Guess what? Content is king again and if you’re not producing well-written, relevant content every day, you’re not going to do very well in search. And, as it turns out, you aren’t going to get much search attention if your pages don’t receive backlinks, either. So, how do you create a piece of content that just makes people want to link to it?
I just read an article at SEOMoz, written by John Doherty of Distilled, a U.K. based SEO firm that works closely with SEOMoz. You may remember that I attended a Distilled conference in London a couple of years back. Anyway, Doherty studied 500 pieces of content from SEOMoz, and used linking by unique domains only to find out what it is about content that people like and naturally link to. The article is “What Kind of Content Gets Links in 2012?,” and it’s very good. I encourage you to go over and read it, but here are some of the important points I found:
- Content pieces with images get more links. This is a no-brainer. If you’re just slap-dashing things together, why bother? Add a cool image that someone can add to Facebook or Pinterest or LoveIt. Besides, people tend to like images. That’s why having your “author” image in Google is such a big deal. It just brings more traffic. Pieces with images garnered over 60% more links, while pieces without, only got just over 40%. So, by adding an image, you’re increasing the chance that someone will link to you by 20%.
- Some topics get more comments than others. Here are the top five at SEOMoz: Black Hat/White Hat, Conversion Rate Optimization, Consulting Tips and Trends, Search Engine Trends, and their great Whiteboard Friday.
- There is a correlation between longer content and links. The more you write, the better people like it and the more they will link to your stuff. Doherty also states that when you search the tag #longreads on Twitter, you’ll find lots of cool information, and that the fact that people may tag yours that way is just another reason to write longer material.
- There may be some correlation between links out and links in. It’s not a proven idea, but Doherty’s study seemed to point in that direction.
- The more media types you include, the greater your chance for getting a link. Here are the top 5 forms that seem to cause linking: Lists, Images & Video, Only images and video, Only lists and video, Videos & anything, Lists and anything.
How interesting is that? Always include at least an image and if you want to increase your link chances, include a list (as above) and a video. Get long-windy, and figure out which types of content are read the most in your niche. If you have enough content yourself, figure out who’s reading what type of content the most.
If you craft your content pieces well, using these strategies, you may find that your traffic increases directly in proportion to how much care you put into it.
That is all.
