Papers & Articles

14/05/2007  |  Link Baiting

The quantity and quality of inbound links are two of the many metrics used by a search engine to rank a website. Link bait can be conisdered as being a part of link building and aims to increase the quantity links to a website. It is considered to be a white hat search engine optimisation (SEO) method.
Link baiting is where the quality of your content is useful or entertaining enough that people cannot resist linking to it, thus improving your page rank, number of inbound links and your position in the search engine results pages.

Although there are no clear subdivisions within link bait, we can still divide it into types of hooks. Here is a short list of some of the most common kind of “hooks” with short descriptions:

• Informational Hooks: They provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare Tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.
• News Hooks: Provide fresh information and garner citations and links as the news spreads.
• Humor Hooks: Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be a link bait.
• Evil Hooks: Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it.
• Tool Hooks: Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.

But how does link baiting work?
Do not forget that, the Internet is a huge network. So if you want your linkbait to attract visitors to your website, you are going to have to use the network to put it where people can see it. Quite literally, you are going to have to do some networking.
You do not necessarily have to put all of your linkbait in places where it can be seen. You can set lures to your linkbait, in a manner of speaking. For instance, you may have engaged in pay-per-click campaigns. Have you considered starting one to promote your linkbait?
In short, however you get visitors to your site, from whatever source or in whatever venue, once they are in your site, they are likely to link to it if you give them what they are looking for.
There are lots of ways to help the network work for you. It is just a matter of knowing how it works.