Fishing for Links? Don’t Forget the Bait!

Photo By Ella’s Dad

Link building should be an essential part to your SEO strategy. Many search engine algorithms base their rankings on the number of links pointing to your site. So it’s no wonder why link development is an important aspect to consider with your online marketing strategy. Ever hear the expression “the best things in life are free”, well the same goes for link building with a strategy called linkbaiting.

What is Linkbait?

Linkbait in a nutshell, is basically something on your site that visitors would like to link to from their site. Linkbait can be a brilliantly written article on creating “Stumble Bait“, a funny picture, a neat Wordpress plugin or perhaps some useful website tool that everyone should know about. Remember that content is king, but great content will rule above all. If you supply your visitors with quality content, there’s a good chance that someone will want to link to it. Be sure to put linking instructions on your linkbait page. This will make it easier for visitors to add a link to your site.

Be Relevant

Search engines like Google place a lot of value on the relevance of links. So even though it is great to have many links for the funny picture of your cat, it won’t help you rank well for your page about vacuum cleaner reviews. If you can create linkbait that is relevant to your site, then and only then it will help with your rankings. If you provide linking instructions, be sure to vary the anchor text to make it look less spammy in Google’s eyes.

Linkbaiting should be an added bonus to your linking strategy and should not replace traditional link building. Creating quality content can be challenging at times, but if pulled off correctly, it can greatly help you in regards to your search engine marketing strategy.