Create useful content, and you will be rewarded with hundreds of backlinks. It’s as simple as that. I know: it’s easier said than done. If you are both an expert marketer and professional content producer, you are a rare breed. Most marketers have to acquire content, and the best way to do that is to find truly talented people and pay them to create something your audience will find interesting, useful and compelling. If you do this, users will link to and share your content. That’s link bait.
What is link bait? Here’s the definition from Oxford Dictionary:
“(On a website) content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing it to create hyperlinks to the site, with the aim of improving the site’s position on the list of results returned by a search engine:”
Why do I want links?
Links lead to improved organic rankings in search engines, which in turn lead to more traffic to your website. Backlinks also give clues to the search engines about which search queries are most relevant to your website’s content. This, in turn, improves the quality of traffic to your site, improving your conversions per clicks. In addition, links also drive traffic from the sites that are linking to you.
How does content attract backlinks?
People see content that speaks to them and then link to it on a website, webpage, or profile they control. This could include things such as blogs, social media profile pages, and forums.
Examples of great link bait
Link bait can come in many forms. However, the best link bait usually takes the form of:
- Blogs
- Infographics
- Survey results
- Whitepapers
- Data visualization projects
- Samples Apps
- Tools
- Videos
- Games
Things to think about
Carefully consider the anchor text that will be used to link to your site. Also, make sure you make it as easy as possible to share and link to your content. This can be done most easily by adding share buttons and by adding encouragement to share the piece.
Remember: successful link bait is always truly good content. Take your time to develop content with a professional that is high quality, useful, accurate, and easy to consume.
Resources: Do a deep dive on Link Bait:
- SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting: Matt Cutts Blog post from 2006
- Link Building section of Moz.com: founded by Rand Fishkin
- SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics
- Linkbait section of Search Engine Land: Started by Danny Sullivan