For the three people who’ve never heard of this SEO tactic, Boggs describes it as “primarily the idea of generating content with the ulterior motive of driving links in a natural manner to [a] particular page.”

Sounds familiar, eh? “Build it and they will come.” Perhaps it’s that simple?

Maybe.

Since “linkbait” can mean far more than plain, old, quality content, things get a bit complex.

Darron Rowse (of Problogger) states, “It is actually a difficult term to be definitive about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs… In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years.”

Then there’s the connotation of the term “bait.” It sounds a bit malicious, misleading, misinforming perhaps? Certainly, there are poor uses of this tactic in the wild, but isn’t that the case with anything?

Boggs argues that the “build it and they will come” mentality is a bit flawed.

“[There are] purists out there who feel that LB should be purely that… and that it has to be worthy to link to… when in fact you really do have to go out and do a little bit of link building to generate the knowledge that the link exists.”

Regardless of how sweet the bait is, it’ll take some other bait to get folks to notice.

Social Search. Linkbait. Pay-Per-Click. Organic. Local Search.

There are a myriad of different shades and brush strokes that comprise the portrait of search engine optimization. For Ben, however, local search seems to be the primary color of the search marketing canvas for his site. His goal at this year’s SES was to learn more about the subtleties of local search, and how it can be used to benefit his local business. The conference had a ton of information to offer in this field, to be sure, but here at WebProNews we go the extra mile in order to provide relevant and up-to-date insight from all corners of the blogosphere.

So here you go, Ben. Eight simple steps to make your page more local,
courtesy of Matt McGee at Search Engine Guide:

– Have your physical location on every page of your site.

– Have your local phone number on every page of your site.

– Give your physical address extra prominence on your “Contact Us” page.

– Create a page on your site called “Directions / Location”.

– Link to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps on your Location/Directions page.

– When possible, include your location in your page Titles.

– Somewhere on your site, list all the cities / towns your business
covers.

– Take advantage of internal linking opportunities with smart anchor
text.

Stay tuned to the WebProNews video blog for more great content from Search Engine Strategies in Chicago!