Bad Terminology

Lot’s of talk in the SEO world about “link-bait”, basically great content which increases the amount of relevant, keyword-rich links that point back to your domain or specific landing pages.

I don’t like the term “link-bait’ it makes people in the SEO business sound like snake oil salesman. Good links are important don’t get me wrong; however, there are lots of ethical ways to increase the amount of links a domain has, take for example: On-line PR and strategical use of social media.

Both of the mentioned activities require generating great content and good ideas, which capture peoples interests and deliver value to them in some way.

Sounds pretty straightforward doesn’t it? So why on earth do SEO’s keep using words such as “bait” in their terminology? You’re not setting up a trap or doing anything underhand!

May be SEO’s will loose their grey image once they stop using bad terminology, and start talking about what’s required to gain good links and rankings: amazing, well produced content, that is to easy crawl and index.

Search is, and will always be a pull medium, active prospects looking for something – be it information, products or entertainment. Good, ethical SEO’s will always analyse what people are searching for and then advise their clients about the best ways to deliver that content.

Delivering competition beating content requires going one step further and getting creative with content.

I am personally starting to see a lot of content on the web, which is highly linkable, yet hasn’t been put together with SEO in mind. Take for example all the data visualisation concepts that have recently appeared.

If you analyze their back link portfolios you start to see the amount of links they receive. Again no SEO magic going on, just a great ideas that people have linked back to naturally. Based on this observation I think all valuable keywords, especially head keywords should have great ideas built around them.