It’s not often that an ecommerce site is going to have naturally occurring link bait, because baiting isn’t just about selling. The best link bait may not try to sell at all, but rather simply tie itself to something of interest with regard to your products. Thus, more than likely, the bait is something you’re going to have to make an effort to create.

One great avenue for link bait is social media – sites like MySpace, YouTube, Digg and Facebook allow users to share and promote content and opinions, almost always for free. Social media sites (sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 sites since most are based on Web 2.0 technologies) are quickly becoming primary promotional vehicles, and the very core of that promotion is link bait.

Creating link bait on social media sites opens the opportunity to reach a large audience of users actively seeking the new, the interesting, and the fun. If these users like your link bait, it will be promoted and your links will proliferate. So, what kind of bait can an ecommerce site create?

• MySpace.com — Oscar Mayer isn’t a true ecommerce site, but it has a MySpace profile for their famous Wienermobile. Victoria’s Secret mirrors their “Pink” campaign on a MySpace page and have accrued 197,783 friends. Importantly, a hip MySpace page can drive traffic back to your corporate site. Do you have a mascot? Can you create a contest and give away prizes? Is there an interesting or funny angle to take on your business? A profile here also allows you to create MySpace groups focused on dedicated subjects, like your company or what it sells. Either way, make sure to include links to your native site.
• YouTube.com — an interesting or funny video can be made about almost anything! Blendtec.com is a great example. They make videos of their blenders blending anything from golf balls to iPhones. It’s hard not to enjoy these. They make sure to incorporate URLs back to their corporate site both within the video and on the YouTube page. As a result, traffic to the corporate site has increased dramatically.
• Facebook — the resurrection of this site is largely due to their open policy on Facebook applications. Anyone is allowed to add their own app, and many ecommerce companies are offering them up. Development is streamlined and made as easy as possible. Facebook wants these applications!
• StumbleUpon, Digg, and Del.icio.us — have an odd or interesting story about what you sell? Post it to these news-oriented and bookmarking sites. If the story hits a nerve with the users, links and traffic will increase exponentially as the story is shared.

Keep in mind that these sites are social, and by definition of that, all things “prefab” and corporate will by and large be ignored. A successful social media campaign needs to steer clear of corporate feel and aim at communicating with attitude; apply your street smarts, not your MBA. Also, be careful not to overdo the backlinks you incorporate in any given piece of bait. Users on these sites are looking for the “cool factor,” not to be taken in by link bait. Too many links will immediately be viewed as an attempt at link baiting, and your content will be shunned.

There are, of course, many more social media sites than the few, large entities mentioned so far. Other important possibilities include blogs, news sites, and sites that might be focused on some part of your business. If you’re selling shoes, for example, seek out blogs that deal with fashion or shoes specifically (there are many more than you might think!). A pet supplies store might seek out Dogster.com, Catster.com or even the dating site, Datemypet.com. In each of these scenarios, sign up and get to know the culture. Once you understand the general disposition of the site, start formulating link bait that panders to that culture.

Above all, try to have fun with your social media link bait. It’s likely that you have a passion for what you sell. The more the link bait speaks to you, or makes you giggle, or raises the hair on the back of your neck, the more likely it’s going to do the same for others. Always be respectful and good-natured when dealing with these communities, but also look for that which will stand out.

Not all photo-sharing sites are perfect when it comes to social media optimization (SMO). A quick comparison of some particularly popular photo-sharing sites shows that one stands out for its inherently search-engine-friendly design.

Read the conclusion of Picture This here, and learn how you can use and optimize images through Flickr, an SEO-friendly photo-sharing site.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In fact, many of these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement, you’d better read on or you’ll end up missing the boat when it comes to better search engine rankings.

The discipline of search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving to better meet the challenges presented by a Web 2.0 world. Specific SEO tactics exist to expose content trapped within AJAX, Flash, RSS, audio and video. The bad news is that the major search engines still can’t cope with these elements.

So, the onus is on you to render them search engine friendly. Let’s start with Flash, a technology with which many of us already are familiar. Some search engines, including Google, have rudimentary means of extracting content and links from Flash. Nonetheless, any content or navigation embedded within a Flash movie will, at best, rank poorly in comparison to a static, HTML-based counterpart, and at worst, not even make it into the search engine’s index.

