and currently it seems highly unlikely that they’ll experience any serious slump in pricing anytime soon. Already, a good many SOHO setups simply can’t afford serious PPC marketing anymore, certainly not in highly competitive industries.

Just as importantly, however, there’s a strong indication that organic search traffic actually converts better. The reasons for this are manifold and beyond the scope of this discussion, I would assume. But what it does boil down to is that even as a PPC marketer you should always include consistent, smart link building in your arsenal if only to at least partially offset the perpetually rising costs of paid search marketing.

As for some more technical tips, I’d recommend devoting your attention specifically to your links’ anchor text, i.e. the viewable and clickable part. Generally, you’ll find a lot of advice about always including your keywords in the anchor text. This is essentially quite correct but it doesn’t reflect the entire picture.

Because you will want to avoid blatantly discernible anchor text patterns as best you can. Make it look as organic as possible - a statement that holds true for all of SEO, of course. But how organic does a network of incoming links look to you where every single link is highly optimized for specific keywords? When everything screams unisono: "For the cheapeast teakwood knitting needles, click here"? Ok, so you will want to vary your anchor text, going for long tail phrases as much as for your more generic terms. But that’s not all there is to it, either.

For you see, based on public statements by search engine reps, and backed up by extensive long term research, it is strongly recommended to NOT include keyword phrases in your anchor text for about 50% of the links you’re generating. Instead, make the web site name itself clickable, just like most mom and pop web sites pointing somewhere will do it.

So how do you optimize those links, then? Easy: by leveraging proximity. While this isn’t hewn in stone, my general recommendation is to place your targeted keyword phrases about 3 to max. 5 words removed either preceding or following the clickable web site (or page) name. The reason being that search engines are growing more leery about artificially inflated linkage on the one hand, while relying on contextual analysis to automatically determine what any given text is about on the other.

And let’s not forget "deep linking". While the majority of your links should point to your site’s home page, make sure you throw a sufficient number of links at your important internal pages as well. This makes your linkage look less artificial and will lend more link love to those critical pages as well.

Finally, make your links consistent. If you want to use "www" in your page addresses, fine: It’s the Web standard, and if in doubt, simply go for it. There’s no tangible disadvantage in leaving it out to make your links shorter, however. Just make sure you don’t mix the two - so do it either one way or the other, but not both. The reason being that for search engines (especially Google!) these two links are not alike:

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

So mixing the two may cause your linkage to be diluted and it may actually land you in even more serious trouble in terms of inadvertently risking a " duplicate content" penalty.

Thanks Ralph. Part Two Next Week….

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First post! Welcome to LinkJuicy.com.

This is a site about links.

This site isn’t about search engine news, or social network IPOs, or technology politics - there’s enough great blogs about those topics already. This blog is about practical ideas and strategies that webmasters can use in order to get more links - how to use links to make money, get traffic, and get seen.

When a beginner webmaster builds a site, they are soon aware that content is only a small part of the puzzle. For that content to be of much use, it needs to be seen. One of the best ways to get content seen is to get links.

But how?

We’ll cover all types of links and link strategy, be they hypertext links, PPC, syndicated media, and new tactics that have yet to be devised. We’ll talk to some of the worlds top web marketing professionals about how they get links, and the strategies they use to do so. You can use this information to promote your own sites, keep up -to-date, and get some of that link juice for yourselves.

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First up, we’ve got an interview with a long-time friend of mine, and search engine guru, Ralph Tegtmeier. Ralph explains why building links at a consistent speed is a good idea, why we should overestimate or underestimate link building.