SEOmoz has been very busy with requests for business lately, and I’m finding a lot of companies I’d actually love to work with. Thus, it’s been neccessary to use both pricing and my own estimation of the achievability of projects and the good-naturedness of the client to help sort who to take on and who to refer.
I’ve also started adding (as a component of the contracts) the development of “link-bait” on each potential site. I feel that creating some amazing, highly linkable and high-quality content is one of the best ways to target the engines naturally and build links through the social networks, blogs and news outlets of the web. The inclusion of link bait creation in an SEO campaign is reasonably rare from what I see on other SEO’s sites, but I imagine it will be crossing into the mainstream of SEO tactics in the near future.
Upcoming will certainly be a detailed article on the subject of link bait and an analysis of some of the more successful examples of it in a variety of niches. The best part about creating content like this is building trust and value naturally – through quality and usefulness, rather than just advertising or link networking. In other words, I’d guess that if Matt (from Google) or Tim (from Yahoo!) had their druthers, this would be the type of tactic they’d prefer were used to achieve rankings. It’s SE-friendly, visitor friendly and link friendly – you can’t ask for much more.
Are any of you offering link bait development/creation services yet? Do you think it’s around the bend?
