The Importance of Link Baiting?

Link baiting can be defined as “link building technique with a twist”. It has been compared with fishing by SEO experts. Have you ever observed an angler catching fish using some fish food as a bait to catch the fish? Similarly, when you want to draw a huge amount of network crowd, you need to display some textual or graphical content on a web page that acts as bait. Instead of hunting out for links you intend to bring links to your site through unique and good site content.

This content can be a blog post or an article or a picture that is used for drawing as many links as possible from different sources on the Internet. This content that is used for baiting links on the Internet is called a link bait and the process is called link baiting. Link Baiting is just like fishing. For example, you publish an article on a specific topic on the web. Others will pick up the content if they find it to be interesting and fresh and will link to it. Here, the article is your bait and the link is your catch.

Link baiting is popularly being used on the Internet for developing links. People place attractive content on blogs in the form of opinion and news articles. An attractive content draws a lot of attention and this link is shared or visited a number of times. As a result its popularity increases. As the popularity increases the number of links rises. Link baiting is different from other forms of drawing network crowds because other websites will link only when they are interested and not because you pay them for linking.

How is Link Baiting going to help in SEO?

Search engine optimized websites are in great demand. Each and every website tries its best to be ranked high in the search engine listing so that its popularity increases immensely and more and more network traffic is directed toward it. By link baiting a website manages to get a lot of links for itself. When the search engine notices that a website has got a lot of links, it will give it a higher priority and allot it a good rank in its listings. A lot of websites try for a place in the top ten positions of search engine listings. The higher the priority of a website in the search engine listings the higher is its probability of being placed in the top ten SEO rankings.

Once a website manages to find a place in top ten search engine listings, it will naturally draw lot of visitors. As a result it will get further links. Hence, its links will keep increasing in leaps and bounds and the website will not have to specifically request any other website to link to it. Search engine optimization is very important for business and e-commercial sites as a lot of customers visit pages that are ranked high in the search engine listings.

What are the techniques of link baiting?

There are lots of techniques that are popularly used by the webmasters for link baiting. As it is all about attracting a lot of network traffic and hence gathering a lot of links, the bait should contain useful, important and attractive information. The main aim is to impress a visitor to the extent of him/her sharing it with his/her acquaintances and hence linking the website with another in the process. You can use five most popular types of matters that “hook” reader to link. These are news, attack, contrary, humor, and resource.

The commonly used techniques are

• To provide the latest and the most authentic information and news.
• To provide valuable resources to the visitor, such as, directory listings of important services along with their contact details.
• To publish in depth and reliable interviews and interview reports with the hottest film industry personalities, prominent politicians, sports personalities, etc.
• To provide useful tools, plug ins, add ons for existing open source documents.
• Technology related news, reviews, snippets, etc. are always popular to catch quick attention of web geeks.
• Including online contests can allure a lot of network crowd to your website and link it up with numerous other sites rapidly.

A website that contains unique features and content is sure to make itself popular in the Internet community fast and pull the attention of the masses. Humorous content also seems to act like good bait as people always like to read funny stuff. 

For example, if a website is organized very attractively and is dealing with an interesting topic they attract links. Burning topics, such as on SEO , technical issues, etc. are going to attract a lot of surfers. These websites enjoy lot of inbound links. Generally surfers link to pages that have a lot of inbound links.
 
A website should have clean layout. It should be neat and not overloaded with advertisements. The logo should be contemporary and the information provided must be very useful. You can add a top ten listing format that is a favorite with the social networking group. Including references to popular sites, such as Digg, greatly enhances the popularity of  websites.

How can you be successful by link baiting?

Link baiting has a lot of advantages. The first of them is that it can tremendously increase the popularity of a website. It can also help the website secure a good position in the SEO listings. New websites can make themselves known through link baiting. Access to more relevant information is enabled by clicking on the links in a website without disturbing the main flow. It helps in increasing the network traffic visiting the website. This in turn enhances the rate of conversion and earning potentials as well. It increases the trust of the visitor in a new site when links to that site are found on an already established website. Links help in providing market intelligence and they show strategic partnerships. They are a popular means of advertising.

Link Baiting: Good or Bad?

Link baiting greatly serves to increase the incoming links to a website and hence increases its popularity in the network community. It is very essential for e-commercial and other websites that use websites to advertise their products and services. Hence it is good. But there is a negative side to it also. In order to gain publicity many of the websites are using controversial content. By doing this, they might be getting popularity, but bad publicity, which might affect their reputation in the long run.

The person who makes the bait should always remember that the content is the most important factor for bait. People like to read content that is useful and worth linking with.

Conclusion

A link bait is a graphical or textual content that is used for attracting the network traffic to a particular website. It greatly enhances the SEO prioritization and hence is one of the most important factors for being ranked high by search engines. There are a lot of techniques that can be used to make baits on websites. Generally websites that contain important, latest and unique content are linked with the most. Link baiting has a lot of advantages. Link baiting is definitely good but it should not be misused. If you take a general view, you can safely say all web contents are generated and published for the purpose of link bating. Go get the best out of it!

Tags: conversion, Link bating, Page Rank, SEO, Social Bookmarking, web traffic