Link bait is a simple concept. You place something on your site that acts as bait for links; it attracts links, people link to your site not because you want them to, but because they really want to. They want to tell people about whatever bait you placed there. You place the bait then let people know about it and wait for the links to roll in.

These are the very best type of links you can have in fact, when Matt Cutts, Google’s liaison with the SEO world, fields questions about linking, link bait is one of the first things he mentions. So what is link bait? It’s simply something so interesting or useful or entertaining, funny, sexy or intriguing or perhaps even disgusting, or evil that people will link to it because they just feel the need to tell their friends and colleagues about it. A classic example is of course YouTube which is at the end of the day is all about link bait. YouTube contains millions of videos and while it’s true that many of them almost certainly are not link bait, many are. And consequently YouTube has more than a billion and a half incoming links.

Another example is a Wikipedia. A site that contains around eighty million pages each one of which could be regarded as a link bait to someone. You may not be interested in the beard liberation front but apparently hundreds of people are. Of course, we can’t all be YouTube or Wikipedia but that doesn’t mean you can’t create your own link bait on a more modest scale. So what can you do? An obvious idea is hosting a blog on a subject related to the area you work in. Blogs are very easy to create. Good blogs are much harder. So, do not jump into blogging until you are sure that you can make it work. You need someone who can write, who wants to write and who can write articles that people want to read. If you’ve got what it takes, if you can create a really top notch blog, a blog may provide great link bait.

But what is a blog? It’s really just a content management system. So whether you create content within a blog or using more traditional web development methods, it’s all content at the end of the day. Perhaps you can provide useful tools of some sort. Many mortgage websites provide mortgage calculators for instance. Of course if you have a mortgage company adding a mortgage calculator today maybe a little late in the game. Essentially you’re going to have to brainstorm this, every business is different of course and the resources you have available vary.

Perhaps it is a glossary of some kind of a directory or a series of videos about using your products. Some outdoor stores host videos on how to use the various types of equipment they sell for instance. Whatever your link bait is, the next step of course is to tell people about it. Obviously you want to use SEO to make sure you link bait is easy to find but you also want to get out there and let bloggers for example know about whatever it is you’ve posted.

You want to do the basic PR campaign contacting bloggers, relevant newspaper or magazine sites; get listed any directories that may be appropriate and so on. Of course you also want to place link invitations next to your bait, little social networking icons and share buttons you see so often.

A quick tip, think back to the first two examples I gave in this article, YouTube and Wikipedia.
Apart from the fact that they contain huge amounts of link bait, what else do they have in common? The crowd created the link bait. The organizations that run YouTube, Wikipedia don’t create any content they simply created the infrastructure that allowed the other people, the crowd to create the link bait for them. In fact many of the world’s top websites do this. Think of sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, Pinterest, Craigslist and many more. Sites that allow other people to create their content, they are link bait.

If it’s at all possible for you to do this it’s a powerful thing. An example would be a retail company that also managed to set up and run popular forums related to its products. Adobe for instance hosts community learning areas, forums and music groups for instance, in which content provided by Adobe customers acts as link bait for many thousands of links. That’s perhaps not why Adobe did it but nonetheless link bait it is.

Creating link bait is actually quite difficult for many companies, which is the reason why so many people turn to other methods, methods that create less valuable links. Spend a little while thinking about this though and you may find a way to create something that people really want to link to.

Sadhiv Mahandru has been developing websites and optimising them for over a decade. Specialising in SEO Services Manchester and throughout the UK. You can learn more about Internet Marketing and SEO by reading my personal blog.