Link Baiting for SEO

Link Baiting for SEO

Firstly, what is link-baiting? Link-baiting is a variety of practices which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other websites.

It is a difficult term to define accurately as it covers many different practices ranging from give away tools through to confrontational blog posts, goading people to bite back. Whatever the practice (I will list some later) it all leads to the same thing, namely that people follow links pointing back to your site. From an SEO perspective, It is important to get incoming links to your site as these are seen as a vote of confidence by the search engines. This in turn assists your website or blog to move up the search engine rankings and receive more traffic.
Is link-baiting a good or bad thing?

The problem I suppose is the connotations around the word ‘baiting’ which gives the sense of trying to trick an unsuspecting person into doing something that they don’t really want to do. While this is accurate with some forms of link-baiting it is not true with others.

My personal opinion on whether link-baiting is good or bad is that it depends what you are actually doing. Like almost anything online there are ethical and professional people trying to add value to prospective visitors. There are also the people who want to be clever for the sake of it and don’t care at all about anything but the results. For them the end justifies the means.

Here are my favourite three, commonly used link-baiting techniques.

Tools - Give other website owners a useful tool or gadget that they can use on their blog or website that points back to your own.

Lists – There is something about a top ten list that is viral. Check out dig and del.icio.us and you’ll see plenty of examples. A lot of the stuff I write is 'top ten' or 'top three' tips. They do get peoples attention and are usually the best read. Oh, by the way, I can get more traffic from an article site than anywhere else.


Research and Statistics - researching a topic that other people can learn from and quote is another is another effective way to generate incoming links. Recently I discovered some research from AOL that gave the percentage increase in traffic from being position one to position ten in the search engine rankings. If you want to see this research go to the SEO Services website for more info (this is my link-bait by the way).