Link Bait: The Path To An Improved Web

With When Are SEO Firms Going To Start Offering Link Baiting Services?. At it's core I still think link bait is about creating quality content that people want to link to naturally. However turning good content into link bait requires a viral component in which you gather your network and bait them into linking to your content. If your network is strong enough you can get a quick influx of authoritative links that will bring a lot of eyes and hopefully a lot more links at your content. In theory if your content isn't good then you won't get links. Unfortunately that's not always the case. The Argument Against Link Bait There have always been ways to get people to do what you want them to do. Isn't that to a degree what marketing and optimizing your website is all about. You add search engine optimization tools I don't believe it was called link bait, but that's exactly what those tools were and are. They just baited me and will many more times. The tools are good. They're useful and make my job easier and Aaron even gives them all away. I have no idea what he was thinking when he decided to add them to his site, but I'm sure in part he was hoping people would link to them and increase the links pointing at the site. Maybe I'm wrong and the term predates the tools, but again I really don't care. Those tools make my life easier and I'll be happy to continue to link to them. They helped me and I'm happy to point you to them, because I think they'll help you as well. Quadzilla at SEO Black Hat is probably someone who might be seen as creating sensationalized posts in an effort to bait links. Of course given the black hat theme of the site and blog should it be any different? Some might say his recent post on the 3 Link Bait Lessons From a Master Baiter? The follow up post is one of the more informative posts about how to create link bait that I've seen. Yes it does offer advice that might at first glance seem to be about artificially turning an ordinary post into link bait, but look again. It's filled with good and sound advice on marketing and copy writing. Lesson 1 tells you to focus on the reader and not the author. Every book I've ever read about copywriting has offered the same advice. It's good advice. Will people still be reading that post six months from now? I can't say. But assuming he's still writing they'll be reading Quadzilla. He's one of the better writers online and one of the few who is both entertaining and informative at the same time. Maybe some of the posts will be temporary, but they are still informative and entertaining and I will link to them, because I think others will find them informative and entertaining too. Perhaps the king of link baiting is Rand Fishkin of Comments Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Steven Bradley is a search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of