It sounds rather obvious; creating perfectly timed, influential content that captivates your readers is at the core of any content marketing plan. The best part is that you don’t need to be an award winning writer to make it happen, you just need to create content that keeps your readers engrossed. Here are a few ideas on how best to do that:

1. Search through Similar Sites For Inspiration

Using the Internet to stir up inspiration for your content doesn’t mean you’re inept at doing your job. It merely shows that you’re digitally savvy and know how to use the resources at your disposal. Sift through similar sites to get ideas for possible content plans, blogs or articles. Whatever works for your competitors can work for you; provided you don’t copy them word for word.

2. Interview an Industry Specialist

Interviews with industry specialists provide engaging content for users to read, but they also allow you to sit back and do minimal work. All you need to do is compile a list of interesting questions that relate to the needs of your readers and voila! Your interviewee will answer them for you with rich, informative content and provide a little link bait for your site at the same time.
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SEO blogs are a great source of material and advice, but sometimes you need to put all of that aside and start looking at real world examples. For today's post, I thought I'd do something a little different.

I'm not going to tell you what I think works. I'm not going to make predictions about the future of Google, or theorize about the quirks of the almighty algorithm. Instead, I'm going to peek behind the curtain and find out what top sites are doing to rank.

Keyword: Loans

Is there a harder keyword out there? I thought I'd take a look at the site that ranks for the mother of all keywords and see what's going on behind the scenes. The site is creditloan.com, and here's what Open Site Explorer had to say about it.

• Top Link – It's from an infographic on Guy Kawasaki's site. The artists from Credit Loan helped him produce the infographic, and he returned the favor with a link.
• Link #2 – Once again, it's a link in exchange for an infographic, this time for Yoast.
• Link #3 – You guessed it, an infographic, this time on Mashable, as part of a series of what they considered the best social media infographics on the web.
• Link #4 – Are you seeing a pattern yet? It's an infographic for ProBlogger, questioning whether or not Twitter is a waste of time.

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Link Bait: The act of attracting large amounts of inbound links, naturally.

There are a number of different link baiting techniques out there, and while each SEO or link building expert has his or her own personal favorites, there are definitely those that suit certain environments or situations. In saying that, there are also some that work in perfect unison with others. Call it a symbiotic relationship, if you will, but there’s a great measure of excellence in bringing two or more link building techniques together to generate greater results.

Some of the most popular link building strategies are listed as such because they either work really well or they take less time to execute than others. It can be a lengthy process, so it’s not always the best techniques that make the cut. A little while back, we took you through some of the easiest ways to make backlinks work for you by listing 700 Ways to Build Backlinks. Today, I'm going to pinpoint just a few in the link baiting niche to showcase how beautifully a few of these methods can work in association with one another.
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This is big news from the Google Analytics team. Analytics now reports backlinks in real time, as they are indexed. The previous tool used by SEOs, Google Webmaster Tools, has been notoriously slow at reporting new links, but this will no longer be a problem.

Analytics is now reporting all links to your site as trackbacks, whether or not the blogger who links to you has adopted trackbacks. Here's what Ilya Grigorik of the Google Analytics team has said about it:

The concept of trackbacks...first emerged back in 2002...but the requirement for each site to explicitly implement this protocol has always stood in the way of adoption. If only you could crawl the web and build an accurate link graph. The good news is we already do that at Google, and are now providing this insight to Google Analytics users.

If you’re not familiar with Trackbacks, then think of it as automated Google Alerts for all of your pages: you publish new content, we scour the web for pages that link to it and build automated reports for you right within Google Analytics - simple as that.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past decade, you probably know that backlinks are the bread and butter of SEO.
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SEO Smart Links Might Not Be So Smart After All

We love a bit of debate, relishing in the opportunity to discuss the latest in SEO news and Google know-how. Something that’s been floating around the Internet ether of late is the dispute around the use of WordPress plugin, SEO Smart Links. In a rather subjective article on the matter, SEO Braintrust made some valid points that were completely opposed to the use of this plugin. They believe it has led to sites being penalized by Google. While they’ve substantiated their claims with some supporting evidence, this could very well still be a case of poor craftsmen blaming their tools.

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Google has stepped up it's anti-spam efforts yet again, bringing the hammer down on low-authority sites with what is now called the Penguin update. The impacts have been widespread, and there is no shortage of webmasters and SEOs protesting the change. The fallout has been large enough that there's even a petition to reverse it.

The blogosphere has erupted with fears about the possibility of negative SEO, fears that were instigated in the warnings leading up to the Penguin update. Examples of the search results getting worse are everywhere, whether or not this is true on a broader scale. With more Panda updates on the way and more anti-spam efforts coming, what's an SEO to do?

What Google Says

For once, Google has been pretty straightforward about what they want from webmasters, since they claim the update was targeted specifically at outright spam. In a perfect world, the following would mean you were covered:
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Parked Domain Classifier Vs Over-Optimization Penalty

Google referred to it as a bug, some have called it a blunder, SEO gurus across the world thought it was something to do with the much rumored “over-optimization penalty”. What’s the truth behind the parked domain classifier incident of Tuesday, April 17, 2012? In case you haven’t heard the details, numerous sites experienced a massive drop in rankings last Tuesday; an event that has caused huge losses in revenue and traffic for the aforementioned sites.

What was initially presumed to be the start of sites being penalized for spam, keyword stuffing and overall dodgy SEO techniques, actually turned out to be an error on Google’s part; or so they say.

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If you had access to the Internet this week, you'd know that Facebook bought the photo sharing software/service Instagram  for $1 billion dollars.  Of money.

Whenever a company carefully weights a major acquisition like this, a funny thing happens.  Every four-toothed hillbilly starts telling them how they'd run their company, because hey, you can make better decisions with just a Facebook account than you can with access to the company's financial records, business plan, and a list of the expert advisors that's basically as long as they ask it to be.

But as annoying as this is, I'm throwing one more piece of outsider advice at Mr. Zuckerberg, because his business effects me, and hey, you're not doing anything right now anyway, right?  I didn't think so.  So, without further adieu:

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Playing catch-up after my recent vacation (pictured right.. what a terrible time) is going to mean a short and sweet "list based" blog post this week.   I'm going to be showing you ways to build backlinks.  And by that I mean that I'm going to show you how to let other people show you how to build backlinks.  Enjoy!

EDIT 4/5/12: While this admittedly lazy post had the honor of being ragged on by Danny Sullivan, and there is a good deal of repetition between these lists, I've made sure that all lists provided add considerable value that the others don't. Each is skim-worthy, at absolutely least. I've also expanded this to include another great compendium of link building methods and will consider adding any other worthy epics on the topic.

99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away (and Improve Your Brand Too)

I'm a big fan of using a link building budget to give stuff away.  After all, great link building is relationship building.  It's social networking.  It's channel partner building.  It's whatever label that marketers want to stick on it at a given moment, but fundamentally, it doesn't change.  If you want some truly valuable links, you need to make some friends, and this approach should be well-received.
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There's no question that this week has been a rough one for black hat SEO's.  Even those that might have had a brush with a bad SEO consultant years back (as surely has one of our clients remembering why they pay us what they do right about now).

First, the good news... 

...Google Webmaster Tools will, for the first time ever, tell you (at least some of the time) if they see issues in the quality of links that point to your site.  And this will no doubt encourage some link spammers to chill out.

Now, the bad news...

....which will occupy the rest of this post.

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