As a follow up to the previous article on SEO, this article talks briefly about LinkBaiting. I described LinkBaiting earlier as a “White Hat” SEO technique. But keep in mind it is only a White Hat technique if it is being followed within the guidelines of White Hat SEO (again, see the previous article for more details).
LinkBaiting is defined as the process of putting any content on your website with the intent of generating a lot of incoming links to it (this is a guaranteed side effect of any content which is good and authoritative). This authority may be attributed to the author himself/herself, arising from excellent research on the subject matter. If you’re an authority on a subject than your LinkBaiting technique may just be producing quality content on the subjects you know best.
However, there are many ways other than authority to attract inbound links to your website, and these fall more accurately under the category of LinkBait. In these days of social networking and blogging, anything worth talking about usually gets linked to. So in order to LinkBait, you just need to come up with content which some people think is worth linking to. We’re over-simplifying, but that’s it in a nutshell.
Here are a few examples:
- Disagree With an Authority – make sure that you do have a sound argument behind your disagreement.
- Write Something Controversial – write about something that flies in the face of common belief.
- Make a Tool, Theme, Plugin, Software, etc. and make it available for free – this has a very large and long running potential if your creation is useful.
- Write Something Funny, Make a Cartoon – everyone likes to talk about something that made them smile.
- Create Content Around Known Persons – make a joke about them, or interview them and then publish that.
These are just a few examples. The above techniques are usually just publicity stunts; so you need to think of and do whatever is most suitable for your own website. Often linkbaiting is followed by a “PR campaign” to let people know of its presense. This PR campaign can consist of submitting a link to the new content to sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon; getting your friends to talk about it on their blogs; leaving links to it in related forums, etc.
Have you had any success in linkbaiting? Share it in the comments for other readers.
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