When it comes to writing viral link articles, there’s not much argument against the irrefutable facts that they are a valuable part of any successful SEO campaign. I’ve read up a fair bit on ‘linkbaiting’ and how an intriguing title for my articles can work by making it so irresistible that a reader can’t help but be compelled to click on it. That part is easy – and logical. But I started wondering about just how much the style of my articles affected how many links they generated, or if in fact it made a difference at all. Are any styles more popular than others? Do funny or quirky articles spread more than say, a celebrity-themed article or straight information based content? Often the style of article I write is dictated by the client and often the keywords, but my guess was that there is a place for all those styles; but still, I was curious. All our writers in the office have different styles. One writes great ghostly tales of haunted hotels for travel insurance; another seems to be able to find a celebrity angle for the most obscure holiday destination; and another writes wonderfully fact-packed destination tips for their articles. Being the newest in the office, I try to cover all bases and flit from funny to factual as the mood takes me! So in order to try and unravel this particular SEO conundrum, I decided to do a little delving. I chose a client of ours that I knew we had written for in a variety of styles and I went back to our link checking board in order to establish (or try!) a couple of things. Being mindful of the fact that rankings are the most important metric and better spread equals better rankings; what were the proportionate results for the spread of the different styles and where had they spread to. (And does that matter?) In the month I chose, there were a variety of articles written for the client. (A travel insurance company) Some were light-hearted fantasy based, some were celebrity-based and some very serious factual articles. The factual articles spread the best with the links generated in the main part to travel- based websites. The funny articles spread only marginally less, also to some serious travel-based websites but also to more seemingly unrelated sites. The celebrity-based articles spread the least, but again only marginally less than the others, and again, to a lot of travel websites. So after that very superficial research, even though there were obviously a number of dubious links generated, there was also a gratifying number of good quality relevant links generated from all these styles of articles. (As an aside, the article which generated the most links was one which had a definitive ‘list style’ title i.e. – “5 Good Reasons ….” But that’s a whole different blog post!) My conclusion? In my opinion, writing different styles of articles will work in different measures for your clients, and I believe that to be a judgement call. But there seems to be no dramatic SEO disadvantage to using any particular style, and it will certainly keep your writing fresh and interesting!