Despite it’s age, and “black hat” tone, Link Baiting is in fact a term that has gotten quite popular lately. Whenever I get asked by clients more than three times to define a term, I think it’s best to write a quick blog on the subject for them to reference.

Link Baiting is simply the idea of writing articles with the intention of provoking enough interest to gain links to that article. So, if this article was deemed very interesting to someone, they may link back to the USWeb Blog posting, giving my site a bit of a boost in PageRank.

Why does this matter? Search engines each have their own way of deciding the relevancy, and therefore ranking of terms. All search engines look at inbound links to a site when deciding how popular a page is on the Web. Developing interesting content that people link back to is not really an SEO trick as much as it is just good web development.

So, why the recent revival of the term? Blogs. The recent proliferation of corporate blogs gives the opportunity to easily write interesting articles. And the increased popularity of RSS provides a simple to use vehicle for syndicating that content to interested readers. Link Baiting has become easier than ever before.

How does Google feel about Link Baiting? Here is a link to a posting by Matt Cutts expressing his opinion. Obviously, Matt may be one of the best unintentional Link Baiter out there.

If you’re interested in trying some Link Baiting of your own, there are several important things to keep in mind. First, make sure to have your “hook”. You’ll find that most people believe in things like the resource, humor, attack and research hooks. It all boils down to creating interesting content that readers will want to send other readers to. Remember why someone would put a link on their site. Make your article something someone wants to reference and send people to.

The second thing to consider is syndication. The first step is RSS. Submit your feed to the relevant directories and get your information out there. And don’t be shy about commenting on other sites and mentioning your posting. By considerate and do not Spam people’s blog. Leave good feedback and let people know you have written your own opinion on your site.

The most important thing to remember is that search engines like Google are not difficult to figure out. They want you to have unique, visible, and relevant content. And that should generate unique, visible, and relevant links. It all starts with the content of your site. Make sure to write something that gets people’s attention and you’ll be successful.

link baiting, seo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.