Note: Like the previous post, this is only a short post – sorry!

Link baiting is the latest craze. Well, everyone is talking about it at the moment anyway.

What is Link bait or link baiting?

It is basically making some form of content on a site that is made just for other sites to link to. It must be:

• Interesting
• Informative
• And easy to link back to

What are some popular recent link bait techniques?

• Make a “web 2.0″ application that is handy – this takes a lot of time normally though.
• Make something fun, such as the Ronald McHummer site (see Seth’s post about it).
• Make a list. They work.
• Get some exclusive news and get it on Digg, del.icio.us, slashdot etc.
• Controversial views about something
• Something funny or an original, fun game

Benifits of Link baiting

• People link to your site
• You get a lot of natural backlinks (well, generally they are natural backlinks anyway)
• You (generally) will in the end get higher search engine results (note the “generally”)
• Visitors visit your site via all those links on other sites to your sites
• It can be very cheap
• You can easily get links from sites with lots of trust – thus giving some of that “trust” to your site

Disadvantages of link baiting

• If you get Dugg (ie on the front page of digg) and a poor server, it can crash/run out of bandwidth
• If you are a new site and get hundreds and hundreds of new links within a very short time it may look like spam
• Time. It can take a lot of time…