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Linkbaiting is the art of doing or saying anything that will get you a link back to your site. Linkbait that tends to work particularly well is what I like to call “toolbait”. Toolbaiting is simple. Create a cool tool, browser extension, next best ajax thing-a-ma-jig and make it available for free.

A couple weeks ago at SMX, for instance, Matt Cutts explained how to turn off personalized results without logging out. Great tip, but seriously… who really wants to manually add &pws=0 to the end of all their search queries? He also hinted that if someone could automate the process, there might be some potential link love involved.

Enter Joost de Valk, an SEO consultant and web designer from the Netherlands. Just a few days later, he spits out an OpenSearch plugin which adds &pws=0 to the query and shows you the clean results without having to log out of Google. Within a matter of days, the high class link love started pouring in.

What kind of linkbait do you use?

Graywolf dropped a list of essential Wordpress plugins a while back entitled “SEO Plugins for Wordpress”. Although a bit misleading, the article covers a variety of useful SEO plugins (some more so than others) that will do everything but tie your shoe. More recently, John Chow referenced an out of the box SEO solution which should also help you achieve better search engine results.

Meanwhile, I tend to fallback on the same Wordpress plugins for all my optimization needs. In order from top to bottom, or rather header to footer, here they are:

Page Titles
SEO Title Tag - Super easy installation and highly configurable. Allows you to override page or post title tags with a custom ones.

META Tags
Head META Description - Upload and activate. Simple. Done.

Keywords
Ultimate Tag Warrior - Compatible with the page title plugin and works wonders for drawing Technorati traffic, not to mention reinforcing on-page keyword density.

Syndication
FeedSmith Plugin - Trick out your feed with all sorts of options including PingShot, a quick notification service that enables your feed to be updated in the widest variety of places as quickly as you add new content.

Sitemap
Google Sitemap Generator - Get a search engine compliant sitemap in seconds.

Common sense would also suggest you contain your core keywords in the post title since most Wordpress themes typically wrap them in h1 or h2 tags. Furthermore, for maximum SEO impact, I recommend you read the definitive guide to semantic web markup for blogs.

Frank Schilling is one of the largest generic domain-name investors in the world. According to Frank (via SEObook):

The best domain-names are generic defensible keyword-style (one two and three word) phrases which get some trickle of organic generic-intent type-in traffic; for nothing more than the keyword-weight, gravity and resonance of the generic words that make up the domain name.

He goes on to say that many people will simply append the subject matter they seek with “.com” in their address bar, expecting to find products and services that match the generic keywords they entered. However, since mining the domain space for these generic defensible undiscovered names is getting harder and more time intensive, I outlined a few of my own domain name shopping shortcuts below.

1. Visit the free keyword suggestion tool and enter a starting keyword or phrase.

2. Copy and paste the 100 related keyword search results into an Excel spreadsheet. Deselect everything and highlight (re-select) the keyword column only, excluding the search count for each keyword phrase.

3. Paste the keywords you just copied from Excel into a bulk domain registration tool.

4. Using your favorite registrar, register any available one, two and three word phrases (.com only) that may get some “trickle of organic generic-intent type-in traffic” with priority determined by search volume.

5. Rinse & repeat.

And there you have it, folks! It’s like Frank says, “If you own a powerful generic name or name phrase, you will get internet traffic independent of what the search engines and auction marketplaces try to do to you.”

G’luck and happy domain name hunting!

Shortly after I spent the morning sifting through my MP3 collection, looking for that perfect beat to chop, edit and upload to my phone as a new ringtone, I stumbled across an old school search hack. Simply put, if you copy and paste the following code and “Google” it, your search will lead you to open indexes that contain downloadable music files.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Artist or Song Name Goes Here”

Turns out, if you tweak the search string just right, you can find free ringtones instead. Take for example, you are searching for free MP3 ringtones, you might use:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +”ringtones” +description +size +(mp3)

Oh, what’s that you say? My phone doesn’t support MP3 ringtones? No problem.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”ringtones” +description +size +(qcp|mid|m4a|mp4)

As with the original hack, you can always go back in and specify an artist or song name. Unfortunately, not everybody uses the smartest naming conventions for their files so the search results can be slim pickings.

Happy ringtone hunting!