Linkbait Tuesday: Darlington Weddings.co.uk

by Patrick Altoft on October 30, 2007

Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments..

Darlington Weddings.co.uk is a niche site offering help and advice for people booking a wedding in the North East of England, about 45 minutes from my house.

The site ranks well in Google thanks to its age and is in need of some links before it starts to rank for more competitive search terms.

Websites like this earn money from selling adverts and the key to selling adverts is to attract a lot of traffic. The listings pages for all the companies and hotels on the site need to rank in second place on Google behind the actual company website. This will drive a substantial amount of long tail traffic.

First of all it is useful to find out what the most popular topics in the blogosphere are at the moment. Search the popular sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, sk-rt.com, StumbleUpon and Technorati to find out what’s being said and who’s saying it. Make sure you read all the wedding blogs and get to know the writers.

To make the site more linkable I would add interactive Google maps with hotel and venue locations as well as photo galleries and information for tourists. It would also be a good idea to stop resizing some of the images using html to improve the appearance. Useful maps are a massive linkbait opportunity in the tourism industry.

Adding Wordpress is probably the easiest way to publish linkbait articles on the site. I would suggest trying to become a wedding blog and maybe listing the Top 50 Wedding Blogs as one of your first few posts. Try to make the list credible and make sure you network with other bloggers so they know who you are.

Linkbait ideas:

How to Organise a Wedding Online
Top 5 Amazing Wedding Venues
Top 10 Geek Wedding Cakes
Apple Fan Has iPhone Wedding Cake
The Ultimate Linux Wedding Cake
Wedding Toolbox: 15 Sites to Help
You Plan Your Wedding
10 Coolest Stag Nights
10 Amazing Hen Night Locations
Top 10 Best Man Jokes
How to Create a Website for your Wedding

Creating a Facebook wedding application so people can view guest lists and venue details inside Facebook would be a nice idea. Maybe have this linked to a tool that creates wedding websites, each with a link back to DarlingtonWeddings.co.uk

What else would you suggest?

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Published in: Linkbait

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Tom 30/10/2007 at 9:53 am: Some great points here Patrick - I think the facebook app is gold. Launch that on a separate domain/brand and I think you could get a lot of wedding sites linking to it, then 301 it later to a sub-dir of the main site (or just link back to your site from the new domain) and you’ll get a lot of benefit from that.

Linkbait pieces relating to best-man speeches would be good too. Perhaps create a section on the site of youtube videos of best-man speeches, almost like a mini-directory. Would be very useful for anyone wanting inspiration on speeches and also would allow you to do linkbait (by dropping the odd funny one in there)
2 Shimon 30/10/2007 at 1:18 pm: Thank you very much for this review.
Not so far ago I asked you to review my website, which is very close to the reviewed one by the idea, so this review is almost an answer to my request!
Thank you!
3 Lyndon Antcliff 31/10/2007 at 10:17 am: 15 of the worst best man speeches
Why you should not get drunk at weddings
Top 20 videos of bad dad dancing
13 of the most expensive weddings in history
Why do brides wear white and other wedding factoids
Why having 3 wives can be a bad thing
54 celebrities who should not have married each other
12 ways not to ask a woman to marry you
How to make you marriage proposal into a marketing tool
23 of the filthiest wedding jokes
14 weird religious wedding ceremonies

I better stop as I need to keep these for my clients, lol.
4 Craig 31/10/2007 at 2:19 pm: Thanks for the tips Patrick, Tom & Lyndon - I will be implementing some of these next week and I will let you know how it goes.

Thanks again!
5 Karen 30/11/2007 at 4:04 pm: Thank you for your tips, nice to get input from people in the industry
6 UltimateBestMan 11/02/2008 at 9:27 pm: Download the Best Man Speech pack - as seen on the BT Advert. Find the resources you need as a Best Man! - Speech, Stag Weekends etc. Best Man Speech, Ultimate Best Man Speech, hilarious speech