What’s The Best Kind of Link Bait?

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Jan 25th, 2006 in Blog Marketing, Blogging, SEO, Search Industry News

Of all the emerging concepts related to search engine optimization and marketing online, there are several memes that I’m particularly interested in that seem to be building steam lately. In particular is the notion of link bait.

The practice of link baiting is as old as the hills, it just hasn’t been called that until recently. As the effectiveness of former link building tactics decreases, tactics like link baiting have become more popular.

Aaron mentioned the idea of link bait in a post last October. NickW has been successful at creating link bait blog posts. Rand posted about the success of using link bait to drive, ah links, and traffic and also posited whether to offer link baiting as an SEO service. Matt Cutts drops in with some of his comments about link bait as well. Interestingly, the same day Bill Hartzer had a good article on link bait published at Search Engine Guide.

What is link bait? I would consider it nothing more than viral marketing. Something clever or fun can work very well to attract links. Think subservient chicken. Controversy works in moderation and useful tools are what I like best.

What’s the best kind of link bait? That’s a great question and it’s people like Andy Hagans that are finding out. He’s running a link baiting contest. The winner gets $500 plus if it works well enough to get onto the del.icio.us/popular list, the winner gets another $500. That’s a pretty good deal for a great idea don’t you think?

Tags: seo, link baiting, link bait, search engine optimization, blog marketing

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Link Baiting Guide

thank you for the article.. i list the top 7 link baiting guides.

Wick-edly Sent Scented Candles

I've learned to write useful press releases and articles that are for everyone, but tie in my business somehow.

I just learning how to linbait to make it useful for the person linking to me.

Lee Odden

One tip I've learned about linkable content besides your excellent suggestions is to be as comprehensive as possible. That way, the content is enough to be credible and useful, but too much information to consume in one sitting, which increases the likelihood of a bookmark.

Julie

Creating valuable content is the best link bait, bar none.

Useful tools that are hard to find elsewhere, sharing little-studied knowledge, offering things for free (with no catch!), and educational materials are what people are most prone to link to. The key is that this content needs to be fresh and new content added often so that the site is seen as a resource and the search engine spiders visit often.

Lee Odden

There's no such thing as "automatic SEO". I've not used SEO Elite, but it looks like a quick fix sort of program, not long term. You get links to your site by first, creating something worth linking to. Then submit to a few relevant directories, send out a press release, syndicate some articles, do some social bookmarking and find out who links to your competition and get them to link to you as well. And never stop getting links.

Robert Casey

Ive been trying to find a way to get links for a while now and its proving difficult to say the least. I have found some softwear on the internet called seo elite but before i invest i was intersted to know if any of you have used this product and what do you think about it, i.e does it do what its supposed to do?
thanks in advance for any help in this regard