What is Linkbaiting?

In SEO this word often gets passed round but not too many people do have a clear view of what Linkbaiting can do for their website. Searching for Linkbaiting at google does not really reveal valuable information on how to use it for pushing a website.
So, we will take a close look on how Linkbaiting can help you achieve your goals.

Definition
Linkbait essentially is a piece of content on a website. This can be a blogpost, an article, a photo or a video or whatever. It is published specifically for gathering incoming links from other websites.
This can be really simple sometimes. In theory, all you need is an interesting page within your site and someone who notices this page and a few people who share the link. This can lead to hundreds or even thousands of incoming links to this page which should really bring your site towards the top. Jim Boykin provides even more details about this. Or read the Linkbaiting case study on searchenginejornal.com.

Linkbaiting Techniques
Darren Rowse has posted a series of articles about Linkbaiting Techniques and he also gives a good introduction to linkbaiting and explores the possible motivations for it.
There are many possibilities for linkbaiting as you can see in Darrens series. Whether you create a new tool or a widget for bloggers which they love or you post a story about a very cool video you have found. You will always find many people who will feature it on their sites and will post a link to yours.
You could also post a contrary point of view to popular topics like Mike Grehan did when he posted an article on clickz.com where he pointed out, that he does not believe the google sandbox really exists. Yahoo´s Site Explorer counts 134 Backlinks to this article alone. Not too bad.

Is this really new?
As Linkbaiting simply means creating content which attracts readers and links to that content, I think this is not really a new idea. When I launched my first website back in 1998 which used to be a site offering job opportunities from companies who where really exciting in the dotcom-bubble, I learned that it was most important to build up visibility on the web. Therefore I had to attract links and visitors. So, kind of deja-vu? Jason Hendricks calls it a new name for an old rule and I think he exactly gets the point.

Linkbaiting as a viral idea
Viral marketing and Linkbaiting are not that different. For both it needs an interesting point - in our case this would be some kind of webcontent - and some people who share it with more and more people.
But what makes it viral? Seth Godin has the answer, he wrote a nice article about what it takes to make an idea a viral idea.

Finally, linkbaiting is of course worth doing it - even it is not really a new idea. Cartoon Barry tries to determine a pricing model for it. For myself, I will try to figure out something for testing purposes. If you like to help, please link to this article.

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linkbaiting, linkbait, link building, seo

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