Last week at SES London, much of the discussion centered around LinkBait. Companies are hearing how sites such as Digg can generate thousands of visitors and links in one day and are looking to tap into social media as a quick-fix internet marketing solution.

Clients have been increasingly requesting proposals for linkbait articles to push themselves up the search rankings, rather than risking a Google penalty by adopting darker rank-boosting tactics. Any short-term boom in visitors or inbound links is may have a long term effect but in the short term is hardly likely to send a site immediately up to the top of Google’s search results.

That said together with other good ethical SEO tactics, harnessing social media is a valuable component in an overall long-term marketing strategy. The key is to make a site attractive to social media users and bloggers and build a solid base of natural links first.

Any site having this sort of long-term inbound link structure has an extremely good chance of rising safely over any Google algorithm filters. Once the site has hundreds or even thousands of natural links, adding a few hundred well-placed paid links wasn't going to raise any red flags at Google.