Link baiting can be one of the most powerful forms of marketing on the internet, not only does it drive highly interested and targeted traffic to your website, but it also has endless potential in terms of Search Engine Optimization. Matt Cutts (Google) once said that Link Baiting was anything “interesting enough to catch people's attention”. Link baiting is just one of the many forms of marketing online which has become a popular and important tool for many webmasters. It allows your links or information to be spread around the internet by other people, thus creating huge numbers of links and driving traffic to your website. In terms of SEO, Link Baiting can give you a huge advantage over your competitors by creating vast numbers of good quality inbound links. There are so many different types of Link Baiting that it can be used effectively by almost any website. With a good news story that is genuinely interesting you can garner yourself and your website huge amounts of attention. Your article can spread like wildfire on social bookmarking sites like Digg whilst your links will be posted on a number of sites. Informational products or articles are also extremely effective with link baiting strategies, if you can create genuinely valuable information for the reader your information will spread around the internet and often the links gained from the article will be from authority sites and highly ranked directories. Creating a website that is controversial, funny, or just interesting, can be an extremely easy thing to do, and also offers you a creative outlet which can provide you with great enjoyment. If you have an existing site, highlight the best content and use it to bring visitors to your website. By spreading your most valuable or interesting information around, your links will soon spread rapidly around the internet. One of the best examples of Link Baiting you will see comes from the blog of Shoemoney (an extremely popular online marketer). He wrote a post about George Bush entitled” George Bush - Great President Or Greatest President Ever?” in which he showed great admiration towards the president. All he did was link to George Bush’s Wikipedia page, but can you imagine how many hits that page received just from Shoemoney’s link baiting? He made an extremely controversial post which a number of people feel very passionate about, and then put an external link in the article. He could have put any link at all and probably made money just from this simple piece of link baiting. If you have a website on a particular topic, try to make sure that if any news comes up relating to your topic, your site is one of the first to show it. By doing this you will probably rank well in Google for that particular news story. From then on if someone wants to include news on their site, they will probably end up linking to you after following the Google trail. You can discuss this articles and any other article that catches your fancy at UK Webmaster World SEO forum
