If the webmaster accepted the proposal, both sites would display a link back to the other site. This technique brought good results for a while, until the engines devalued the weigh of reciprocal links.



One way links were the way to go. And this is basically what made the Paid Links market boom, using the Page Rank variable as the main indicator of a page's equity in the link currency.

But Google decided that this has to end. Links should be earned by the quality of the content, and not by the size of an SEO campaign budget.

I really don't want to get into the whole debate of whether Google is right or wrong on this stance. I only care about the fact that Google wants Internet Marketers to do things certain way. So I, as an Internet Marketer, will do it that way. Is it because I love Google? Not really, it is because I love to enjoy good rankings in Google listings.

So Google wants webmasters to obtain links through the quality of their content. How do you make this happen? Developing an ongoing Linkbait campaign.

These are the steps you need to follow to launch a Linkbait piece

1.Visit Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Propeller. There may be other popular social media sites in your niche. Research for stories related to your niche that have become popular in the past.

2.Analyze all these stories and use them as the basis of your brainstorming. You want to understand why these stories were popular amongst these communities.

3.Write your article. Make it funny, polemic or useful. You need to write it in a way that it will get some viral attention.

4.Write a catchy headline. You can have the best article in the world but no one will even look at it if you don't grab their attention. Social media users have a very short attention span and you are lucky if they give you half a second while scanning through your heading. Some examples of magnetic headlines would be: “The Secret Of [your topic]”, or “How To Build [something related to your niche] In 10 Easy Steps”.

5.Network. All submissions need an initial promotion in these social media sites to become to the rest of the users.

A successful linkbait campaign can get thousands of good quality links that would have been impossible to obtain through traditional means such as link exchanges or links buying.

Furthermore, Google is totally happy with this way of building links and this means that your site will not get penalized in the future.

I cannot emphasize enough how important this last point is. Often you will come across people talking about how they achieved a ranking by buying links. That may be, but it also has an expiration date. Sooner or later those sites are going to be penalized, whilst link building done in the basis of link worthy content is future proof, which means more consistency in your business plan.