First off, for those of you who haven’t been exposed to the phrase yet, here is WikiPedia’s take on LinkBait. The definition doesn’t feel complete to me. I’d probably add a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to bookmark the link” (because many social bookmarking sites convey “SEO link juice”) as well as a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to click on the link” (because Google is dabbling in having link performance on search results pages effect SEO).

For a pile of linkbait examples, you need to look no further than PopUrls, which aggregates the top links around the web (Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, etc). You’ll see a lot of commonalities in word selection, title structure, etc. As I look right now, I see “The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World” topping Reddit. “30+ Free 3-column Web Site Templates” tops Del.icio.us. “Don’t Mess with the Marine Corp. Calls for Fox News Boycott.” is near the top at Digg.

Getting back to the title of this post… I sent out 700 invites to the RescueTime Beta yesterday and noticed some REALLY interesting data. Before this, invite emails have been opened about 65% of the time (with about 90% of openings resulting in a clickthru). So far so good. I haven’t been thrilled that 35% of people don’t open the email, but it’s understandable given how long it’s been since they’ve signed up for the beta. Hey, don’t blame me– we got a LOT more interest in the beta than we’d orignally imagined we would!

Yesterday’s email, I decided to make a slight change to the subject line of the email. Previously, the subject was “(Finally!) Your RescueTime Beta Invite”. I decided to remove the “(Finally!)”– as we’re working on a business/team offering, I thought maybe we ought to be a touch more professional and a bit less self-deprecating about our beta invite delays.

I was surprised to see that the open rate dropped to about 51% (a pretty significant change). There are other factors at work here– potentially the time of day and the day of the week could change things dramatically… But I tend to think that the culprit is the subtle language change.

Which prompted me to wonder– What if I changed the subject to map to linkbait style? “(FINALLY) Your RescueTime beta invite– Know exactly how you spend your computer time!” or some such? Anyone have any suggestions? I’m happy to experiment.

My thinking about linkbait also made me wonder about page title tags (the SEO-critical bit of code that determines what the window title is and what the link title is on Google search result pages (SERPs, if you wanna get SEO-geeky). When I do a quick search (say for “plasma tvs“) and look at the blue links through the lens of linkbait, I’m not bowled over.

Would results in search engines perform dramatically better if the title tags adhered to the rules of linkbait? Related, could SEO geeks like me craft a title that was linkbaity and still had the right keywords while remaining under the 65 character limit that Google displays? If we could, would it drive everyone crazy to see bombastic claims and top 10 lists on search engine results?

It’s possible that the world of search engine results and email subjects need to be more mundane to be effective. Maybe marketeers have created so much mistrust in these arenas that anything remotely smelling of linkbait will be dismissed as spam. Any thoughts?