What is Link Baiting?

This process of creating great content to attract links is known as ‘link baiting’. The two key components in link baiting are:

1. lots of great content - something people will want to link to (‘Bait the hook’).
2. social media - your avenue for letting people know about your great content (‘Cast the line’). Of course, your content also needs to be optimized for your target keyword phrases so that the search engines know how to index it.

Creating great content & lots of it

Great content can mean virtually anything.Anything that you think your readers would absolutely love to link to. They’ll do this because they want to be useful to their own readers and they’ll gain credibility through their association with your site and its content. It might be any of the following:

• Useful, unique, intriguing, exciting, humorous, controversial or subversive blog posts or videos
• A useful tool that’s only available at your site (e.g. a theme, plugin or web application)
• Industry/niche news (e.g An announcement about a newsworthy event or tool)
• Research results
• Free stuff
• Something entirely different - it all depends on your subject matter and audience,and you’re only limited by your imagination, business intuition and industry awareness

Writing useful, unique blog posts

The key to a useful and unique blog is writing about what you know and what you think. No one else in the world knows exactly what you know, so leverage that uniqueness and expertise. So write stuff that you think your readers won’t already know, and will want to know. Or stuff that they may already know, but would be interested in hearing your take on. Things like trade secrets, handy hints, news, products, white papers, instruction manuals, and so on… And do it often. Partly because this keeps readers engaged, and partly because it keeps the search engine bots coming back more often. Also, as a general rule, search engines equate lots of content with usefulness.

Write in a style that suits your audience

Whatever your subject matter, write in a style that your audience will be comfortable with. If they’re from the old school, don’t write like I am. Don’t use contractions, don’t end sentences with prepositions, and don’t start sentences with “and” or “but”. But if they’re not old school,just use conversational English. In fact, the more of yourself you include in the post, the more engaging it will be. The key is to make it readable.

Remeber to link

Internal links help the search engines figure out what pages you consider important.And external links (links to other sites) can show Google that you’re intent on directing visitors to helpful,relevant content. So do both where relevant. And make your link anchor text keyword rich. Also, when you link to someone else’s blog post, quite often, a snippet of your post and a (nofollow) link to your post will be automatically added to their comments. This is known as a ‘pingback’. The pingback link doesn’t pass on any PageRank, so it’s of no direct SEO benefit to you, but it’s certainly beneficial in terms of building your social media presence. It lets the original blogger know you linked to him or her, and it puts your name and link in front of that blogger’s audience.