What Is Link Bait? The Not So Evil SEO You May Think!

If you’re new to website building and getting visitors to your site, then you may not be aware of an SEO technique known as “Link Baiting.” The wording alone conjures thought of negativity, but it isn’t necessarily so.

Wikipedia defines Link Bait as:

Link bait is any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website.

Matt Cutts, of Google defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” The content for this type of linking could be in the form of a headline, photo, audio recording, or a short video (YouTube). All it has to be is of a nature that it will catch the interest of others.

Link bait can create a situation that causes the link to go viral. The link may be submitted hundreds of times on social networks, added other websites, and even passed through private emails. A successful link bait strategy can result in thousands of visitors daily to a site that normally gets less than a hundred unique visits per day.

Often the link bait will be one that has little to do with the actual website that first created it. An amusing picture of a chimp driving a monster truck (as a bad example) may have nothing to do with the website that first posted it. Get to the website and it won’t be about chimps, trucks, or anything else vaguely associated with the original link. You might find yourself on a website that talks about how to invest your money. The point is, you arrived, as did thousands of others, and may decide to stay awhile. You might even purchase something that website is selling, because the website is actually a pretty good one about investing.

One you wouldn’t have known about without the link bait.

This site has one link bait article. It’s fairly obvious to those who know of the technique. I don’t try to hide the fact. In fact, I created it as an example of link baiting. Within a week this article generated over 500 unique visitors in one day to that specific post and tracking my visitors showed that about half of them clicked to another page on this site. My 5 minute task of getting the article known consisted of posting it on Facebook, doing a Tweet, and submitting it to sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.

Not bad for a half-hearted effort at link baiting.