Best linkbait article ever: SEO Lessons Learned Through Pictures of Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts certainly needs no introduction to most industry pros: he's the head of Google's web spam team. In other words, he's the guy all the search engine optimization experts are trying to outsmart. Despite Cutts' exalted status, he freely shares advice through his blog, Twitter, and Google Webmaster Help videos.

SEER Interactive, an Internet marketing agency, pulled some screenshots from those videos and wrote up this great linkbait article: SEO Lessons Learned Through Pictures of Matt Cutts. Some of the photos and connections they made are hilarious:

3. Matt is not a ninja, and neither am I.

Aside from the fact that ninjas are getting a bad name recently, saying you’re an SEO ninja is like a plumber telling me he’s a pitching ace. The skills do not transfer over or build confidence.

I liked this piece because it showed that SEO can be fun and creative. It isn't just about optimizing title tags, tweaking the meta data, and constantly worrying about your search rankings. Instead of trying to trick users into clicking on something, the emphasis is on creating content that people will want to share. I can imagine someone at SEER thinking, "What's something cool and useful we can put out?"

On a meta level, the article is an outstanding example of linkbait. By writing about an industry "influencer," SEER will attract the kind of readers they want. Moreover, they would grab the attention of the influencer himself. Indeed, I found out about this article through Matt Cutts on Twitter. All of the SEO tactics that SEER is talking about, are being applied in the article itself! Brilliant.