What is Link Baiting?

The traditional link building process comes in three primary flavours: direct links to your website (inbound links), cross linking content on the Internet (reciprocal and 3 way links), and deep linking to specific pages within your website.

This linking to specific pages of your website can be greatly enhanced by link baiting. So what does link baiting include from the SEO viewpoint?

Link Baiting means to create something that naturally attracts inbound links for your website. Just one successful link baiting campaign can be worth far more than any amount of  PPC advertising  you undertake. It can also be far more effective than the thousands of emails you could send out trying to get inbound links for your website.

Just getting your link bait featured on Digg will yield tens of thousands of visitors in a very short period of time and potentially many more inbound links within just a few weeks.

The clear goal of link baiting is to naturally increase the number of links pointing to your website. And the more links you have pointing back to your site the more popular your website is considered to be by all the major search engines, and so the higher your search engine ranking will turn out to be.

Some Common Link Baiting Techniques

• 1. Become an expert in your particular niche and write valuable and newsworthy information.
• 2. Write an interesting and informative article about your products or services.
• 3. Write useful comments on something that is currently happening in your field of activity.
• 4. Interview (by e-mail or phone) prominent people and publish the results to your site and/or blog.
• 5. Write something outrageous or controversial to spark an interest.
• 6. Run an event, such as a contest or free giveaway.
• 7. Make a blog theme, plug in or a piece of software to give away as an incentive.
• 8. Make or design something that others can put on their website's but that links back to your own site.
• 9. Write something funny or controversial.
• 10. Be the first to expose a scam or the scammer.
• 11. Be the first to research and document something completely new and interesting.
• 12. Provide people with a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important, and watch people flock to your site.
• 13. Take recent news and events and push them out to others who form part of your online community.

By getting people to talk about your link bait, blog about it, discuss it on forums and post it on their social networks and link to it from their website's, you can attract tons of visitors to your own site.

Use Video as Link Bait

Don’t miss the opportunity to generate views for any videos you may have.

Providing informational videos is an easy way to generate traffic and interest, especially if they are short, to the point and helpful.

One of the major advantages of videos, compared to traditional written marketing, is that it saves your visitors a lot of time understanding what is being offered and there isn't much effort required on their part. Start the video and everything is explained to them right there and then. Hearing and seeing you tell them all about your products or services has more credibility and allows you to connect with your visitors on an emotional level.

Another great advantage of video marketing is that if you use the right keywords in your video's tags, you have a much better chance of reaching high rankings in many search engines.

You can include the videos on your own website or load them up to YouTube.

YouTube does have some advantages, as the number of times a YouTube video is seen plays a role in their popularity rankings and in getting videos to show up in Google's universal search results.

Many people are still afraid to use video as a promotional tool and think it's difficult to do. So now is the perfect time for you to get ahead of your competition.