Flash Not Friendly

Google’s view on Flash is that it doesn’t provide a user-friendly experience. Flash is wholly inaccessible to the vision-impaired, unrenderable on devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, and can’t be accessed without broadband connectivity.

In particular, Google frowns on navigational elements presented exclusively in Flash. Given this stance, Google isn’t likely to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon. So, it’s in your hands to either replace those Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or to employ a Web design approach known as “progressive enhancement,” whereby designs are layered in a concatenated manner to provide an alternative experience for non-Flash users. This way, all users, including search engine spiders, will be able to access your content and functionality.

An example of progressive enhancement in action can be found at Amazon.com’s “Create Your Own Ring” on the Web. Simply turn off the JavaScript capabilities in your browser and build your ring — with or without the Flash interaction. All customers are equally served (http://tinyurl.com/yrh6o7).

Problems With AJAX

AJAX poses similar problems to spiders as Flash does. That’s because AJAX also relies on JavaScript — that’s what the “J” in AJAX stands for, after all. Search engine spiders can’t execute JavaScript commands (or Java either, for that matter). AJAX can be used to pull data seamlessly in the background onto an already loaded Web page, sparing the user from the “click-and-wait” frustrations associated with more conventional Web sites. It’s a great timesaver for users, but the additional content that’s pulled in via AJAX is invisible to the spiders unless it’s preloaded into the page’s HTML and simply hidden from the user via CSS.

Here, progressive enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the AJAX application for spiders and JavaScript-incapable browsers. A low-tech alternative to progressive enhancement is to place an HTML version of your AJAX application within noscript tags.

Other options include rendering static HTML pages from product searches, as the vertical shopping engine Become.com does. Google’s guidelines warn that your search result pages must provide value to users to warrant inclusion in its index. So, extra care must be taken if employing this approach.

Widgets, the mini applications webmasters are encouraged to place on their sites to pull data from an external source, also are in most cases inaccessible to search engine spiders. Most widgets are built in search engine unfriendly Flash or AJAX.

A well-loved widget in the blogosphere is Eurekster’s Swicki (http://swicki.eurekster.com), which you may have seen in the sidebars of popular blogs like TechCrunch’s (www.techcrunch.com) “What’s Popular” buzzcloud. Under our tutelage, Eurekster made its widget more search engine friendly and reaped the benefits with a huge influx of search-referred traffic.

Unlike Flash and AJAX, RSS is inherently search engine friendly. That’s because an RSS feed is an XML file, and XML is text-rich with semantic markup. But RSS isn’t well-supported in traditional Web search. It is within certain vertical engines, such as Google Blog Search and Technorati, but those aren’t the mainstream search engines that catalogers care about.

Over time, the major engines will get better at interpreting the XML and using the extracted data for ranking purposes. For instance:

• counting the links contained within the feed as votes; and,
• taking the anchor text of those links into account for ascertaining the linked page’s keyword theme.

In the meantime, prepare for this inevitability by making one or more full-text — not summary — feeds available on your site through text links and by including within those feeds at least 20 items (not just the default 10). Each item should have a keyword-rich title and keyword-rich text links contained within the product’s HTML-encoded content.

RSS Fuels Podcasts

We have RSS to thank for the podcasting revolution. It’s the RSS feed with “enclosures” of audio or video files that makes it a podcast, not the fact that it has audio or video files available for download. For those catalogers producing podcasts, use the ID3 tags of your MP3 files to incorporate show notes, images and a link to your podcast feed. Then, syndicate your feeds via multiple venues for optimal exposure on the Web.

Some Web 2.0 technologies already are primed for search engines straight out of the box. Blogs and wikis are two such technologies. Google seems to love blogs — the rich textual content, the widespread interlinking between blogs, the intricate network of internal links, the frequent updates, the semantic markup, etc.

By then applying specific blog optimization tactics — such as using “sticky” posts to add keyword-rich intro copy to category pages, incorporating topical tag clouds and tag pages into your blog, and overriding the automatically generated title tags with custom-written ones — you can really make your blog hum. Wikis tend to do fairly well in search engines, too, because wikis are text-rich, frequently updated, and heavily linked internally. But they’re also more susceptible to spam, and the content is only as good as the contributors.

As you head down the road of Web 2.0, just remember that user-friendly doesn’t readily translate into search engine friendly without some assistance. But know that help is available when you embrace this brave new World Wide Web.

Stephan Spencer is president and founder of Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting firm specializing in search engine, optimal Web sites and applications. You can reach him at