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Why

Why link bait strategies and link baiting services aren't bad

While link bait strategies and link baiting services sound like bad things, they can be ethical search engine optimization tactics and white hat SEO techniques.

What is link bait? In "The History of Link Bait," Brian Clark of Copyblogger says it's "just a sexy term for high-quality content that benefits the reader. And what is link baiting? According to Clark, this is merely an inelegant phrase that means "copywriting and storytelling as a way to attract links and traffic." Nevertheless, participating in "link schemes" can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results. It is important to follow Google's guidelines, especially its "Quality Guidelines."

Getting other sites link to yours

Recently, Google added detailed tips for following its "quality guidelines." One says: "Make sure that other sites link to yours." That's easy to say, but hard to do. Google observed, "If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site."

Google also advised getting "natural links" to a site. These develop "when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors." But, you don't want "unnatural links." These are "placed there specifically to make a site look more popular to search engines."

Creating good content pays off

Google provided the following tip that SEO-PR has incorporated into its strategies and services:

"The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it."

Google added, "Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

Catching people's attention

Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, has also provided some SEO advice on link bait and link baiting. In his Gadgets, Google and SEO blog, Cutts said he thinks of link bait "as something interesting enough to catch people's attention." Doing this by "putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights," or by being creative isn't "a bad thing," he added.

"Especially if it's interesting information or fun," link baiting doesn't have to have negative connotations, Cutts said. "I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful 'bait' for links."

Writing a good hook

Generating new link bait ideas is a part of the process, but writing a good hook is also an essential step.

There are several good hooks, including:

  • News hooks - An authentic news hook works effectively to get authoritative links from online journalists and influential bloggers.
  • Interesting hooks - This hook works best when pitching relevant information to special interest media and blogs interested in receiving it.
  • Creative hooks - The creative hook can work if viral campaigns or viral videos consist of jokes, bloopers or funny clips.

Driving traffic to a website

SEO-PR has developed link bait strategies and provided link baiting services to a variety of clients, including:

SEO-PR has focused on more than getting links. It has also focused on driving traffic to a website and putting butts in seats, including using excerpts, images and online videos as news hooks to get publicity, build links and increase website traffic to "Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story."

SEO-PR's blog outreach program used interesting hooks to generate 89 inbound links to the Wharton Economic Summit and get a record number of attendees to the event.

Increasing brand awareness

A link bait strategy and link baiting service can also increase brand awareness. For example, SEO-PR used new survey data from the Harlequin Romance Report as a hook to request relevant links from romance blogs. The data revealed that 55% of American men and 41% of American women have said "I love you" in the hopes that it would lead to sex.

Initially, our effort generated 190 rave reviews and 202 relevant links from romance bloggers. Two weeks later, Jay Leno mentioned the Harlequin Romance Report in his monologue on The Tonight Show and referenced the survey and statistics.

Still, the word "bait" does have potentially negative connotations, so care must be taken

As Eric Ward declares in his LinkMoses Linking Commandments - part one: "Thou shalt not refer to content as link bait, any more than thou shall refer to your users as carp."

If your company is interested in link bait strategies and link baiting services, click on our SEO PR search engine optimization public relations inquiry form and complete the form.