In a previous article, Alan discussed the perils of duplicate content.   But sometimes duplicating content can actually be a good thing and in this article our new SEO star, Tim, is going to turn things around and look at when this can provide great benefits for your website.

In the world of SEO,  it is a given that more links mean better rankings and that better rankings mean more traffic from the right search phrases.  One very effective way of generating these links is via a process of writing and distributing viral link articles.  The articles contain an embedded link back to the client’s website, so the more these articles spread virally around the internet, the more inbound links are created back to the client’s website. 

So, in the case, when other people copy, steal, beg, borrow (or otherwise duplicate) our articles and spread them virally all over the internet for us, this is excellent for our clients and, because this content is not reproduced on our clients’ websites, we avoid the problems associated with duplicate content that Alan wrote about in his article.

The faster and further these articles spread, the more links they generate. The million dollar question is: how do you write content that spreads like this?

Writing viral content is not an exact science. There are plenty of things that you can do which make it more probable that your article will spread rapidly, but there’s nothing that can be done to guarantee it. One can spend hours planning, researching and crafting what you think will be the perfect piece of linkbait, only to see it generate just a handful of links. The next day, an article that you dash out on the spur of the moment spreads like wildfire, bringing in dozens of great links for a client in the space of a few weeks.

It’s a process that is frustrating and rewarding in equal measure, but there are certain trends that we spot and respond to when it comes to writing link articles for our clients. We track every article that we write, watching where they go, how many people read them, and (most importantly!) how many links they produce for us. This allows us to build a picture of the kind of article that tends be to be successful. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, comedy and celebrity can do wonders for helping an article to spread, especially when we combine the two together. A particular joy in article writing is finding the ‘celebrity connection’ to one of our clients, which we did with great success when we produced “Before They Were Famous – Top 10 Celebrity Lorry Drivers”. Movie stars and lorry drives aren’t two things that one usually sees side by side in the same article, and it was this strange combination that probably helped it spread so well. There are plenty of celebrity news and gossip blogs online that are just waiting for great stories and interesting facts to reproduce; when we throw something juicy their way, more often than not they shower us with links in return.

As the example above also demonstrates, Top 10 or Top 5 lists can be irresistible forms of linkbait. They don’t have to be associated with celebrities either, as no matter how obscure the subject, there’s just something about ranked lists that make people want to click on them, link to them and reproduce them. We’ve written numerous highly successful list articles for our clients: “Top 5 Clubs In Ibiza” did especially well, for example, as did “The World’s Top 10 Ski Resorts”. Top 10 lists often provoke disagreement and debate on blogs and websites, and whenever we produce a list that does this, we know that we are on to a winner. Even if people reproduce our Top Ten list just to disagree with it, that’s still a link to a website and exposure for the client for as long as the debate rages.

Comedy articles, celebrity anecdotes and inventive lists can all do well, but sometimes it is our straight up informative articles that do the best of all. Apparently innocuous articles that we have written, such as “A Guide to Common Job Interview Questions and Answers” and “How the New Employee Holiday Entitlement Laws Will Affect You” have been some of our best performers. They aren’t especially funny or celebrity focused, but we carefully researched each one to make that it was informative and accurate on a topic for which users need reliable information. People like to read and share kooky lists and funny celebrity stories, but above all, people come to the Information Superhighway to learn – if you help them do that, then you’ll be knee deep in links in no time at all.