Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit In
By: James Eckstein
The internet has completely changed the way the average user gains information. Now they have even more requests and choices than before and while ads are still necessary, search engines only accept information that comes from content in the site’s search results. One of the topics that is most often found on any email to your site is getting people to search, and this can be pretty difficult if you don’t get your audience hooked. Whether your content is based around your keyword of choice, your audience, or will be shared, being able to optimize your links and hosting pages from the site can really push traffic, leads, and posts to your site, and your author page, a.k.a. the public part of your website. This won’t be the article you would write; it will be something you will publish on your site and develop from there.
As a site we launch.co, there are a number of things we are trying to improve: increase traffic, grow the numbers of users, and gain more insights on where to future plans with any of our product or feature ideas. The best way to do this is to build a linkbase that will push traffic to the site in the form of news and information. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to show our audience how they can take advantage of our linkbase, and so started by offering helpful links to a handful of Google News articles. In return we got lots of email that were queries to our linkbase and clicked links that showed our increased referral traffic, which helped us understand and track our ability to develop a drive for traffic by elevating our overall linking page.
In our searches we want to make sure we are sending everyone who reads our content to the right page and that’s where the link is for our content. That’s why sharing links on social media has been very important in the last few months. Every time we post something there, we want to make sure that the link goes to the right website. To best do this, we want to give our readers a reminder every time we post a tweet or Facebook update. One of the issues that sometimes arises with links is that we can add a link to a page that may be content that our audience doesn’t link to, or that won’t really make a difference in how our readers find what they are looking for. That’s where we focused all of our resources with this: get the links that will get the most reach to our readers.
A frequent point of confusion in linking has been accidental links. There are times that you accidentally share a link to another website; something that wasn’t meant to get your readers to the right site. While this happens in all websites, content sites, and publications, search engines tend to treat these sites a little bit worse than your other articles. It really comes down to your intent and how you are using social media, especially Facebook. If you know your audience already, they will see you and likely use that connection to your own website if you have an author page, that is) instead of sharing the same link. This is why we spend so much time with a carefully pre-designed creative to show our readers how to use social media and add value to the links they share.