‘Link Baiting’ is yet another buzzword that seems to have become a popular phrase in SEO/social media marketing.  It’s strange, when the term is mentioned I often draw an analogy with my childhood days when we used to go fishing down the local canal.
Friends and myself would haul our fishing gear (rods and baskets) for miles, along the canal bank, to find the best ‘patch’ to set up for the day. We would intuitively know where the best patch was, either by word of mouth from fellow anglers or we would look for an area of the canal that was potentially teeming with fish. I say potentially because as we well know with fishing (if you are an angler) a lot of things happen under the water, so you learn to trust your instinct for where the fish are. This might be a small ripple or other indications that conditions appear to be right. These conditions would depend on how clean the water is, the depth of the water, safety in numbers, where the fish would gather, what kind of cover the fish have and where the location poses no threat.

Preparation and checks would be next on the list.  A good angler would then check his equipment; rod, reel, line, float, weights, hook, bait and depending on the size of the fish, a landing net.  Next, the preparation of the water, to attract the fish, this would entail using a catapult to launch balls of fish bait to the selected target area. The next thing to prepare would be the type of hook you use (size) and also the strength (breaking strength) of the fishing line. For example it would be no good trying to catch a large fish with a small hook and a line to weak to hold it and the same principle would take affect for a small fish but in reverse.  When all preparations are in place the game or sport begins.

In many ways (SEO) link baiting is similar to this analogy where in-bound links are encouraged by preparation and hard work and maybe a little luck to entice the catch.  The next question should be what bait (bait linking) are at our disposal as a resource to lure in-bound links to a customers site. The following list could be used as a guide:

• Current news baiting – Continuous, up to date news on breaking topics with expert commentary on the topic, products and service.
• Controversial baiting – You can also say something controversial to generate discussion – introducing  debate into a topic that will  encourage  reasoned response. Check your facts and make sure you know what you are talking about or you’re going to get some serious reputation management issues to deal with.
• Resource baiting – Build authority by resources that are available to all, social media sites, directories, blog sites and create your own blogs or RSS feed. There are plenty of ways that can establish that you are an expert in your particular interest or have a knowledge that will help others to promote there product or service. And, in the process attract a whole bunch of links at the same time.
• Humor baiting- Write something funny about your industry or the people in it. Everybody needs a good laugh now and then, it alleviates stress and helps bring approachability. A little self-deprecation is great to show people you don’t really take yourself too seriously. Create a site that is purely for fun and allow the links to flow in
• Ego baiting. Create a site that allows other bloggers with a voice to express their ideas by offering them significant exposure.

To summarize Link bait – Link baiting simply put, is content that is interesting, useful, funny or otherwise so outstanding that it becomes alluring to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. It’s a good way of improving your site’s inbound links and therefore it’s value in the eyes of search engines.

Links are important for SEO because they tell the search engines how important your site is to the wider online community. Links from high quality, relevant websites will give you an enormous boost to your SEO.
First, evaluate your competition

You need to find out who your online competition is. Do a quick search for your keywords (you know what keywords are, right?) and the top three websites are your competition (unless your site is in the top three… if this happens then do another search for a different keyword, and so on). Next, you need to find out how many backlinks your competition has, because if they can acquire them, then in theory, so should you be able to.

The easiest way to discover your competition’s backlinks is to go to yahoo.com and type in the search box linkdomain:http://www.yourcompetitionsdomain.com and Yahoo Site Explorer will list all the pages that link to that domain.

Quality Links
You should bear in mind that not all links are equal, some links have better “Link Juice” – the page they come from has a higher PageRank, and they are relevant. Relevancy is more important than PageRank. A link from an unrelated site with a PageRank of 10 isn’t going to be as useful to you as link from a relevant page with a PageRank of 7.

The age of the domain is also a factor that Google, in particular, seems to take into consideration. Visit www.domaintools.com, enter the competition’s domain in the whois lookup search box and click search. Scroll down to Registry Data and look for “Created” this will give you the date the domain was created. Generally an older domain will carry better “link juice” than a newer one.

Another great source of links are .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. Search engines know that educational and governmental websites don’t give away links to just anyone, so, in theory the links they do give will be of high quality and high relevancy.

An additional thing to consider when examining linking partners is who else do they link to? Is it a page with hundreds of other links on? If it is then it probably isn’t worth your time and effort to obtain a link from them, as the search engines probably won’t even count the link anyway.

Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink. Often this just says, “click here”, which is as about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, as this doesn’t tell you anything about where the link is going to take you. It is always best to use descriptive text for your anchor text, for example a site about web design should have links to it called “Web Design” or “Website Design” or something else related to the subject of web design. It is also a good idea to vary your anchor text, as overuse of the same keyword can actually damage your search engine results as the search engines may see this as spamming, as it looks unnatural.

Community participation
This has many benefits, and not all of them are for SEO. By participating in your online community you will become known to other members of your online community, who are probably already ‘authorities’ in their (and your) field. You will also get the opportunity to learn and share information with these people, giving you access to a huge wealth of information.

Blog commenting
Blog comments often give you a link back to your site or blog. It is very important that you do not spam the blogs, blog moderators will just break your link, ban you or in some cases they can even report you to Google, getting your site sandboxed for a period of time. This obviously isn’t the name of the game, so when commenting, make sure you add something useful and informative, ask questions, give advice, but always ensure you stay on topic.

Web Forums
Forums are usually moderated, so, again, it is best to stay on topic. Make sure you find relevant forums to post on. Find forums that are related to your topic and make constructive responses, otherwise you’ll just be labelled as a spammer. Try to find forums with a PageRank of at least 4, and make sure that they have a lot of incoming links, this will ensure you’re efforts won’t be wasted. An added bonus of using forums in this way is that you will probably start to get traffic directly from the forums themselves, as well as increasing your rankings in the search engines.

Requesting Links
You can request links from other website owners. You will already have found a lot of sites you can target from your competition evaluation. Make sure that they are high quality sites and the links you get from them have good keyword rich anchor text. The best way of gaining a link from a website owner is to try to establish a relationship with them before asking for the link. This obviously takes time; so make sure you only target quality sites.