Walter CronkiteThe Nuremberg trials, World War II, Vietnam, John F. Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, and Project Mercury. What do all these events have in common? Each were reported by the late Walter Cronkite on his way to becoming "the most trusted man in America." And though your website may never become the "most trusted in America," successful link building can lead to historical events in your traffic logs.

So in honor of the late television and radio broadcast legend, here are five examples of Emmy Award worthy linkbait to help your site achieve top ratings, even if you don't have moon landings to report on.


5 Pieces of Emmy Award Worthy Linkbait:

1. Presentation Inspiration -- Beautifully designed aggregation that showcases great PowerPoint decks.

2. Baby Name Finder -- Interactive baby name tool that shows baby name popularity over time.

3. Travel IQ Quiz -- Fun game that allows you to plot cities on a world map.

4. Seasonal Food Map -- Interactive tool that identifies regional foods that are in season.

5. Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis -- A visually engaging and useful chart from Mint. 


Five Thumbs

  • Google News Search Video Tutorial (15 min)
    PageRank is a lesser factor in news search than citations, timeliness, relevancy, and editorial interest. In her video on the GWC blog, Maile Ohye talks about ways to optimize articles for news, including article layout, news Sitemap submission, image inclusion, and categorization.        
  • Bing or Bada Bing?: As Michael Arrington pointed out, Bing's AdWords creatives were appearing on searches for "pornography," which makes you wonder -- were they also using dollar bills to bid on broad match keywords?

Four Thumbs

  • 8 Best Whiteboard Friday Videos: Call it RandMeme. Call it TechFish. Take your pick. Either way, the post Jason Borro over at Superl8tive aggregated a good array of great Whiteboard Friday Videos.
  • Internet Radio: Still small, but growing fast: Only 42 million Americans listen to internet radio, but with online radio ad spend up 30% over last year, and the Radio Ad Bureau coming off their worst quarter in history, Pandora's Box might be open for traditional radio.
  • 14 Reasons Why SEO is LIke Marathon Running: Sports analogies can be great ways to contextualize life lessons. SimplSEO's in depth comparison of marathon training and SEO highlights some interesting similarities between the two disciplines.

Three Thumbs

  • Why Conversion Rate Tests are Like Viagra: In a tongue and cheek post Tom Critchlow compares conversion rate optimization to Viagra. Disclaimer: for conversions lasting longer than 4 hours, please call your designer.

Two Thumbs

  • Nofollows on Digg: Digg's use of nofollow is worth noting, but not particularly newsworthy. So even though the discussion prompted a video from Matt Cutts, without question the most interesting attribute implementation to revisit in the video is Matt's use of hair.
  • Ice Cream Glove or Snuggie?: Both the Snuggie and Ali G's Ice Cream Glove are laughable products, yet the Snuggie is real, and it has sold millions of units. In a post about customer development, Eric Ries discusses the distinction between the two equally ridiculous products. 
  • E-mail Engagement: Open rates may tend to be higher with Gmail, but the greatest volumes of e-mail traffic still come from Hotmail and Yahoo.

Rocking on YOUmoz

It was another stellar week on YOUmoz and posts #1 and #2 below were each promoted to the main blog. Also, for Mozzers looking to find or post a job, there are several interesting opportunities currently on the SEOmoz Marketplace, including this SEO Internship with SemiDirectory. 

  1. A Developer's Adventure Into the World of SEO by RefurbUPS   
  2. Networking at an SEOmoz After Party by audiore   
  3. How to identify linkbuilding opportunities with Competitive Link Finder by Ethan Stanislawski
  4. Optimizing your thank you pages by DebbieC
  5. Ways SEO and copywriting can be a real workout by jf3ig
  6. Using your blog for niche market research by daniscool
  7. The "head in the sand" business model by ilovedietcoke

Thumbs Down

  • Fox Tries Live Twitter Overlays on TV: Social media will find eventually find its way to your TV, and perhaps an iteration of what Fox tried with their Twitter overlays will work, but it's safe to say that Fox's initial experiment is not worth retweeting.

twitter / samniccolls