In his Linkbuilding Techniques series, CEO of SEOHacker, Sean Si, describes link baiting as “more an art than work.”
Firstly, link bait attempts to be compelling as it should prompt readers to come back to you. The best way to do this, he explains, is to get an emotional response from the reader. Some link baiting techniques that work well include guest posting, infographics, widgets, and contests.
Link bait is essentially content that contains a controversial comment, piece of data, conclusion or any other curated content piece that if mentioned on another site, would need to link back for reference.
Neil Patel describes link bait as a potentially “powerful form of marketing” that is “inherently viral.” He defines link bait as “any content or feature on a website created for the purpose of gaining attention or encouraging others to link to the website.”
In a post published on SEOBlog, Mike Juba describes link bait as follows: “It is a must because whatever the link points to is so excellent, so full of bold information, so beyond its competition that other websites can’t help but link to it.” Webfx further adds: “In a time when content is king, you could say that link bait is emperor.”
Excellent link bait has a few distinct qualities: It is specifically designed for purposes, it motivates sharing across social channels and it links to own blogs or websites. It is useful, timely and contains great visuals.
Let’s take a look at some successful examples when link bait was used effectively to get more click-throughs, attract traffic and ultimately generate more sales leads and of course profit.
Guest posting is essentially writing and pitching articles to other sites and online publications. This builds a network and links your website’s name to others and give your credibility and recognizability. Neil Patel tells us that bloggers have perfected the art of link baiting.
“Because one thing that bloggers believe in most is good content – if their content isn’t interesting, then no one wants to see it, share it, or link to it,” Patel writes.
Stats are always interesting for users and an infographic using stats is even more so. A well-presented infographic is irresistible and a little addictive. The best link bait is the creation of unparalleled resources and that this would take some research and work. The best way to do this is with an embeddable infographic.
When it comes down to it creating amazing content must be at the core of an excellent link bait strategy. You can have the best strategies for creating great links and anchor text, but if your content is not up to scratch you will never get anywhere. Optimize your content through keyword research, make the article fairly long to fit with Google’s current algorithms and, above all, be sure to give comprehensive information and useful advice.
Patel adds that a good list makes excellent link bait as these are a great “one stop shop” for what people want to know. He adds that lists can be on anything and everything and the longer the better. He warns however that they are worth putting in time and effort and curating carefully.
Widgets can be used to hide “pieces of code” that will link back to a webpage of the creator’s choosing. There are many widgets already in use, they are not often implemented as link bait anymore. Hosting companies may also sponsor someone and then request them to provide a link back.
While it can become expensive running online competitions, these can be an excellent source of link bait. The trick is to set up the competition that participants must link back to the contest host.
Adding an anchor text ratio goal to your link building campaigns will reap significant results. An anchor text ratio is the percentage distribution of all anchor text types for a given website or page. Google has learned to recognize the use of “spammy anchor texts” and as a result it is an excellent strategy to introduce a variety of anchor texts to avoid being penalized by the search engine.
For a homepage it is important to focus on the branding aspects for the anchor text to maximize SEO. Service pages, on the other hand, are more intent on selling and for this purpose it becomes very important what searcher intent would be.
Controversial content is excellent link bait especially in niches like politics. This can result in an insane number of links. The reason why people share links to controversial articles or content is because they like and want to support the underdog or support negative news about the underdog’s nemesis. Controversial content performs even better if it is linked to a piece of data for the ultimate strategy.
