One of the best ways to increase your SEO rankings is to attract inbound links to your blog or website.

Traditional link building efforts involve asking for links, link swapping, or link buying. This process is extremely time consuming and can get expensive if you are buying high quality links. Really, in this instance, is there any such thing as a quality link? After all, Google has made no secret that it is actively seeking ways to weed out this practice.

In contrast, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by leveraging social media to convince others to link to your content. The challenge is coming up with link-worthy material and then spreading the word via Twitter and other social media tools. Fortunately for those of us with little time and fewer resources, the process of building this content just got a lot easier. You no longer need to embark upon a lengthy research project or write a 10 page white paper. These days, successful link bait is taking the form of widgets or mashups or other forms of rich media content. The prerequisite is that the content should be helpful, clever, funny, or remarkable enough that others want to write about it or include it in their roundup of free tools.

The process of building a widget or mashup used to require Web development skills or enough budget to farm out the work. I’ve been reading about a number of free tools that allow just about anyone to create their own widgets but have not found the confidence to try them. Prodded by a “tweet” from one of the more influential Twitterati (did I really just write that?), I decided to check out, Sprout, an extremely cool and easy to use site to help you build widgets or other informational tools that can be embedded in your blog or web site. http://sproutbuilder.com/whataresprouts.

Sprout looks easy enough to use and I’m ready to check it out. Now, I just have to come up with the “killer app” for our blog readers. To get ideas, the first step will be to reach out to the community reading the BreakingPoint blog at www.breakingpointlabs.com and then do a bit of brainstorming.

More on this in another post.