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What is Link Bait and How Can It Help Me?
By Philip C (c) 2008

Specifically, linkbait is used to attract visitors to your
website whether through interest, anger or knowledge seeking.
Linkbait is content that is specially written to either educate,
entertain or inflame your readership and prospective readers.
These articles create buzz, and the buzz spreads virally from
site to site in the form of links and comments that others make
about what is written on your site. These inbound or back links
are used by search engine algorithms to rank a website. The
higher the rank, the higher the listing, the more traffic that
arrives at your website. More visitors create more buzz which in
turn creates more visitors. Linkbait creation is a marketing
campaign on steroids and falls under the task of link building.
Its sole aim is to increase the quantity of high-quality,
relevant links to a website.

Search engine optimized on a specific keyword phrase, linkbait
comes in two flavors: specific, helpful, useful content written
by an authority in a niche market or content that will incite
discussion and sometimes argument on a niche subject. Either
way, linkbait articles attract visitors to your website.

Here's the difference. Your content is supposed to generate
links from other websites, right?. That is the goal. You want
people to like or hate your article/post/rant enough to write
about it on their website and post with that follow-up a link
back to your site and page of where the content is sitting. This
is basic viral marketing in that visitors don't just read your
material, but webmasters who find you are either riled up enough
to rant about your post/article on their website or love it
enough so that they quote it and refer to it. This becomes a
never-ending source of links back to your site.

What happens with backlinks or one-way links from other sites?
The search engines keep a count of how many sites link back to
your website giving you love and higher listings in their search
engines which translates to more traffic for your website. This
form of viral marketing is used successfully by many; however, a
lot of webmasters are overlooking this very easy method to boost
their natural search engine listings. Natural search engine
listings are the ones you don't pay for, that help your website
naturally improve and hang around in search engines for long
periods of time.

Looking at linkbait, there are essentially a few different
types. Let's go through those, and then look at the best, always
guaranteed to attract forms that have been used since the term
was invented.

Informational: If you provide information that educates and
informs your readership, they will always return and use it as
reference. Copyblogger and Problogger often provide these types
of articles.

News: Keeping up with the breaking news on the web and around
the world is followed by readers who want to know, in capsule
form, what's happening.

Humor: Funny stories, bizarre pictures or videos, cartoons and
jokes are always a winner. People love a chuckle and references
or collections of these are always a traffic attractor.

Controversy: Rant and rave on something or someone in a
negative fashion and people will love to stop by and dispute
your view. It will always yield a ton of attention. Writing
something unpopular gets and keeps readers who want to air their
views on your views. They will also rant about your unpopular
views on their sites and link back to yours so that others can
follow suit.

Resource: One of the best forms of linkbait is building a
resource list. A good list will not only be indexed and listed,
but will be passed by word of mouth and links on other sites. It
creates a great deal of credibility for you and your website in
a particular niche, and will become a reference work. Creating a
niche specific list is an invaluable resource for people in that
particular realm, and will make your readership loyal. If you
have a great resource page, it is literally gold. You can have
hundreds of other pages of content, but what will steadily
attract people and cause them to return and refer others is a
good resource in their niche.

One of the best examples of the resource type of linkbait is
Smashing Magazine, a blog devoted to nothing but lists of
resources that draws a continual stream of visitors and is
referred to by all who visit. It has everything and is not only
an extremely interesting read, but one of the best resource link
sites around. As a result, folks quote it, refer to it, use and
love it. The resource lists are quality content, and that's the
big difference between success and failure in this form of
marketing. If you create a lousy linkbait article, it will fail.
Further, your credibility will suffer. First impressions count
on the web and with only nine seconds to convince the arriving
traffic that you are worthy of them sticking around, you need to
deliver quality content, astounding resource lists and consistent
high levels of content that is valuable and entertaining.

All in all, you really need only remember one thing when
starting this type of marketing campaign: provide quality
content that is useful, interesting and entertaining. Deliver it
in a professional style and make it as user-friendly as
possible. Optimize for search engines, and folks will find you.
Allow for comments on your material and traffic will come.
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Real Estate Hyper Links (http://www.realestatehyperlinks.com) is
a New York search engine marketing firm specializing in various
techniques to achieve higher search engine rankings faster than
normal search engine optimization campaigns for real estate
companies.
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