Real Link Baiting

Linkbaiting is content designed to attract attention and garner link backs from readers, generating more traffic for your site.

As the online competition grows exponentially, webmasters are looking for unique strategies and approaches. Search engine optimization depends not just on keywords, but on links, and you can get a lot of organic ones if you bait your site accurately.

The basic idea of link baiting is to create a concept that will attract a lot of attention, and have it circulated in high interest media areas. If the content you publish generates ‘buzz’, it will interest many visitors and websites will link to this content on their website or blog. This will generate natural one-way links to your website.

Publishing articles, comments and forum posts in high-traffic social network sites gives the most exposure. The number of one-way links will continue to grow with time, as the ping-backs come from farther and farther down the line – this means that you are reaching an ever increasing audience!

Google will sit up and take notice of your website because of the increasing one-way links that encourage the search engine spiders to visit your site. The links can also increase your PageRank, which influences your spot on the SERPs. Building one-way links this way is totally accepted by Google.

Matt Cutts, an engineer with Google for the last 8 years and one of the most respected SEO masters, says that link baiting is a highly “search engine-friendly” SEO technique, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand and depend on fantastical falsifications.

The places visitors can come from include Digg, del.ici.us, Google, Yahoo Groups and other similar networks. The key to having good link bait is to follow the steps below:

Keep fresh and unusual content on your site, without losing relevance.
Ensure your site is properly indexed, and that the spiders visit frequently.
Work on making your online social profile all that it can be.
Don’t exaggerate, but find things people are honestly interested in and play on that.
Always be aware that people are watching, the search engines are watching – hey, your mom might be watching, so keep that white hat on!

Once you have successfully link baited once, it will get easier and easier to find good ways to attract traffic, and eventually you might even get a good reputation such as “Hey, check out this site – they always have cool stuff going on!”

That’s when you know you have arrived.