By: Deepti Jain

Link Bait: Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Link bait creation falls under the task of link building, and aims to increase the quantity of high-quality, relevant links to a website. It is considered to be a white hat optimization method almost universally.

It means to create something that naturally attract backlinks for your web page by getting people to talk about it, discussing it on forums, blogging about i, posting it on del.icio.us/Furl/Digg/Shoutwire and linking to it from their sites. It also attracts a lot of visitors.

Types of link bait

Although there are no clear-cut subdivisions within link bait, many attempt to divide them into types of hooks. This is a short list of some of the most common approaches with brief descriptions:

Informational Hooks - Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.

News Hooks – Provide fresh information and garner citations and links as the news spreads.

Humor Hooks - Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be a link bait.

Evil Hooks - Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it.

Tool Hooks - Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.

Digg Bait: It focuses specifically on the interests of social communities and what they respond to. With Digg bait, the power is not in the usefulness and value of the content, but the title and description of the news item, sometimes bordering on the sensational.

Lee Odden at the toprankblog has an interesting look at the comparison of linkbaiting and Digg-baiting.

Spread the word: Link Bait,Digg Bait

By: Deepti Jain

Search engine optimization is the practise of optimising a website for reasons of attracting targeted search engine traffic, breaking down crawling barriers to help the search engines fully index your site, Social Media Optimization on the other hand is about knocking down site walls so content can be easily found, distributed and shared by the community. This process may simply mean embedding a “Digg This” button on your site blog or it may mean spending hours to create a piece of compelling content, that could either drive thousands of visitors to your site or have no effect at all.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of optimising a website so that its content can be easily spread on the Net by the website’s own visitors to off-site social and online communities – basically making it “socially friendly”. The most common example is adding social bookmarks, trackbacks and widgets to a site’s page, such as “add to del.ici.ous” links and the MyBlogLog widget.

Apart from the Search Engines, you can also get additional traffic from various other channels through SMO strategies! Your website’s popularity gets increased!

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Deepti Jain

ZoomInfo Unveils Business Information Search Engine, featuring comprehensive search optimized for the business user, including free access to in-depth information on millions of companies, people and jobs.

ZoomInfo has claimed thats its users will benefit from highly relevant search results delivered via its patented semantic search technology in an organized, easy-to-digest format.Their database has information on over 3.5 million companies and 35 million business people.

Users can search by company name, employee name or by job category. An earlier version of their search engine was a paid service this one is free and ad supoorted.

“Now, business users have a single site to find the information they need, instantly and without having to sift through thousands of irrelevant results.”

New features on ZoomInfo.com include:

• Free Company Searches.
• Comprehensive Job Searches.
• Highly Relevant Product Searches.
• Low Cost Access to People Information.
• Advertising.

Zoominfo