The idea behind blogging and posting for SEO purposes is to offer that extra amenity to visitors and users – an element that they can share with others who are interested in the same things. In turn, ideally, you’ll get links, and one of the best ways to create content that has great link magnetism is by curating your own list. This is probably something that you’ve heard before, but just crafting a good “Top 5” list and putting it out there is cutting short your lists’ actual potential. You’ve got to get behind your content to maximize it’s real linking potential.
As an SEO company, we write content for dozens of blogs. We stick to the cardinal rule of engaging, original, and informative content as much as possible, but many times – as tends to happen with great content – it gets lost in the deluge of posts, tweets, and blogs that regularly flow in and out of a visitor’s atmosphere on a given day spent online. What’s the point of spending time crafting a great article if it’s just going to get buried?
Just publishing a list and hoping that someone will share it puts you behind in the link race. As an SEOer, you’ve got to invest in your content. When you publish a “Top 5” list, let the businesses/competitors/brands/blogs that you mentioned know that they’ve just received a free plug on your site. Chances are they’ll have a blog, Facebook, and Twitter account where they can proliferate this information.
This is the ever-important act of “following-up” on your content, the investment.
With this technique, you can’t demand links outright. Invite/incentivize those potential link-building partners to help promote your content. Chances are, if they like your content, then they’ll link to it and promote it. Even though not all the folks mentioned in the list are going to give you a link on their site, you’ve still opened up a relationship with them that could be beneficial in the future. Those highly-effective, primo links don’t just happen overnight, they take some massaging, and a link on a list is a great way to start that dialogue.
Lists aren’t just link bait anymore. They’re also an easy way to cultivate beneficial relationships, leverage your content effectively in a social way, and put more shelf life on your posts. In addition, lists have the potential to attract link-builders to you. As detailed in a recent user post on the SEOmoz user blog, a great way to isolate ideal link-building partners is to find the people publishing lists. ”If you can find good quality, curated lists of websites, then you can be reasonably sure that you have found sites that are good ones to get links from.”
Don’t just hang your content out to dry, give it some wheels for mobility!
This post was written by Internet Marketing Manager Chris Galis.
