The Blogosphere & RSS
The common SEO adage continues to be valid in the 2.0 world: content is king. It is the content boundaries and means for dispatching content that have truly taken SEO to another level. Since the inception of the blogosphere, a term that describes all blogs as a social network of public opinion, rumblings of the people’s voice via the Internet have quickly risen to a powerful roar. Beginning in the form of an online diary in the mid 90s, the blog has since developed into a simple vehicle of communication for anyone who desires to send content across the Web. The dissemination of information through blogging has become so mainstream that one can find a blog from an authority source on virtually any topic. The blogosphere, centered on the concept of original content, has provided a link rich venue for the SEO to plan his or her linking strategy surrounding good content.
So what is good content and what does it have to do with good linking strategy in Web 2.0? In this new era of the Internet, good content is viral. Whether this content is a written article, a homemade video, or a podcast, if it grabs, provokes, or tickles the user, it will travel, and it will travel fast. From the content’s eye-view the Internet has become much easier to navigate following the advent of Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS allows for a program called an aggregator (or feed reader) to notify users of new content added to a website, retrieve that new content, and present it to the user in an easy to use interface. RSS and blogging go hand-in-hand because of the constantly updating quality of the blog. As a result of RSS people are discovering new content on the Internet, passing it along, and linking to it at an unprecedented rate.
Enter the skilled SEO who sees potential for organic traffic and quality backlinks. By creating or at least harnessing the creativity necessary to produce content that people find useful, funny, or interesting, the optimizers can watch as his or her creative efforts pay off in dividends. In Web 2.0 a fully comprehensive linking strategy must spend more time producing quality, viral content, and less time submitting to directories, buying links, and reciprocal linking. While these later tasks are low cost, they are time consuming and efforts can often be wasteful or present the risk of a decrease in search engine rankings if responsible linking tactics are not observed.
Baiting the Link
The SEO practice of producing content with the hopes that people will link to it from their own website is known as link baiting. Good link bait has the same qualities as good content. From a well written controversial article to a video clip of a bulldog on a skateboard, website owners will link to any and all content as long as it is interesting and catches people’s attention. There are no boundaries surrounding the types of content one can use to bait a link. In fact, the very name of a new kind of link baiting suggests an indefinable quality. This new link baiting tactic is called widget baiting. Nick Wilson, CEO and senior strategist of the social media market agency Clickinfluence, declared that “the holy grail of linkbaiting in 2007 will be the widget.”
In reference to computers, a widget is an element of a user interface that displays information or provides a specific way for a user to interact with an application. A widget could be a calendar, a stock ticker, a quote of the day, or an icon that collects the most popular YouTube videos. To get an idea of the limitless widget possibilities check out Yahoo! Widgets (http://widgets.yahoo.com/). In its most basic form a widget is a downloadable interactive virtual tool made up of simple bits of code that can easily be added to a webpage. When a widget is added to a webpage, if coded correctly, it will act as a crawlable link pointing back to its page of origin. These links can help to boost a site in the search engine rankings, but they also represent great potential for organic traffic. Creating a popular widget could in some cases out weight traffic from the major search engines. One example of traffic generated by a widget is a blog editor Firefox extension created by the professional blogging company, Performancing, that received close to half a million downloads when it was first released. The brand awareness that widgets can promote has also made advertiser s extremely enthusiastic. One would be hard pressed to find a better method of exposure than a logo attached to a button that sits in front of a user’s eyes daily. Widgets can be downloaded to the desktop so the user does not even have to have an internet browser open to be exposed to the advertising. While all interactive marketers will recognize the widget as an effective marketing tactic, in most cases, due to the linking and organic traffic potential, it will be the SEO who is best suited to orchestrate the creation and implementation of the widget. In Web 2.0 effective linking strategy must include widget baiting.