Advanced Link Building: Hosted Content, The Quest for the Perfect Link

Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn’t have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn’t receive the same weíght as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link – the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.
Article Syndication
In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offër these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the “about the author” section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the frëe use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.
Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It’s a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.
The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author’s site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links – somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.
In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author’s site. It’s still more valuable than a plain link exchange, but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what’s a site owner to do?
Hosted Web Content
It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content – all basically the same idea.
The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the “eyes” of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.
Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hostíng site get useful content.
This strategy isn’t new. It’s simply doing what search engines want us to do – produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.
Designing a Hosted Content Page
You’re paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.
Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header

, subheads and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be “spamish” regardless of where the content appears.
Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article’s text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it’s also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hostíng your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offër real value to readers.
It’s Not Quantity, It’s Quality
It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.
Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more “natural” from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links - the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.
Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today
It’s being done everyday, successfully building small sites into largër sites, providing frëe advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hostíng site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers – exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards – so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.
Start searching for websites that might be interested in hostíng your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that’s unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won’t even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers – exactly how it should be.

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by Frederick Townes in the owner of W3-EDGE.

Let Google’s Algorithm Show You the Traffic

Recently Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org brought together 37 of the world’s Top SEO experts to tackle Google’s Algorithm, the complex formula and methods Google uses to rank web pages. This ranking formula is extremely important to webmasters because finding which factors Google uses to rank their index is often considered the Holy Grail of site optimization.

Google’s ranking factors affect how and where you are listed in their search engine results or SERPs. Since obtaining top positions for your targeted keywords often spells success for your site, knowing Google’s ranking factors can be very beneficial.
Every experienced webmaster will know Google is the main supplier of search engine traffíc on the web, getting listed on the first page or anywhere in the top 10 positions for popular keywords will result in plenty of free quality targeted traffíc.
Briefly listed below are some of the main ranking factors you should be optimizing your web pages for in your marketing. The majority of these ranking factors will be very familiar to most webmasters who take full advantage of any and every SEO tactic which will give their site an edge over their competition.
Here are some of the main ranking factors to consider:
1. Keywords In Your Title And On Your Page
Place your keyword or keyword phrase in the title of your page and also in your copy. Many webmasters use variations of their keywords on this page and also include it in the H1 headline.
2. Keywords In Your URL
Keep your page on topic and place your keyword in the URL. Use your keyword in the H2, H3… headlines. Place it in the description and meta tags, place it in bold/strong tags, but keep your content readable and useful. Be aware of the text surrounding your keywords, search engines will become more semantic in the coming years so context is important.
3. Create High Quality Relevant Content
Have high quality relevant content on your pages. Your content should be related to the topic of your site and updated regularly depending on the nature of your site.
4. Internal Onsite Linking
Internal linking is important to your overall ranking. Make sure your linking structure is easy for the spiders to crawl. Most suggest a simple hierarchy with links no more than three clicks away from your home/index page.
Creating traffíc modes or clusters of related links within a section on your site has proven very effective for many webmasters, including this one. For example, creating a simple online guide on a subject related to your site’s topic can prove very beneficial. Keep all the links connected and closely related in subject matter and don’t forget to have occasional external ‘anchor keyworded’ links coming to these internal links on your site instead of to your homepage. Deep build your links.
5. Only Linking To High Quality Related Sites
Don’t forget to link to high quality PR related sites. Linking to high quality sites shows the search engines your site is very useful to your visitors. Build relationships within communities on the topic of your site. Be extremely careful not to link to bad neighborhoods, link farms and sp@m sites… when in doubt, don’t link out!
Unless your site has been around for years and is well established and trusted by Google, this factor will have an adverse effect on your site’s overall ranking. Linking only to high quality content sites will give your site an edge over your competition.
6. Global Linking Popularity
One of the major ranking factors is the Global Linking Popularity of your site. You should try to build plenty of inbound links from quality sites. One simple and effective way to do this is through writing articles and submitting them to the online article directories. Only related sites will pick up and display your articles with your anchor text links back to your site. These are often ONE-WAY-LINKS.
But don’t just write articles to get links, write quality content that will help the reader first and the links will come naturally. Also remember an article is an extremely good way of pre-selling your products and gaining trust with your potential customers.
7. Anchor Text Is Very Important
Anchor text is an important factor your must not forget to use. Perhaps more importantly these inbound links should be related or relevant to your site’s topic, which will play an important role in your rankings. Don’t ignore the text surrounding your links and use different anchor text links to avoid keyword sp@mming.
Keep in mind, as search engines become more semantic, the whole text of your article will probably be considered your anchor text, thus making articles even more important to your rankings.
8. Number And Quality Of Your Inbound Links
Your inbound links should also come from related high Global Link Popular sites. The more links your have from these popular related sites the higher rankings you will get. Many SEO experts suggest you should have a steady stream of new sites (inbound links) added each month to keep your rankings growing. These links will age and íncrease your rankings after 4 or 5 months. Both quality and quantity is important.
9. Reliable Server And Service
Like any business, Google is only serving up a product (SERPs) to its customers, this service must be continuous and available at all times. Make sure you have a good reliable server because any extended downtime when your site is inaccessible to the Bots may be detrimental to your rankings. If it is down for over 48 hours, you could be dropped from the index. Ouch!
10. Duplicate Content Is A NO NO!
Make certain you don’t place duplicate content on your site. This may affect your rankings and get your pages thrown into the supplemental index. Be careful not to use duplicate title or mega tags on your pages as this will lower and disburse your internal page rankings, resulting in poor optimization.
Your overall SEO strategy should be to provide valuable relevant content and links for your visitors and the search engines. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, be extremely careful who you link out to from your site. Avoid sp@m sites, link farms or selling links. Although it is a bit outdated, using the Google Toolbar will still give you a general overview of a site’s PR or Page Rank.
These are some of the most common and important ranking factors Google uses to rank and display their search engine results. Optimizing your site or keywords for these factors can prove very beneficial and rewarding.
There are many more factors so you should use the link in the resource box below to get all the gory details. For any novice or experienced webmaster it makes for a fascinating read and is extremely helpful in tackling Google’s complex ranking system or algorithm. Conquer it and an endless supply of free organic traffíc is yours for the taking.

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By Titus Hoskins

Building Link Bait

Link bait (n): Link bait is any content put on a website with the primary function of attracting links to that page or to another page on the site.

The purpose of link baiting is pretty obvious, to develop incoming links to your website. One thing that may not be clear however is how links to internal pages on your site helps you rank highly. The benefits are divided into two parts:

1. You will rank for more phrases. Building links to internal pages is a great way to get those pages ranking for related terms. For example, if you run a real estate site and you put out some great content on how to get a mortgage in yourtown, somestate and who your visitors should use and provide a few useful tools to help your visitors you can attract links to this page for mortgage-related phrases. This will then help you rank for phrases such as “mortgages yourtown somestate”, which in turn is going to drive traffic to your site.

2. You will boost the overall strength of your domain. Building links to internal pages helps build the link strength of your overall site. The internal links from the linked page to your other pages will be stronger and so, in turn, those pages become stronger. Stronger pages rank higher.

So we understand what link baiting is and what its purpose is however, how do you build it? This is a difficult question to answer as what makes good link bait can vary from site to site and industry to industry. In short though, you need to create something that others in your industry will find important, useful, or even humorous enough to link to.

Let’s use an example we all know, YouTube. If you view any given video on YouTube you’re going to find two ways to put that content on your site, link to it or embed it. The link provides the link bait benefits, embedding it provides the branding. They win either way. Now they have content to meet any persons’ needs/wants, but what do those of us with fairly fixed site topics do?

Here are the steps for building link bait:

1. Figure out what appeals to those you want linking to you. This is not necessarily the same as what might appeal to your target market. When you’re doing this try to think about the types of people they are (likely very similar to you). Are they funny? Do they just want quick solutions to their problems? What do the people who own websites related to your topic want to provide for their visitors?
2. Build it. If you want to provide a solution to an information gap, write up a great article. If you want to provide something humorous, do that. If you want to provide a useful tool on your site, write up your specs, hire a good developer and get it made.
3. Test it. If you’re unsure as to how your new link bait will be received, test it. If you’ve written a great article on a subject you know people are interested in, try visiting a few forums and posting a link to it and see what the reaction is. You can do the same for humorous content and tools as well. Find out how they’re going to be received by your site visitors and site owners you are hoping will link to it.
4. Launch it. Now it’s time to add it to your site. In the Testing stage we put it up on the site but didn’t link to it internally. Now it’s time to link to it from inside your site. If you feel your potential clients will enjoy it, why not add it to your navigation? If you feel it’s better for the people you want to link to you but not as useful for your potential clients then perhaps you’d be better of to build a resources page and link to it from there. Or, if you have a blog you can simply announce its launch on your blog.
5. Promote it. Now it’s time to get the word out. There are a wide variety of methods for doing so and the most effective will vary by site category and who you want to reach. Here are some of the methods we have found most effective across a wide array of subjects:
- promotion on your site: large buttons on the homepage, in the navigation or other prominent spots
- press releases: if it’s a service or information that a wide variety of people will be interested in a press release is a great way to get the news out quickly
- forum posts: if what you are offering will help then why not tell them about it in related forums. Chances are there are people looking for the solution you are providing – post a link to it for them, and others, to see. This will provide you with a link from the forum and potentially many more as people find the information and feel it may help their visitors too
- newsletters: take out an add in an industry newsletter
6. Monitor it. Now all that’s left is to watch your stats and backlink counts to monitor the success. If you find you’re getting solid traffic, or backlinks, or both it’s a sign you just might want to do more of the same. If the results aren’t as spectacular as you were hoping then you’d do well to consider how well you performed the five steps above, how they might be adjusted, and what else you can do.

It’s important to note that building link bait is not a “one off”. A successful site will continue to develop greater and greater numbers of incoming links through a variety of methods. Once you determine how to successfully link bait in your industry you’ll want to reproduce it periodically. Fortunately, with the results you’ll see if done properly – you’ll be happy to take the time to do so.

Author: Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. Beanstalk provides search engine optimization services that are guaranteed to get results or your money back. For more information on how they can help you develop your link popularity through link baiting and other tactics visit their link popularity services and keep updated on the latest goings-on in the link popularity and SEO world on their blog.


By Dave Davies